FOLD 2024 Festival Program

VO I C E S F RO M TH E FO L D A FESTIVAL MAGAZINE YEAR NINE

PRESENTED BY

THE FESTIVAL OF LITERARY DIVERSITY APRIL 28 — MAY 5, 2024 >> VIRTUAL + IN-PERSON

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See yourself here.

Look to us for inclusive programs, services, and collections. Our Pride Book Club offers open conversation about issues and allyship.

Visit the calendar of events on our website to discover programs for all ages and interests.

Do MORE

with your library card borrow • download • stream • learn • grow Scan the QR code or visit our website to register for your free library card.

bramptonlibrary.ca 2

CONTENTS From the FOLD Team

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Mayor’s Letter

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Death Dance

By Olivia Van Guinn

Is Your Stuttering a Disability?

By Justin Ancheta

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Feast

By Jenna Butler

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wherever you are

By Kathy Mak

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Mahdia

By Amanda Shuman

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Cat’s point of view 1: Translating/Traduciendo

By Logaine Navascués

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My Not-So-Secret Identity

By Judith Lam Tang

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Ancestory.com

By Rahma Shere

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Bones

By Jem Woolidge

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We Celebrate The Rain

By Fareh Malik

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the code

By Pritha Jain

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Birthday

By Nasrin Abedi

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Qahr For Bissan

By Amal El-Mohtar

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FOLD at a Glance

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Festival Schedule

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Festival Participants

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FOLD Book List

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Cat’s point of view 2: Favorite places/Lugares favoritos 16

By Logaine Navascués Her

By Anny Tang

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Night Illuminates

By Elizabeth Mudenyo

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WINNING WITH PRINT • Direct Marketing • Wide Format Printing • Service Illustrations • Posters

Print Three Brampton supports and encourages the

initiatives undertaken by The FOLD Foundation

905 · 454 · 4284 www.print3brampton.com

Serving Brampton for over 30 years.

STAFF Executive Director JAEL RICHARDSON Kids Coordinator ARDO OMER Interim Communications Coordinator JONISHA LEWINSON Volunteer & Audience Engagement Coordinator SAMANTHA CLARKE Graphic Designer KILBY SMITH-MCGREGOR Volunteer Lead TONI DUVAL Poetry Curator THE WILD WOMAN Associate Program Editor ALEXANDRA YEBOAH Pitch Perfect Facilitator CALYSSA ERB Educator Guide Writer TONI DUVAL

PROGRAM ADVISORY TEAM

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Samantha Clarke Yeli Cruz Toni Duval Calyssa Erb Emmy Nordstrom Higdon Aaisha Islam Kristen Johnston Sarasvathi Kannan Jonisha Lewinson Lavanya Narasimhan Monica Nathan Ardo Omer Ramona Porter Anita Ragunathan Jael Richardson Fiona Ross Natasha Shaikh Lamoi Simmonds Alya Somar Monica Tang Monika Trzeciakowski Meg Wheeler Alexandra Yeboah

Director, Lead LAVANYA NARASIMHAN Treasurer TERI VLASSOPOULOS Secretary ASHISH SETH Director, Kids Programming KAREN RICHARDSON MASON Director, Sponsorships & Special Projects FELICIA QUON Director, Human Resources CYNTHIA INNES Director, Board Governance MARK RICHARDSON Director, Adult Programming MONICA TANG

SPONSORS & PARTNERS LEAD CORPORATE SPONSOR

PLATINUM

GOLD

An agency of the Government of Ontario Un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

BRONZE

SILVER

CELA opens books no matter how you read Diverse voices deserve to be heard.

Diverse stories deserve to be read.

COMMUNITY PARTNERS

The Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) is pleased to partner with the FOLD to make accessible versions of the FOLD’s featured books available through public libraries to the estimated 3 million Canadians with print disabilities.

Celalibrary.ca

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FROM THE

FOLD

TEAM

Left to Right: Jonisha Lewinson, Samantha Clarke, Jael Richardson & Ardo Omer

We feel very grateful to be celebrating the ninth annual Festival of Literary Diversity.

As a new (and growing) team, we’re excited about the incredible ideas that the FOLD Program Advisory Team have contributed and the way our Board of Directors continues to guide the organization.

We’re so grateful to our funders and sponsors who continue to support us—many of them year after

year. They are a critical part of our ability to deliver an accessible festival virtually and in-person, and their confidence in our work means so much.

Finally, we are also grateful to you, our audience and supporters. We hope you enjoy this year’s festival. We hope it challenges your way of thinking, and that you discover incredible new voices that shape your worldview.

