Our very own Julia Chan will join Cities of Migration for a 60-minute webinar to learn about successful strategies for community engagement, creative mentoring, and promoting immigrant integration through the arts. Presenters from Auckland and Julia will share innovative ideas about how music, performance and new literary voices are building stronger communities through the arts and changing the way we see ourselves in the city.

The webinar will take place:

July 19 in North America
4:00 pm PDT in Vancouver, Los Angeles
7:00 pm EDT in Toronto, New York

July 20 in New Zealand and Australia
7:00 am SGT in Singapore
9:00 am EST in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane
11:00 am NZST in Auckland

Register at the Cities of Migration website here!

Emerging writers Alicia Elliott and Lynda Allison will read with established writers David Layton and Martin Mordecai from their Toronto-set work in the Diaspora Dialogues anthology TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6 at Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street at 6 p.m. Antanas Sileika will be the host at the event.

We asked them to share their thoughts about how they feel ahead of the event. 

Alicia Elliott

Having a slightly high-pitched voice and generally nervous, awkward demeanor, I’m worried about how my reading will be received. Will people listen? Will they look at their watches the whole time I read? Will they make snide remarks behind their hands? Or, worse still, will I be reading to an empty room?

If it isn’t yet abundantly clear, this is my first reading, so I’m having my fair share of pre-reading jitters. To prepare I’ve been reading my piece in the shower in different voices. My Christopher Walken is coming along nicely, while my Sarah Palin could use some intense work. This may seem like tomfoolery, but it is one of the reasons I love writing so much. I don’t mean to say I enjoy writing in hopes I can read my pieces in terrible celebrity impersonations; I mean to say I enjoy writing because it gives me the opportunity to tap into so many different voices and experiences.

The piece I’ll be reading from, “Heels,” started as an examination of racial stereotypes and the way they can be enacted and perpetuated by people in complex ways. Under the careful guidance of my mentor, David Layton, I added more weight in the character of Stephanie’s mother, Dina. Dina is dealing with bipolar disorder, while Stephanie is dealing with Dina. The way mental illness cycles through families, and the fear of this cycle continuing, for me, was thematically linked to my original idea.

So to sum up, I’m really looking forward to stuttering my way through all of this at Ben McNally Books this coming Thursday. It’ll be a lot of good, awkward fun.

Alicia Elliott is a recent graduate of York University’s creative writing program and is senior fiction editor of Existere Journal of Arts and Literature. She was one of the first winners of the Dominion Institute’s Aboriginal Writing Challenge, and her winning story was published in Initiations: A Selection of Young Native Writing. When she is not reading or writing, Alicia spends time with her fantastic daughter, Eva, and amazing partner, Mike in Toronto, Brantford or Six Nations.

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Lynda Allison

Diaspora Dialogues’ mentoring program has been a great learning experience for me. Being a part of it has encouraged me to not only re-write and submit my story, “Switch,” to TOK 6, but also to keep writing.

I wrote “Switch” out of a desire to share the story of a young girl who finds herself pregnant and living on the streets of Toronto. If Kari were a real person, I would want to meet her and become her friend. I am surprised to have this opportunity to read a portion of her story and share a glimpse into her life.

My mind is also muddled with children’s tales and a partially written young adult fantasy trilogy. In pockets of time and energy I spill words onto the page and play around with them hoping to arrange them into well told stories that young people will find meaningful.

Lynda Allison teaches high school, facilitates writing workshops and drama camps, and coordinates teams that support at risk children and youth and their families. She writes to explore and share life from various points of view and is inspired by the resiliency and courage of people who thrive despite incredible and sometimes seemingly insurmountable challenges. Lynda hopes her stories resonate with readers in such a way that their issues and conflicts help them discover their inherent value and potential empowering them to effect positive change in their lives and the lives of other people.

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Don’t forget to drop in and support Toronto’s best and brightest writers! We here at Diaspora Dialogues and these writers would love to see you there.

WHAT: Readings from TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6
WHEN: Thursday May 19, 6:00-7:00 PM
WHERE: Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street
COST: Free

David Layton has had short fiction and articles published and anthologized in various literary journals, newspapers and magazines including: Penguin, Exile, the Daily Telegraph, Conde Nast and the Globe and Mail. He is the author of Motion Sickness, a memoir that was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. His critically acclaimed second book, The Bird Factory, was published by McClelland and Stewart and film rights for the novel were sold to Marty Katz, executive producer of Hotel Rwanda. David Layton’s third book, Bloodlines, will be published by HarperCollins in the spring of 2012.

