A Canadian-Irish Symposium of Art and Ideas
Fáilte, Bienvenue, Boozhoo, Welcome.
Welcome to DD’s Canadian-Irish Artistic Symposium, a two-day showcase of art and ideas taking place March 15-16, 2024 in-person at the Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave, Toronto (Yorkville), with two digital writing masterclasses happening March 13th and 14th.
St Patrick’s Day, the celebration of Irish culture, is synonymous around the world with parades, parties and a whole lot of green. Canada, like many countries, has a sizable Irish diaspora, with twelve percent of us claiming Irish heritage.
This St Paddy’s Day week, Diaspora Dialogues explores what it means to be Canadian, and to be Irish, through the ideas, words and performances of writers and artists from both countries. As always with Diaspora Dialogues, this showcase takes a whole of society approach, featuring contemporary artists across art forms, languages, cultural backgrounds, genders and ages.
There are five professional development workshops/writing masterclasses – two digitally and three in-person. An immersive sound installation. A literary and musical salon. And four panel conversations, presented in-person with a digital livestream that will be recorded to make into podcasts. It promises to be both thought-provoking and fun.
All events FREE with registration. ASL available for the public talks.
Presented in partnership with Poetry Ireland.
Event Schedule:
Wednesday March 13
12PM | Masterclass: Finding Your Voice with Francine Cunningham (VIRTUAL)
This masterclass will help participants clarify the place within which they are writing from. We will define what their personal goals are for their writing and how to access that truthful place for their voice to live. Participants will be expected to take part in some writing activities and hopefully feel comfortable sharing throughout the process. This is an interactive workshop that will provide sparks for creation and impart knowledge on different ways of approaching your own life story.
Register here.
Thursday March 14
12PM | Masterclass: Poetry Writing with Maria McManus (VIRTUAL)
Join poet Maria McManus for an immersive poetry writing masterclass, where words transcend boundaries and emotions flow freely. Delve into the art of crafting evocative verses, as Maria shares her insights on imagery, rhythm, and the power of storytelling through poetry. Whether you’re a seasoned wordsmith or just beginning your poetic journey, this class promises to ignite your creativity and elevate your expression to new heights.
Friday March 15
2PM | Mentoring Workshop: Storytelling with Oein DeBhairduin and SJ Okemow (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL)
Join us for an immersive workshop on storytelling tailored for emerging writers! Uncover the secrets to crafting compelling narratives that captivate readers from start to finish. Through expert guidance, you’ll learn how to develop authentic characters, build engaging plots, and master the art of storytelling to bring your creative visions to life on the page.
3:30PM | Mentoring Workshop: Story Fundamentals with Darach Mac Con Iomaire (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL)
Join us for a dynamic workshop designed to empower emerging writers with essential storytelling fundamentals. Participants will delve into the art of crafting compelling narratives, mastering plot development, character building, and the nuances of effective storytelling techniques. This workshop offers invaluable insights to help you unlock your creative potential and captivate your audience with unforgettable stories.
Video here.
4:30PM | Mentoring Workshop: Writing Methodology with Darach Mac Con Iomaire (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL)
“Writing Methodology” is a dynamic workshop designed for emerging writers seeking to refine their craft. Through interactive exercises and guided discussions, participants will explore various methodologies to develop their unique writing process. From outlining and drafting to revising and polishing, this workshop provides practical strategies to help writers navigate their creative journey with confidence and clarity.
Video here.
5:30PM | Mother Tongues: An immersive sound installation (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL)
Sound has the power to speak to our soul at a visceral level, deeper and older than language itself. Join us in an auditory feast for the senses in an installation by sound designer John Gzowski, featuring original work in Irish and French produced by Stiúideo Cuan (Galway) and Quotidian Word on the Street (Belfast), as well as theatre artists Merlin Simard (Toronto) and Edwige Jean-Pierre (Ottawa), and singer and actor Jodi Contin (Wasauksing First Nation).
The sound installation will be housed at Heliconian Hall, and freely available for listening on Friday, March 15, 2024 (5:30pm-9:30pm) and Saturday, March 16, 2024 (10am-6pm).
7:30PM | Salon Rue Hazelton: An Evening of Poetry and Performance (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL)
Please join us for a lively Friday night cabaret of readings and performance by Irish and Canadian poets, writers, storytellers and musicians, including poets Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi and Catherine Graham, storyteller Oien DeBhairduin, and harpist Sharlene Wallace.