— JAEL , ARDO, SAMANTHA and JONISHA

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IN GARDEN SQUARE

SATURDAY NIGHT MOVIES JULY 6 - AUGUST 24 7:00 PM & 9:00 PM

EAST COAST KITCHEN PARTY

FEATURING SCREECHED INN & MAINLAND KITCHEN BAND JULY 19

STOMP N’ STAMPEDE

FEATURING KALSEY KULYK, DJ JOHNNY RIVEX, & DOUBLE TROUBLE LINE DANCER AUGUST 16

THE POETS: A TRAGICALLY HIP TRIBUTE PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE GORD DOWNIE & CHANIE WENJACK FUND AUGUST 30

CLASSIC ROCK ROYALTY

FEATURING MICHAEL WHITE’S ORCHESTRAL LED ZEPPELIN & SMOKE ON THE WATER, THE DEEP PURPLE EXPERIENCE AUGUST 31

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E

Y T S

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April 2024 Greetings from Mayor Patrick Brown Dear Friends, On behalf of the Members of Brampton City Council I would like to welcome you to the 9th Annual Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) which is Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and storytellers, held in historic downtown Brampton. The FOLD provides one-of-a-kind events for kids and adults that engage readers, inspire writers, and empower educators by highlighting important and underrepresented voices.

The 2024 festival will take place from April 28–May 5 and features 25+ events and over 40 authors. Panels, discussions and workshops will allow guests from across Canada and around the world to participate in the festival. All virtual and most in-person events will be close-captioned. Multi-modal format: In-Person Dates: April 28–May 1 (The Rose Theatre). Virtual: May 2–5.

This festival will bring established and emerging writers, educators, and literary professionals together with readers from all walks of life to celebrate and expand Canada’s body of diverse literature.

The festival will also provide aspiring writers with the opportunity to develop their skills and improve their writing by connecting them with other writers and by providing them with professional development opportunities that allow them to learn. I want to thank the sponsors and the Board of Directors for their ongoing efforts in promoting literacy and making this festival a success.

Enjoy the festival!

Sincerely,

Patrick Brown Mayor

NEW SPRING

Exhibitions at PAMA on now The Suitcase Project Lii Buflo: A Métis Way of Life

opens May 25, 2024 Oh My Dog! Stories of Home + discover events and programs for all ages

pama.peelregion.ca 9 Wellington St. E., Brampton, ON L6W 1Y1 905-791-4055

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original poem.

DEATH DANCE

BY OLIVIA VAN GUINN Mom makes me change into my nice pants (out of the striped pajama bottoms she sewed) because Granddad’s coming home. And the uncles change out of their well-worn polos because Granddad’s coming home, and the uncles clear a path through the house so the aunts may help Bà nội off the sofa, to the stove so she may taste the pork rib soup; she approves, and the aunts help her back to her seat while more aunts chop herbs and ready the plates, and set the table for Granddad’s return.

The eye-watering sting of their medical oil.

Charred onion, ginger, lemongrass, hoisin.

Mom stays close to me. It’s as if she’s afraid I’ll be kicked about in the household tumult like a tumbleweed. But then I think she’s afraid that she’ll get lost too because Dad is so busy. “Ông nội is your grandma’s husband, and your Dad’s dad,” she says, as if unveiling a new rotation of the Earth–my Dad’s dad. “He died in the war before you were born. But today, he’s coming home.”

My aunt stands two red candles on glass feet, and tickles the wicks with her lighter until they catch flame. Then Dad displays a glass full of uncooked rice, and Bà nội plants incense in that white soil, flowering yellow embers.

And two-by-two, my relatives pray, softspeaking into their hands with words I can’t understand, oldest-to-youngest, like all things–and the waiting line proceeds, dwindling to my sister, then me.

I rest my knees on the carpet, fold my hands.

While Uncle murmurs a cloud over my head, I take three bows, slicing through air, and the house whooshes down then up.

I stand and bow to the four principal directions:

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Wise, silver. A grownup’s scent.

Jasmine. Fine pollen strands twist, dance.

Old sheets, thick dust.

left, then back, then right, then straight; I’m dizzy in this death dance. Mom makes me unclasp my hands, fall away. The incense dwindles to half, spitting ash to its bedding of rice, and the uncles unclench their backs and sigh.

Mom tugs me backwards while the aunts bolt forth to the kitchen. “When the incense is done,” she says, “Granddad will go back to heaven.

Then we can eat.” I ask why Granddad doesn’t stay all the time, since we miss him so, and Mom’s voice turns low. “Because— —this isn’t his home anymore.

He lives with his parents in heaven now.

But even though he’s gone, he still likes to visit Sometimes.”

I ask why Granddad doesn’t visit more.

And Mom turns her eyes away, disguising how far from here she really is. “Because— —Granddad’s afraid he isn’t invited.”

Red onions. Chili crisp. The finishings.

The incense wears out and blinks away.

The smoke trail dragon-dances back to the sky; Dad blows out the flames and uncles dismantle the display while aunts set plates in the kitchen.

Mom keeps me safe from tumbling away, taking me to the side and making sure I watch the proceeding, so that I’ll know how to do it myself someday.

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original essay.

WHEREVER YOU ARE

BY K ATHY MAK Time / malleable like yarn / weaves itself into the past and present. Takes no concern of fraying ends / tangled history / knotted memories. The here and now / now and future continues to evolve. Past settles but memory molds it into something old / new. Old like the brush balanced between the nock of my forefinger and thumb.

