WORDS SYDNEY BARTOS
KALEIDOSCOPE
PHOTOS SAHAR ASKARY
DANA SEIF For each workshop, Seif chose motifs like mistakes, identity and heartache, topics that people often struggle to open up about.
Despite being an artist of various mediums, a “mosaic person” in her own words, Dana Seif has most significantly felt the power of writing. To her, writing is healing.
“I’ve noticed this culture of pretending something didn’t happen just because you don’t want to deal with it,” she said. “People come to the sessions and they talk about those things, and they write about them.”
The graduate student arrived in Toronto for the first time in September 2018 to begin her studies in the media production program at Ryerson. Her initial plan was to attend Western University for media and communications, but Seif decided to apply to Ryerson at the last minute. After getting accepted to both, she went with her gut and chose Ryerson. From there, she described everything as happening organically.
Seif realized that people attended her workshops because of the themes. Many people who didn’t define themselves as writers came because they liked the subject matter. “It’s a very overwhelming and empowering feeling,” she said.
Seif was born to Lebanese-Canadian parents but grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and lived in Beirut for three years to complete her undergraduate degree in graphic design. During her second year in Beirut, Seif attended her first writers’ workshop.
The Poetry Passport became an incubator of sorts in Jeddah. “There weren’t a lot of other things happening, because it was a community where not a lot of people came together to talk about topics.”
After moving back to Jeddah once her undergrad was complete, Seif began a workshop called The Poetry Passport in September 2017. At the time, she was working a corporate design job that her heart just wasn’t in. The workshop became “this thing for my soul and spirit to do on the weekends,” she said.
With its success, the workshops soon became weekly. Seif decided to relate the effects of The Poetry Passport to her major paper, a component of the program that students work on throughout the year. While her thesis would evolve throughout the year, she knew it would have something to do with The Passport.
The Poetry Passport began as a bi-weekly writers’ workshop, each one with a unique theme.
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