As well as a fascinating tour of the literary and songwriting history of Toronto with novelist and poet Anne Michaels with singer-songwriter David Sereda and guitarist David Gray.
Saturday March 16
10:30AM | Narratives Across Time: The Power of Oral Storytelling (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL + DIGITAL LIVESTREAM)
In cultures that evolved with oral records versus written, storytelling evolved as a vital conduit for preserving and sharing knowledge across generations. Join us as we explore how oral traditions in different cultures shape identity and community, transmitting invaluable wisdom through the ages.
Panelist: Oien DeBhairduin and Anthony Audain
Moderated by: Janet Smyth
Video here.
12PM | Linguistic Hospitality (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL + DIGITAL LIVESTREAM)
What is the power of presenting work in its original language of creation?What possibilities exist for the connection between artist and audience that needs only be grounded in artistic dialogue, not necessarily shared language? And for performance, do subtitles detract from the integrity of the work, or open up new audiences?
Panelists: Darach Mac Con Iomaire, Maria McManus, Merlin Simard and S.J. Okemow
Moderated by: Alison Vicrobeck
Video here:
1:30PM | Archives of Displacement (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL + DIGITAL LIVESTREAM)
How do artists/writers interpret and document experiences of displacement, migration, and discrimination in their art, contributing to the shaping of a collective narrative? What role can collaboration – across cultures, ages, languages, art forms – play in creating a contemporary practice and sparking the imagination of artist and audience?
Panelists: Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi and Nedra Rodrigo
Moderated by: Aparita Bhandari
Video here.
3PM | Cultural Preservation as Creative Catalyst (IN PERSON: HELICONIAN HALL + DIGITAL LIVESTREAM)
What is the dynamic interplay between efforts to preserve cultural heritage and identity, with the reality that societies and people evolve every day? Can the frame of cultural preservation act as a catalyst for artists to imagine brand-new narratives for themselves and for the wider society, informed by history but not bound by it?
Panelists: Edward Lee and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi
Moderated by: Deborah Dundas
Register here.
About the Participants
Aparita Bhandari is an arts and life reporter in Toronto. Her areas of interest and expertise lie in the intersections of gender, culture, and ethnicity. Her work has appeared in a range of Canadian and international media including the CBC, The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt magazine, andRoads & Kingdoms. She’s gone hyperlocal when she covered the many communities that make up the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. She’s also the producer of Hindi language podcasts KhabardaarPodcast.com and Darmiyaan.com.
Francine Cunningham is an award-winning writer, artist and educator who spends her summer days writing on the prairie’s and her winter months teaching in the north. Francine is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta but grew up in Calgary, Edmonton, and 100 Mile House, BC. Francine is also Metis, and has settler family roots stretching from as far away as Ireland and Belgium. She currently resides in Alberta but previously spent over a decade calling Vancouver her home.
Her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for The BC and Yukon Book Prize, The Indigenous Voices Award, and The Vancouver Book Award. Her debut book of short stories God Isn’t Here Today (Invisible Publishing) is out now and is a book of speculative fiction and horror and was longlisted for The inaugural Carol Shield’s Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award, and won the 2023 ReLit award for short fiction. Her first children’s book What if bedtime didn’t exist (Annick Press) is out March 2024 and has been chosen for the 2024 TD Summer Reads Program. She is currently the Canadian Writer in Residence at The University of Calgary.
Francine also writes for television with credits including the teen reality show THAT’S AWSM!among others and was a recipient of a Telus StoryHive grant to make a web-series. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have also appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories, The Best Canadian Non-Fiction, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, and on the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist among others. You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca.