New to the muted rice paper that crinkles and smooths as ink spreads across its terrain.

The last time I dipped brush to ink / traversed into my culture and roots / was when I published an essay on swimming and Chinese calligraphy. Initially it was a release that enabled me to momentarily put down the weight / anxiety / stress I felt when training to become a lifeguard and swim instructor. The focus was on my swimming journey but somehow calligraphy became associated with it. Somehow while walking circles by the undercover area of my elementary school / and seeing a puddle of ink steadily ripple to every rain drop / the idea to meld calligraphy with pool waters emerged. After returning home and researching / I learned there were eight common strokes every calligrapher learned / and the number coincided nicely with the eight fragments I had written.

The structure for my attempted hermit crab essay had come into being. But what I had not accounted for / was calligraphy becoming fused into the tight ball of repulsion I had for the sport. And I couldn’t / didn’t / write.

Calligraphy demands a certain mindset / a certain moment of suspension from the everyday. The ecstatic heart that wishes to show off her completed script / the tumultuous heart that carries the burden of today. The agonized heart counting down to the remaining beats of time. These varying degrees of emotion span and fluctuate not only within the self / but is reflected in the characters themselves. The way each stroke is created through a flick of wrist / position of brush / slant of tip / viscosity of ink / and minutes spent grinding the inkstick against the

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inkstone / shifts / based on how we feel in that precise moment. In a way / it captures and reveals more of us than we know. More than any other form of penmanship.

I didn’t always appreciate calligraphy. Time was forever in a child’s mind / and I didn’t have the attention span as I did now / to explore the breadth and depth of the craft. To let time run on itself as the parchment fills with languid black strokes. My memory fails to remember why I began writing again / after that lapse of years since childhood. Why I decided to choose calligraphy as the medium for a mail art exchange. Why it felt different to breathe / to hold the same brush in hands that were more rugged and mapped / I would only understand later. But memory holds on why I returned this year. Influenced by the energy and broiling passion from Lunar New Year / seeing elderly masters dip their bush in ink / expel great flourishes on strips of red banner moved me.

That evening and for two weeks straight / I periodically wrote in near silence. I remember the cast of shadow from fluorescent kitchen lights / the musty aroma of ink smudged to my fingers / and the occasional hum from the refrigerator. Calligraphy / I found / excels in solitude.

And solitude was all I had / in that existence.

Though like any instance of passion and energy / it dilutes as time ebbs. After that frenzied two weeks of continuous writing / I couldn’t / didn’t / write. Until Ma told me grand uncle Dai had passed away.

This was the grand uncle who exercised in the park every morning / went to the library to read news and stories.

The one who spent afternoons in his home writing Chinese calligraphy. He was a master himself / with scrolls upon scrolls of his own dedication to the craft. One year / he gifted Ma some of his prized calligraphy brushes. For your daughters / he’d said. They arrived within hand towels wrapped in plastic bags / parceled with care.

And now I write / for the past and present / for words I never got to say / your face I’ve never seen. I write for great admiration of your spirit / your kindness / your existence / and the love you’ve given / I will always cherish. I write for these words on the page / for them to take flight / reach / unbounded and true / to wherever you are.

路向平安 身心放開

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original comic.

C AT’S POINT OF VIEW 1:

TR ANSL ATING/ TR ADUCIENDO

BY LOGAINE NAVASCUÉS

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original poem.

ANCESTORY.COM

BY R AHMA SHERE Himalayan salted complexions that change as the rushing Indus carves through changing terrains from towering giants of glacier valleys to fields of white cotton clouds dotting rural neighbourhoods in a land that has been conquest from time immoral through the ancient routes of The Silk Road to the first ships that landed on coastal ports populated by sun baked bodies shamed for not being fair and lovely. My body is a reflection of the land I come from, a land of my ancestors, home to monuments to deities and Sufi saints who penned poetry in our name and gave birth to nations that still stand under ever-shifting skies of the winter sun and monsoon rains nourishing this vessel that holds who we were and who we are today. We, the people who refused to dissipate in the melancholic wars of men.

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original essay.

WE CELEBRATE THE RAIN

BY FAREH MALIK SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001 - 7 YEARS OLD

The PA system rings in young ears like an alarm. In this era before smartphones, humanity has an untethered freedom; many of these people have no idea what just happened in NYC. My parents pull me out of school early– a 7-year-old’s cause for celebration. Lunch will be eaten early, video games will be played, Dr. Robotnik is about to get this work. I come home to my mom crying on the phone. She tells me it’s nothing. I believe her.

My white friend is not allowed to come over and play after school. His parents say they have to think about it. I don’t really understand what they have to think about; tag is a game that requires more than one person. I am allowed to go over there if I want to, though. His father says I’ve earned that at least.

What do you mean earned?

His father says we will be playing hockey.

I don’t know how to play hocHis father says, “It will be good to get some Canadian in ya.”