Martin Mordecai, a late bloomer, published his first book, Culture and Customs of Jamaica, a reference work written with his wife, Pamela Mordecai, at the age of fifty-nine. His first novel, Blue Mountain Trouble, was published simultaneously in the United States and Canada when he was sixty-seven. Before writing, he had worked as a civil servant, a media practitioner and a very small business person. Since writing, he has been grandfather to Zoey Rita, which is less tiring and more fun.

Antanas Sileika is the author of two novels and one collection of linked short stories, Buying On Time, which was nominated for both the City of Toronto Book Award and the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. His last novel, Woman in Bronze, was a Globe and Mail Best Book selection. He lives in Toronto, where he is the director for the Humber School for Writers.

“Diaspora Dialogues isn’t just the name of your English literature grad school seminar—it’s also a Toronto literary organization running innovative programs with the city and the storytellers who live here.

Designed to support writing that reflects Toronto’s diverse artistic and literary culture, Diaspora Dialogues works in three major ways: through creating multidisciplinary programming for partner festivals and services like Word on the Street, Luminato, and the Toronto Public Library; through their teen writing program, Young Writers from the Edge; and through an annual mentorship program, which pairs emerging Toronto writers with established voices to improve their craft and receive advice about their work.”

Read the rest of the piece here

Diaspora Dialogues‘ mentorship program connects emerging writers with established writers. Past mentee Pradeep Solanki writes about his experience working with his mentor, Rabindranath Maharaj. You can read more about the Diaspora Dialogues mentorship program here.

By Pradeep Solanki

There is a saying in Hindu literature which says that on the spiritual path (as well as any other worthwhile but arduous endeavor) one must pursue it with the same urgency as a man running for the lake when his hair is on fire. I suppose for me the desire to be a writer had always been with me but it took a near-death experience to alight that fire. I was not expected to survive my heart attack, but somehow I did. And like many people who beat the odds, I felt there had to be a purpose to why I was spared. Coupled with that, the near-death experience was so profound, so vivid and so mysterious that I needed a systematic way to process it. And so I turned to my love of writing for answers.

During my early days as writer, I was naïve enough to believe that my work was polished enough for publication. I churned out some 40 stories and mailed each one to practically every literary magazine in Canada. Soon the rejections began to arrive, mostly form letters, but a few came with hand-written encouragements. I was fortunate enough on my journey to have met Wayson Choy, the award-winning writer and fellow heart-survivor. He graciously read my work and said that I had talent, but if I wanted to avoid rejection letters what I needed to do was to work on my craft.

It was during this trial-and-error phase of honing craft that I saw a call for submissions from Diaspora Dialogues. I read with great interest about their free mentorship program (M.G. Vassanji was one of the mentors that year; he is one of my favorite authors). Plus, there was a chance to be published in DD’s annual anthology. With hasty enthusiasm I sent out what I then considered my best short story. Some three weeks later, the letter from Diaspora Dialogues arrived and I tore it open with expectant glee. It was another rejection letter, suggesting that I try again next year. And I did. This time, when the envelope with the prominent DD logo arrived in the post, I was cautious. The letter was thicker than the one the previous year. Prepared for disappointment, I shut my bedroom door and opened it in private. I had been accepted. I should have been happy, right? Wrong. The mentor assigned to me was not M.G. Vassanji, it was Rabindranath Maharaj. I knew Rabindranath was a respected and gifted writer, but he was still not M.G. Vassanji. Rabindranath’s style of writing vastly differed from mine: I wrote magic realism, my stories were philosophical; he wrote about alienation, his stories were character studies. How could this man possibly be of help?

Well, it only took the first feedback email from Rabindranath to show me how wrong I had been. Not only is he an accomplished writer, but he is an experienced teacher. He understood my style better than I did, and he knew how to explain things in a way that made sense. For example, one criticism I had heard more than once about my work from others was that I had a tendency to introduce tidbits of information which took the reader away from the main narrative. So in this story I had been careful to keep it tight. Rabindranath pointed out the places where expansion of side-details would enrich the story. He explained that if I did it in a way that revealed more about the protagonist, then these side-details would not distract the reader but rather engage the reader further. Of course he was right. On the second rewrite (we are allowed a total of three) Rabindranath was mostly copy editing with an eye for rhythm. I asked him if it would be more helpful for me to submit a second story for the third feedback instead of the same one. He generously agreed. In fact, he was very generous with answering questions in between the drafts as well. I ended up accepting almost all of his suggestions and I feel my story was much stronger with his help. Diaspora Dialogues agreed; they are publishing it in the anthology TOK 6.