Oein DeBhairduin is a writer, activist and educator with a passion for preserving the beauty of Traveller tales, sayings, retellings and historic exchanges. He is the author of the award-winning Why the moon travels (Skein Press, 2020). His other works are Weave (Skein Press, 2022), The Slug and The Snail (Little Island & Skein Press, 2023) and Twiggy Woman (Skein Press, 2023). He is the Traveller Culture Collections Development Officer with the National Museum of Ireland and seeks to pair community activism with cultural celebration, recalling old tales with fresh modern connections and, most of all, he wishes to rekindle the hearth fires of a shared kinship.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is an Igbo-Irish writer, editor, educator, and arts facilitator. She is a commissioned poet on the Poetry as Commemoration project run by the Irish Poetry Reading Archive under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Her poetry film was screened in the Words at Wilton Park 2022 programme and was among the official selections for the 2022 Bloomsday Film Festival. She was selected for the Screen Ireland 2021 X-Pollinator Programme, and her short story was longlisted for the 2020 An Post Short Story of the Year Award. Her fiction is published in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories anthology edited by Sinéad Gleeson (Head of Zeus, 2020). She co-edited the anthology Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets anthology (Dedalus Press, 2019). She is working on her debut poetry collection.
Deborah Dundas is a writer and journalist, has worked as a television producer and is currently an editor at the Toronto Star. Her work has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the UK and Ireland including Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, The Belfast Telegraph and The Sunday Independent. She attended York University for English and Political Science and has an MFA in Creative Non-fiction from the University of King’s College. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter and their loving, grumpy cat Jumper.
Catherine Graham is a poet, novelist, podcast host and creative writing instructor based in Toronto. Her eighth book, Æther:An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Poetry. Her debut novel Quarry won an IPPY gold medal for fiction and was a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction. The Most Cunning Heart and Quarry were both Miramichi Reader Best Books and finalists for the Fred Kerner Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated poet, she teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award, leads the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Virtual Book Club and co-hosts The Hummingbird Podcast—part of the WNED PBS Amplify app. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems is her latest book. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet
David Gray, musician.
Edward Lee was born in Montreal, Quebec. He is a former arbitrator and lawyer. His fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and various literary magazines. His radio documentary, Tiger Balm, Batman Comics, and Barbeque Pork was produced by CBC Radio Outfront. He lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter. The Laundryman’s Boy is his first novel.
Darach Mac Con Iomaire is Creative Director of Stiúideo Cuan – a flagship venue, recording studio, production house & creative centre for the arts in An Spidéal, Conamara, the largest Gaeltacht region on the west coast of Ireland. Recent artistic achievements include An Cosán Draíochta by Johnny Óg Connolly, Cuan an Cheoilwith Liam Ó Maonlaí and the major live music series Beo ón gCuan produced in cunjunction with RTÉ. Darach has over twenty-five years experience in writing and Directing Film, TV & Radio Drama, and theatre. His commissioned work for the Abbey Theatre (Ireland’s National Theatre) includes End Meeting? and Baoite (Bait), which premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2018 before transferring to the Abbey for a sell-out run in 2019.
Maria McManus is a poet. Her most recent collection is Available Light (Arlen House). Librettos include Wretches and Ellipses, both with the composer Keith Acheson and Tierra Sallada with Argentinian composer Martin Devek. Poetry, dance and film collaborations are BIND, Epilogue and TURF all of which are collaborations with ACNI Major Artist awardee, choreographer Eileen McClory and filmmaker Conan McIvor and composer Katie Richardson (BIND). Essays are published in IMPERMANENCE (CCI/No Alibis), The Irish Times, The New Frontier (New Island). Her work has been broadcast on RTE and the BBC. A former Artist in Residence at the Belfast International Arts Festival she brought Poetry Jukebox to Ireland and founded the literary arts production company Quotidian with the poet Deirdre Cartmill. She serves on the boards of Irish PEN and Poetry Ireland.
Anne Michaels‘ books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice longlisted for the IMPAC Award. Her novel, Fugitive Pieces, was adapted as a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her new novel, Held, was released in November 2023.
SJ Okemow is of mixed Cree and European ancestry and currently lives in Toronto. Her work has focused on cellular animations that enable us to learn about our bodies, and thus, our connection to the world around us. Her debut children’s picture book,Âmî Osâwâpikones (Dear Dandelion), published with Annick Press.