Alright, at least it’s outside.

No matter where I am, the news channels blare like background music.

SEPTEMBER 12TH, 2001 - 7 YEARS OLD

My friend showed up without her hijab on for the first time today. I like her hair, but I liked her hijab, too.

Words reminiscent of Bill 21 are tattooed on her nape.

She won’t make eye contact with our teacher. Her par-

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ents and mine have never met, but have a magical, telepathic, unspoken pact– neither of us is allowed to walk home after school anymore. My parents stop my white friend as he walks by on his way home. They lecture on a driveway; tell him not to believe what the news says about people who look like me. “You’re going to hear some terrible things about us. About people like us from overseas. Please don’t listen to them.” I wonder how they know this future. It must be a grown-up thing. I look up at my mother, and for a brief moment she looks like a composite of all my aunts and uncles. My dad widens his mouth to fit the voice of a billion Muslims.

DECEMBER 16TH, 2001 - 7 YEARS OLD

Today is a love letter to Gerrard Street– a three-blockstretched collection of storefronts where we go for our desi necessities. The fresh samosa and ittar scent gives you no room to smell anything that isn’t ambrosian. I have not returned to Pakistan since I was a child, but this must be what it is like. Every clothing store smells like an ancient basement, but not in a bad way. It’s almost like your grandparents. It is more like a comforting wisdom.

My grandmother breathes what little humidity there is into her lungs, finds home in a rickshaw-turned-bench, and for the first time this week doesn’t feel the need to puzzle together broken English. Her trembling hands can find her tasbeeh like a metal detector, and here she is not afraid to dig it out. Oh, Gerrard Street– the magical corner of Toronto that waters my family’s roots; the sanctuary we go to for all things our white neighbourhood can’t provide. Sometimes this means masala packets and saris– in most ways it means home.

Eid al-Fitr falls nine days before Christmas. Fasting is easy when the sun sets this early. Still, I am ready to gorge on any piece of food I can find. We usually play Quranic

recitations around this time of year. “Okay, but we’ll keep the volume down,” my family agrees. I’ve never heard it this quiet before. I’ve never heard them this quiet before.

It feels like I’ve never been this silenced before.

I’m told that salat won’t be at the masjid this year– they’ll only tell the Muslims that they know where it will be.

Word of mouth becomes a valuable currency in this pocket of suburbia. I pick which shalwar kameez and topi I will proudly wear to school. Looking fly is effortless on Eid. I choose the black one because it matches my friends’ button-ups; plus there’s less risk of food stains. When I fall asleep, my parents hide the outfit.

DECEMBER 20TH, 2001 - 7 YEARS OLD

My family already knows.

My people know.

Down the hall I can hear my father clinking glasses, doing the dishes far too early, and far too anxiously. He’s been up since fajr and still holds onto his sleep cycle from when he worked. He says the earlier you wake up, the more you can get done. My dad is a man, pragmatic and practical– his brain, a scripture of problem solving.

Exact measurements for instant coffee and sugar sit in my empty mug– dad’s duty bursts forth from his body in funny ways. When I wake up, he immediately says we have to elect a Muslim into office to guarantee us protection; that we have gone too long, doing too little.

I used to lead Jummah prayer in an unused classroom at school. I still do, but now I do it without my parents permission. I’m sure that if they knew they would be angry. Jasim approves though; I often think I inherited my rebellion from my older brother alongside his hand-medowns like some sort of Mjolnir-transformed-sweater, frayed at its edges. I feel frayed at mine too. I rinse my body into temporary smoothness like a ritual. My friends stand guard outside.

The sun beams in from the backside of my house, and from my bed I can see the darkened outline of my mother’s shadow. My grandmother is no longer with us, but I can tell my mom’s body gave a home to the lost pieces of her soul– they both find solace in foreheads pressed to the carpet. They both laugh at the same pitch, alas, not today. They both pray on their knees and rock, swing, rock back and forth.

APRIL 11TH, 2011 - 17 YEARS OLD

Rock.

France decides it will ban women from wearing a burqa or niqab. My cousins tell me that their existence has become a daily protest. Meanwhile, high schoolers leaving my french class mockingly lift their t-shirt necklines up over their noses. I have seen enough overly forced-shut windbreakers to know just how much imaginary dynamite lies underneath. A caricature of Allahu Akbar muscles its way through their lips.

My fist unfurls. I whisper:

When shadows are this long, every subtle movement seems cosmic, like any body sway could swallow the home whole.

Swing.

I wish to be swallowed. I wish to be carried.

Rock.

* I try to convince myself into a late awakening– I am always a pendulum out of unison. one time under my breath to make up for theirs.

Swing, dammit.

JUNE 6TH, 2021 - 27 YEARS OLD

The news channel bellows again, this time across smartphone screens. An entire Muslim family was killed in London, Ontario. It’s hard for Muslims to get understood as the victims. It’s hard when our blood stains streets. It’s hard when our blood stains sand. It’s hard even as our bones decorate graves.