I felt so encouraged that I sent a proposal for a short fiction collection to a small publisher, along with a sample story (the one I worked with Rabindranath on). To my surprise, the publisher liked the sample story so much that she asked to see the full manuscript. The collection is presently under consideration.

I would heartily recommend this program to any writer serious about getting published. It is certainly a leg up on a path that is often steep and slippery.

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I felt myself, at one and the same time,
well-suited and totally unsuited to be a ‘mentor’ to ‘emerging’ writers, when Helen Walsh asked me. For one thing, I’m something of an emerging writer myself, having published my first book – co-written with my wife Pamela, a real writer who’s been earning a living by writing for 25 years – at the age of fifty-nine; my first and so-far only novel appeared at age sixty-seven. Then Helen mentioned money and I was sold. I still don’t know why I was asked but I am glad for the experience.

Having grown up on the literature of the early- to mid-twentieth century – I’m not much for the Victorians excepting Dickens – my imagination and stylistic preferences are fairly conventional, even old-fashioned. And I confess to reading, shall we say, selectively in ‘modern’ literature, with little patience for theories, pre- or post-colonial. So to be foisted upon four very twenty-first century writers must have been somewhat baffling to them, but was a learning experience for me.

The different ways of telling stories that came at me from the mentees was, in a curious way, more affective on a manuscript page than on the page of a published book. My own storytelling style — to the extent that I write stories — tends to be fairly linear. But the story ‘Hunger’, my contribution to TOK 6*, which began as a completely linear concept (and got nowhere fast) started prisming as soon as I decided to abandon linearity and thereafter got written quite easily. Its quality is a matter for debate but it was a very liberating exercise, for which I thank them.

Fortunately for both of us, they came well-equipped with their own very distinctive voices. Mostly what I did was apply ‘the physics yardstick’: If A is at one end of a very long street s/he can’t possibly see the colour of B’s eyes at the other end. It’s something that’s easy to forget in the creative rush of actual writing, so better applied by an outside eye. I’d like to think it helped.

There was one unexpected and marvelous bonus in the experience. One of the mentees turned out to be the daughter of someone whom I didn’t know well enough in a previous life – we were diplomats – to call ‘friend’ but whom I’d liked and respected enormously. You never know who you’re going to meet at Diaspora Dialogues.

by Martin Mordecai

*Diaspora Dialogues launches the sixth book in its TOK: Writing the New Toronto anthology series, with readings and a lively panel discussion from emerging and established writers, including Rishma Dunlop, David Layton, Karen Connelly and more.
April 20, 7:30 pm
Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West

Biography

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I never realized how essential writing has been throughout my life, until recently, when I stumbled upon some old stories that I wrote when I was about six or seven. Regardless of how juvenilely comedic The Lion and The Toy Mouse was, I’m proud (blushingly so) to say that that story was my beginning. However, I only started my more serious work during the beginning of grade nine. I feel terrible to say this, but I didn’t start writing at the time because I needed to—which Rilke constantly stresses any artist must do—but because I was merely attempting to be a part of my school’s writing club. Yet, I’m extremely grateful that I did force out that strung-together poetry, for it started me on a winding road that dove deeper into my potential as a writer. Now, I write whenever and wherever I please.

Currently in grade ten at Father John Redmond CSS, this is the second year that I have had the pleasure of working with Diaspora Dialogues mentors in creative writing workshops. After attending my first one in grade nine, with the prestigious Kerri Sakamoto, I have made it an issue to attend every workshop at my school. I’ve had a tendency to only write poetry, but after hearing some of the works by our mentors, I’ve been writing so much more. I know it sounds awkward, but it feels as if each workshop is like an injection of an inspiration-stimulant. Since our last workshop in February, I’ve already written some chapters for multiple novel ideas, a few rants, about three and a half short stories, and numerous poems.

For the Diaspora Dialogues presentation this year, though, I chose a piece that I wrote the night after a workshop with Anne-Marie Woods. It was raining pretty hard, so with the workshop in mind came my poem Black Sky of Hope. (Below is a short excerpt.) I really just wanted to show how beautiful something so intense could be. And in truth, when regarding the Diaspora Dialogues program, how intense something already extraordinary really is.

“…Strike me down
Burn me to a crisp.
Why should it matter anyways?
We all need to be shocked back into reality,
And the storm-maker takes it upon himself to do so.
So I stand,
In the middle of the still blowing soft green grass,
Dripping with rain, sorrow, and uncertainty.

So strike me,
STRIKE ME DOWN!
BURN ME!
And wake me up.”