Nedra Rodrigo (she/they) is the founder of the Tamil Studies Symposium at York University, and the bilingual event series, The Tam Fam Lit Jam. She is a translator, academic, curator of multi-arts events and a Member of the Board of Directors for the Tamil Community Centre Project in Scarborough, Ontario. Nedra’s published translations include In the Shadow of the Sword (SAGE Yoda, 2020); His Sacred Army and A Time of Questions, Vols. 1 & 2 of the Devakanthan quintet Prison of Dreams (Mawenzi House 2021). Her essays have appeared in Kalam, Briarpatch, C Magazine, Studies in Canadian Literature, river in an ocean and Human Rights and the Arts: Essays on Global Asia. Her translations of poetry have featured in Words and Worlds, Jaggery Lit, Still We Sing: Voices on Violence Against Women, Human Rights and the Arts in Global Asia, and Out of Sri Lanka. Her translation of Vols. 3, 4 & 5 of Prison of Dreams are forthcoming with Mawenzi House in 2024.
david sereda is a singer, songwriter, pianist and composer. His is a distinctive, passionate voice, heard in concerts and festivals across Canada and the USA and through albums of his original songs. He’s written for music theatre and produced over 40 Stray Dog Salons in Toronto and Owen Sound, exuberant thematic cabarets that bring together musicians, writers, playwrights and dancers. His long artistic history with novelist and poet Anne Michaels continues in a new collaborative Dialogue, an intimate performance of spoken word and song, now in development. david lives in Grey County, Ontario – close to Georgian Bay.
Merlin Simard (she/they/iel/elle) is a performer, playwright, dramaturge, and screenwriter originally from Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal), now based in Tkarón:to (Toronto). As a performer, Merlin has worked with Factory Theatre, Stratford, Crow’s, Outside The March, Buddies In Bad Times, Talk is Free, Toronto Dance Theatre, Studio 180 Théâtre Français de Toronto, and many other theatre companies across Canada. She has also acted on Grand Army (Netflix) and This Life (CBC), as well as in the short film Poils Anyways (Fittonia Inc.), which she also wrote. Merlin is currently the facilitator for Paprika’s Playwright’s Unit and is developing several projects spanning across theatre, TV, and VR in both English and French. Her practice focuses on themes of access, gender euphoria, technology, and multilingual performance. @hussy4hussy | merlinsimard.com
Sharlene Wallace is one of Canada’s most prolific and versatile harpists. Winner of two international competitions, (Lyon & Healy International Pop & Jazz Lever Harp Competition (USA) and Concours d’Improvisation de Rencontres Internationales de Harpe Celtique (Brittany)), Sharlene has toured internationally and performed in festivals and concert series across North America and in Europe. She has released seven albums featuring her compositions inspired by her explorations with South American, Celtic, Classical and contemporary music. This Spring, Sharlene will be releasing a new album of her compositions with Jean Martin for Celtic harp and electronics. She is also creating a co-composition recording-performance-environmental project, Trees.Listen, with composer Frank Horvat, also for Celtic harp and electronics. Sharlene teaches lever harp at Wilfrid Laurier University and York University.
Alison Vicrobeck is a radio and television host based in Toronto. She is currently the host of La Billetterie, a Radio-Canada TV show about arts and culture in Ontario. Alison has worked as a host, a producer and/or an on-air reporter for both radio and television outlets, including Radio-Canada/CBC, TFO, Unis and Choq-FM, where she covered culture, minority language rights, education, socio-economic issues, international affairs, and politics. She was also a fact-checking intern for the New York Times. She has a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences and International Law from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (SciencesPo Paris). She is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Creole.
Anthony Audain is an African Canadian actor, teacher, writer, singer, workshop leader, storyteller, and community builder. He holds a degree in English and Theatre Production from Mount Allison University’s English/Drama program, and an Honours Diploma from Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Performing Arts. As a writer, he has created a variety of storytelling performance narratives based on topics from Ancestry to Fairy Tales for both adults and young audiences at libraries, theatres, and schools across the country. He has combined education with performance, both “in person” and virtually, at workshops at U of T – OISIE, and at The Manitoba Theatre for Young People.
He is an experienced Arts Facilitator with the Winnipeg School Division and has been a performer at many Winnipeg International Storytelling Festivals sponsored by the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba. He is a featured storyteller for the 2024 Canadian Children’s Book Week Tour covering the Metro Toronto area. Anthony received a Dora Award nomination through his association with Golden Horseshoe Players, a Toronto-Hamilton based Children’s Theatre Company in the Theatre for Young Audiences Category featuring new works for a play called The Peacemaker. Mr. Audain takes pride in helping others discover their own style and personal narrative. Culture and Art play a huge part in our lives and development and Anthony hopes to do his part to bridge gaps by bringing people together in that process and on that journey.