When I was young, I was the whiny kid. The sensitive kid.

The one whose anger came out as tears and tantrums.

So much of growing up as a boy is being told to suck it up.

So much of growing up a minority is hardening your skin.

So much of growing up as both, is being a man too soon.

Don’t cry.

The news claims we don’t know the killer’s motive yet. I already do.

Men don’t cry.

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I am rooted here today.

Men don’t cry.

Stuck.

Don’t cry.

There is a prayer rug folded neatly at the corner of my bed, its tasselled fringe peeking out, flowing freely in the breeze of a plastic fan. I envy them.

I cannot move. My limbs, now coursing with lead-laden blood instead of iron, remember the feeling of giving themselves to paralysis. I am barely awake– my body, an ancient machine, is clinging to the bed like rust. I cannot see full consciousness on the horizon, either. My phone, a phoney sun, projects the holiest light it can muster.

Notifications from politician statements sunrise on its screen; people with much more energy to argue than I. They all collectively tell me to get up and place my stake somewhere on this spectrum. My mother tells me to get up and pray. My father tells me to get up and work. My heart feels like colonized land.

SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2022 - 28 YEARS OLD

I return to Gerrard street, this time as a man. I visit that wondrous land with its vibrant colours now bleached; its bustling boulevards now windswept. I figured out how to shave, but my once-courageous beard tucks itself into an N95. The imam says it is sunnah anyway.

I walk past the paan shop and remember the worlds I have lived in before. I imagine the worlds hereafter. It feels spectral to be here– I trace the chipped body of an old redstone to make sure this is real.

The thing about hauntings is that ghosts dwell in street corners far more often than abandoned buildings. Those bloody tides will retreat into the split of a sidewalk. Souls fight to fill hollow spaces— cracks in pavement and corner store windows— more than you think. ** To the frightened, even the shadow of a tree is a ghost.

I’m told to go back to my country. I go visit my parents in the suburbs.

Sometimes when you look at a place, you can see the pain it’s been through. You can feel it. There are only so many metaphors you can craft about a neighbourhood possessed by grief.

JUNE 13TH, 2021 - 27 YEARS OLD

OCTOBER 15TH, 2022 - 28 YEARS OLD

JUNE 12TH, 2021 - 27 YEARS OLD

I overhear a man say he’s glad a couple Muslims got mowed down.

JUNE 14TH, 2021 - 27 YEARS OLD

I read my poetry for a crowd of hundreds at a Muslim festival. I sling my backpack over my shoulder and walk back to my car. The sound of the crowd dies down and reluctantly makes way for a megaphone– a man with a picket sign across the street guards the way to the parking lot.

His poster claims that I’m evil. He turns to face me and his voice says the same thing. My family taught me that I shouldn’t hit someone unless they’re a danger to me or someone else. I know this. Regardless, my pocket floods with clenched fist. I dig the car key in between my fingers, just in case. I am far too quiet as I pass by and say: *

My mom goes for daily walks. She says it’s good for her legs. Shit, I’ve got legs too– so I go with her. At least I wish that was the reason. A part of me remembers that she’s a Muslim woman in a Canadian city kind of like London.

A stubborn corner of me remembers that while most of me is fighting to forget.

Her eyes tell me a story of heartbreak. A tale of perseverance. They’re the same eyes my grandmother had. I wonder if when people tell me I look like my mother or father, this is what they see– a hardship won at a cost; survival imprinted into the contours of a face.

She looks up at these sunset-draped boughs and mentions how beautiful the leaves are as they change colour.

I marvel at her, appreciating something that’s beauty thrives on the brink of its death.

under my breath.

She tells me to look up at them with her.

Naan and butter chicken fill my belly in a way that shouldn’t feel like defiance.

All I can see is that she’s standing too close to the curb. * Arabic ** Urdu

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original poem.

BIRTHDAY

BY NASRIN ABEDI BIRTHDAY Which season were you born into that Autumn cries for you?

The leaves run barefoot and howl for you Didn’t you say when autumn comes, We’ll dance with our hair in the wind?

And celebrate our birthdays among the trees?

So that the swallows build nests for us?

Which season were you born into that your hair became a nest for the swallows?

[Author’s Note. In autumn of 2023, following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, protests against the Islamic republic of Iran began all over the country and many of the protesters were killed.

Mahsa Jina Amini was arrested, beaten and killed by the Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police of Iran’s government for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards in September 2022. ]

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original comic.

C AT’S POINT OF VIEW 2:

FAVORITE PL ACES/ LUGARES FAVORITOS

BY LOGAINE NAVASCUÉS

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Originally published in Grain (Volume 48.4, Summer 2021).

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original poem.