Written by Dante Mottillo 

I discovered Diaspora Dialogues at a low point in my life.  I’d just moved back to Toronto after a miserable stint as an English professor in small town Nova Scotia.  After spending the past decade of my life studying “isms,” I’d come to the realization that I had little interest in grand theories for talking about literature.  What I really wanted to do was write my own fiction.  A belated realization, no doubt.

All the story fragments my grandmothers had told me about dances and Japanese-American beauty pageants and dusty Internment camps in Minidako, Idaho and Kaslo, BC, and the gritty neighbourhoods where they’d resettled after the war caught hold in my imagination.  That well of collective memories surrounding the Japanese-Canadian and Japanese-American communities was what I wanted to spend my life writing about and exploring.  But in order to tell these stories, I had to develop my own voice and get into my characters’ heads, which is easier said than done.

I submitted a short story I’d started working on to Diaspora Dialogues, upon seeing their Call for Submissions in a café.  I was delighted to be selected as one of their “Emerging Writers” for the 2009/10 mentorship programme.  And what luck to be matched with Emma Donoghue as my mentor (a year later, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her latest masterpiece, Room). 

As a mentor, Emma was no less masterly.  Corresponding by email over the next several months, she gave me a wealth of advice about how to improve my story, “The House on St. Clarens,” which tells the story of a Japanese-Canadian man in the midst of a meltdown, as he struggles with his mother’s imminent death.  It’s told from the perspective of his daughter (me, really), while she witnesses her dad’s “acting out” and in the process discovers some tragic family secrets surrounding his childhood in 1950s Toronto, in the rough Bloor-Lansdowne area.  Emma advised me on how I could expand certain sections of dialogue to heighten dramatic tension.  And I particularly appreciated her suggestion that I could transform a secret revealed all too early into the climax, solving the problem of how to end the story (I’d been disgruntled by the ending in my first draft).  At the end of our mentorship, I was delighted that my story was accepted for publication in Diaspora Dialogues’ anthology, TOK: Writing the New Toronto. 

With my first published story under my belt, my confidence was boosted.  Soon after a friend introduced me to Sam Hiyate, who founded the literary agency The Rights Factory, and he expressed interest in reading my work.  Over the next few months, I participated in a writing workshop Sam teaches and during that time I embarked on a new project, a memoir called The Reading List: Literature, Love, and Back Again, which revisits some of the material in “The House on St. Clarens” in a different form.  The Reading List tells the story of an exhausted English professor who leaves her job to return home to her parents, and tries to get closer to her retired father (who has his own crisis to deal with) by putting together a list of important books for the two of them to discuss.  Representing me as my agent, Sam sold the rights to Variety Crossing Press, which is publishing my book later this fall.  More details about the book can be found at my blog, http://www.the-reading-list.com/

I feel that Diaspora Dialogues played a key role in helping me realize my dream of becoming a writer.  The mentorship programme offers an amazing resource to emerging writers.  The 2011/12 Call for Submissions is now open and I would encourage any aspiring writer, who has ever dreamed of developing her voice and telling her own distinctive story, to apply.

The anthology is published by 42bookz.com in India and is a collaboration between the publishers and Trade Architects Inc, a Toronto-based creative agency.

A short story by Mayank Bhatt, who was a mentee for Diaspora Dialogues’ Mentoring Program in 2009 and whose short story was published in TOK 5, is also featured in the anthology.  

According to Dr. Jasmine D’Costa, President of Trade Architects, Indian Voices is a “representation of one voice from different parts of the world – the diversity comes through from a shared sensibility that stems from the same roots.”

Poets and authors of Indian descent from Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Muscat, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Singapore, UAE, Uganda, the UK and the USA are featured in the anthology.

We asked Mayank a few short questions about his involvement with the anthology:

How did you get involved with Indian Voices?

Jasmine D’Costa, editor of Indian Voices had issued a call for submissions early 2010. My association with Jasmine began in 2009 with Canadian Voices II, which was published in September 2010 – four months after my first ever short story was published in TOK 5.

Tell us about the piece that will be included in the book.

[The piece is called] “Ruksana’s Journey” – the story is actually the second chapter of my novel. At present, I’m working on the second draft of the novel. It’s a continuation of my story The New Canadians published in TOK 5. This story is about the mother’s (Ruksana) train journey to Bombay. Ruksana is fleeing her home after religious fanatics attacked her home.

You must be looking forward to its publication in the spring.

Indeed, I’m excited about the launch. I began to write fiction only in Canada – thanks to Diaspora Dialogues’ mentoring program – and the two short stories that have been published so far are in Canadian anthologies. This is the first work of fiction to be published in India.