HER

NIGHT ILLUMINATES

BY ANNY TANG

BY ELIZ ABETH MUDENYO

a child again. I trace blue-soft tremors

Tonight nursing wounds I pretend to wait up if mom doesn’t come home I’ll describe her Black woman, late 50s, 5’1 last seen wearing ? Note: double check closet

of her eyelids like veins of silk leaves, her longing for a riptide of sleep that doesn’t arrive. how she once waited at my bedside in lush darkness, her arm pulled to my belly like an oar. the way villagers lay sacks of rice on restless toddlers, the weight dragging them to the still depths of a dream. whether her myth or memory, I never learned. now I touch her mottled temple, a burial of singed nerves. her mouth dried persimmon, language carved clean like a pit. at dawn, I feed her congee from soft spoons & her hands collapse to her heart, an inelegant gratitude.

I confess – there are people not meant for this life & I am one. my future nothing but your old promise: our faces withering twin-like & together in coffee shops, rinsed

Speak to the aunties next door, at church or to her new friend, another adult, mid-30s broad smile shaggy head of locs mom might be with her Outside the bar taking in cool night air a gentle toke, a few passes back and forth loose hand pumping to disco music fanning out to meet them, my mom stepping heel to toe, heel to toe Closer to her new friend laughing, bursting pockets of air between them, can’t see the time, dangling long sleeve over gold watch, the moon looking down the entire night the rotating disco ball leaked onto the ground Don’t hesitate if her hips don’t act her age if you overhear her friend call her another name if sweat dew means she evaporates into a tease into a snicker, into nobody’s mother Good luck then, trying to find her

in tinsel glow of fleeting Novembers. but now you’re gone already. here, but lost behind ashen eyes. will you ever smile at me again like before – that summer in Hainan, our ankles marbled in the sea. how you laughed, pulling me close under a shawl of milk-stained night

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Originally published in carte-blanche (Issue 45, June 2023).

IS YOUR STUTTERING A DISABILITY?

BY JUSTIN ANCHETA 1.

How do you define “disability”? a)

An umbrella term covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. None of which could ever apply to you.

b)

“Tell us more about your experience with asexuality and disability.” You imagine the question coming up in tomorrow’s news interview. You’ve worked with asexuality and queerness to cut out and hammer together a healthier identity for yourself. But you haven’t considered disability to be an identity you had the right to claim.

You wonder if you’ve been wrong.

c)

2.

3.

b)

It’s not like you have reduced hearing or sight.

You can still talk “normally” sometimes. You don’t have a chronic illness or need a mobility aid. So maybe it is the product of your imagination.

You remember a PBS science show on stuttering. The medical animation of vibrating vocal cords locking together, slamming shut like angry doors. You hold your hands to your throat, replaying the clip in your mind. Real people don’t talk like that, but occasionally you do. There must be something wrong with you.

“Take a look at this,” your friend says, opening his psychology textbook and showing two brain scans. The “normal” is lit up like a Christmas tree. By comparison, the stutterer’s brain was muted—a holiday disappointment. “You can see here where the speech centres of the brain are active. In the stutterer’s brain, the activity patterns are…different.” You cross and scratch your arms when you visualize your brain dulled and dimmed out like that.

How is your stuttering an activity limitation (causing difficulty in performing tasks or actions)? a)

You want to ask, “Do you know where I can find the cinnamon?” But thinking of speaking hardens your throat. You feel the screw turning, your brain dimming. But you open your mouth and hear the speech flow from your throat—fluent and effortless.

b)

In a music shop, you try to ask, “Where can I find the Sakanaction CDs?” But your speech arrives dismantled, tumbling in misshapen phonetic chunks. Is it your thoughts or your throat this time? The cashier answers with a demure smile.

c)

The phone cuts to the Canada Revenue agent.

“Please tell me your name,” he orders. “J-…Ju… J-…Uh, uh…uhh…” Your body’s voice runs into a brick wall. Head ringing, you glue together fragments of syntax and filler words into language.

The agent’s tone sharpens, impatient. “You mean you don’t remember your name?”

How has your stuttering been an impairment (a problem in body function or structure)? a)

18

You ask the bus driver if he’s going to Rexdale Boulevard. At the hard “r” sound, a set of locking pliers clamps on your throat. The tightening screw turns until your voice is a raspy wisp of air. Your dry throat and spasming vocal cords transform you into a twitching mass of tissue and bone.

c)

4.

Do you consider your stuttering to be a participation restriction (a problem impacting your involvement in life situations)? a)

It’s not a restriction. On some days fluency is effortless. When your throat stumbles midspeech, you know those listening will wait for you to finish speaking, without judgment or mockery. You feel able. Not broken.

b)

You struggle in the liminal space of a restricted body that works on the whims of muscle spasms and misfiring neurons. Your speech flows in and out of dysfunction, refusing to conform to your definition of disability.

c)

5.

It is a restriction. But you don’t care. You don’t care how long it takes to say, “Take the stairs towards Bloor Street.” You don’t care how you look, neck bent askew, jaw contorted. You will the words out of your grinding throat and into existence. Disregarding external triggers, the universe shrinks down to your vocal cords racing each other to the finish line.

Record your answers.

How many of each answer (a, b, c) did you choose?

•

Mostly (a): The question of whether or not you qualify as disabled lessens in importance compared to the question of how you relate to your stutter. Do you continue to fight it, or do you embrace it? On more days than expected, you can pass for fluent. But they don’t zero out the days you can’t.

•

Mostly (b): Your stutter is like every other part of you that walks the tightrope between selflove and self-loathing. Gaining normative fluency would be comparable to losing a piece of yourself. Your body would not find a substitute variable for your stutter, the equation would no longer make sense.

•

Mostly (c): Some say your stutter is a challenge, not a disability. Yet, no one denies the battles of attrition you’ve been conscripted to fight for your voice. Every social interaction is a whistle commanding you to jump out of the trench and charge into disputed ground, praying your dignity will survive.

•

Mostly (a), (b), or (c): There isn’t a right or wrong option here. Only the truth that your stutter belongs to you. The answer is whatever you need it to be.

How do you feel about your stuttering as a disability? a)

A disability? Your voice box is Schrödinger’s playground. Put your words inside, seal it shut: Will you or won’t you stutter? You won’t know until you open your mouth. How could you be disabled if your disability is a state of quantum uncertainty?

b)

Your stutter propelled you inward, forging rich new inner worlds defined not by your disfluency but by the written language. The journey was difficult, but you couldn’t imagine who you’d be without this experience.

c)

You fantasized about swallowing razor blade shards or hydrochloric acid to punish your straining throat. You are grateful you never acted on it.

19

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original essay.

FEAST

BY JENNA BUTLER There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

—Arundhati Roy, Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, 2004

finally make themselves understood. There is a line of refrigerator trucks wrapped halfway around the block, engines idling, for the bodies.

I have a talent for finding berries—the ones that come early or linger late, first on the tongue or last of the season. My husband tells me, I don’t know how you find them, how you see under the leaves, but I do. It’s not that I’m attuned to hidden things, but more like things that are always there, just a step to the side. You see goldfinches the same way, or hawks swinging on a single wingtip against the blue. Less a sharpening of the eyes than an easing, an opening of the gaze. There they are. Sometimes it feels as though, if you sharpen yourself too hard against the world in an effort to see, you miss what’s unfurling right alongside you.

The friend who dies, her name means earth. I carry her in my body as I sow and tend the summer garden, feeling my muscles strengthen and turn ropy with use. Our skin is the same copper as our mothers,’ speaking through us of Dodoma and Zanzibar, though mine collects lines and freckles, scars and burns, tokens of a life lived outdoors on stolen land here in Canada. Tokens of a life lived, still.

My friend’s name means earth, and mine, little bird.

My friends start to die in June, the beginning of strawberry season. There is too much rain. The berries are mushy and taste like sodden summer, a bloated glut. They will disintegrate in the pail, crushing one another with their weight. There is nothing for it but to glean as I go, popping the tiny berries between my lips. The jam kettle is empty on the stove. This year, strawberries will be a short-lived memory.

The friend who dies in New York City misses, mercifully, the triage cots set up in Central Park. At the hospital, she is unresponsive; the doctors tell her parents that she needed to be there ten hours ago, a day, then they might have had a chance. I see it like I see the berries: her mother’s head swinging helplessly toward her husband, not knowing her daughter is on life support fifteen doors down a crowded hallway, not understanding the words.

She is wearing her good sari, rich purple with small panes of mirror glass; her husband’s kurta is spotless. It doesn’t matter, though, that they present themselves well, properly turned out, respectable, masked. They have presented themselves too late to save their daughter’s life.

They are not allowed to see her, even after the doctors

20

The white-throated sparrows return and nest in the stand of aspens behind the house. They disappear into the cool green for a handful of weeks and emerge again trailed by fledglings, the babies still a little unbalanced, singing their songs backward until they learn the rafts of notes. The merlins hunt the alfalfa fields for deer mice and hares; the bald eagles slope down like meteors. At night, the great grey owls alight on fenceposts and turn saucer heads vast and round as prayer bowls. I slant through the dark hours like the bird I am named for, flying from something I cannot name, can only glimpse from the corner of my eye.

The rains let up as the raspberries come, tart and bright, dangling from their canes in some sort of flirtation. The jam kettle roils on the woodstove above a tamarack fire, and summer glimmers in the jars on the kitchen counter before it is stowed, sulky ruby, on the pantry shelves.

Three friends are dying at once, in three different states.

Black, Filipino, Syrian—none more than thirty-five years old, none with medical coverage. All in the space of a week. One funeral goes ahead with five mourners, another over Skype like some strange Netflix spoof. The third friend’s body will be stored until her family can gather from abroad. Stored. I think of her, slotted into a freezer berth at the funeral home, as though she is waiting, mere-

ly sleeping. As though there will be a time when she sits, swings her legs over the edge of the metal slider, folds herself into her mother’s arms. It will be months before the borders open, and months beyond that before people from her country are welcome. She will hover just under the surface of our awareness, not quite here, not yet gone.

We cannot know, in the early days after her death, that the funeral home will finally bury her, rigid and alone, when a month has elapsed and her family still has not come.

The saskatoons arrive, and the wild blueberries. In the garden, the yellow wax beans droop like teats; the Alderman peas fill bowl after bowl. Through the daylight hours, my husband and I are quietly obsessed with preserving food. The garden thrusts itself into our hands, and we eat and eat. There is so much life that it overwhelms. We browse chervil and kale, striped beet and soup celery. The days are long and the work is so hard, and I eat with tears running down my face.

When Mamounia dies, I know I will never hear anyone sing that way again—as though the music was swimming its way up through her chest, as though she had only the lightest grip on the notes. The best of talents makes the work look effortless, and she sang like she cooked: subtly, attuned to the spice. Barberry, za’atar, pomegranate; crescendo, sostenuto, silencio. I know she was alone when she died, and that her daughter will never forgive herself for moving away (a progressive city, a chance at a job beyond retail). I stash the deaths like bone counters.

I hold them in the rigging of my spine.

they had combed up every last fallen grain of wheat, the farmers couldn’t stop their children from gorging on grass to fill their bellies. This is what you understand, collectively and alone: how they tried, right up to the end, to ward themselves against what was coming.

When I was a child, I was taught that you must feed those who appear at your door, even if you don’t know them on first sight. You can never be certain that an unexpected visitor isn’t an ancestor, isn’t a god.

I imagine the feast we’ll have when my friends appear at the door. June raspberries pooling in their syrup. Saskatoon, blueberry, chokecherry; we’ll lift each jar to the window beforehand, the dense, opaque jam, the clean light slicing through the jelly. And they’re so thin, too, my friends, practically translucent, disappearing momentarily when they turn sideways to the sun. It’s a vanishing act more profound than the one perpetrated in hospital wards or classrooms, courtrooms or checkout lines, anywhere we’re caught wearing our inconveniently coloured skin. Three years in, tallying the losses, we hold all their stories and more.

The table is creaking with food. Nobody needs to go hungry into the dark.

There is outrage, and then, past it, a stunned sort of unvoicing. In our farming community, homemade billboards pegged down by the highway proclaim, Free Canada! No Vaxx, No Masks! In the checkout lines at the Co-Op, rig boys sneer at immigrant summer workers with their surgical masks and downcast eyes. Get those diapers off your faces! Where the hell you think you are? This is Canada.

This is safe.

This is how you count. By the pint or the quart, by the litre, by the gallon. By how much your basket can hold, or your ice cream pail, or your open hands. By the jars lined up in the pantry and how many months they will cover, how long they will ease the hunger in your house. Whether they will cut back on the stops you’ll have to make at the food bank and whether they’ll ever touch the cavernous wound opening somewhere behind your breastbone. In your mother’s country, or your grandparents,’ or your own, during the worst harvest seasons after

21

VIRTUAL EVENT DAYS VIRTUAL EVENT DAYS SUNDAY, APRIL 28 9am

10am

AT AT A A GL GLANCE ANCE

MONDAY, APRIL 29

TUESDAY, APRIL 30

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1

BACK TO SCHOOL with the Indigenous Writers’ Circle

NAVIGATING REALIST FICTION FOR TEENS

WORKSHOP:

LUNCH ‘N LEARN:

LUNCH ‘N LEARN:

LUNCH ‘N LEARN:

with Matteo L. Cerilli

with Farzana Doctor

Writing Distinct Voices with Taj McCoy

with Island Scribe’s Simone Dalton

FOLD KICK-OFF EVENT

12pm

FREADOM

CRAFTING CHARACTERS

with Emily Pohl-Weary

3pm

ONE-O

with Wa

Welcome + Trivia

Authors on Activism

WRITING HORROR

MANAGING WRITER’S BLOCK

ON DIALOGUE

1pm

2pm

THUR

SUNRISE WRITING SPRINT

11am

THE SH*T NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT WRITING

THE WRITER’S LIFE with Brian G. Buckmire

THE SPOKE

MAKING MONSTERS

THE BUSINESS OF BOOKSELLING

THE WRITER’S HUB: ROUNDTABLES A Drop-in Networking Event

4pm

THE BUSINESS OF BOOK INFLUENCERS

NAVIGATING NEW NARRATIVES:

TRIVIA TIME

TRIVIA TIME

TRIVIA TIME

TRIVIA TIME

CANADA READS 2024 REUNION

FUN WITH FICTION

NAVIGATING GHOSTS:

RE-IMAGINING HORROR

AFTER PARTY

AFTER PARTY

AFTER PARTY

AFTER PARTY

Insights from Muslim Debut Authors

5pm

6pm

7pm

8pm

22

IN-P

9pm

Memoirs and Memories

PAINT AT PAM

with Ros

MAY 1

eary

IN-PERSON IN-PERSONEVENT EVENTDAYS DAYS(DOWNTOWN (DOWNTOWN BRAMPTON) BRAMPTON) THURSDAY, MAY 2

FRIDAY, MAY 3

SATURDAY, MAY 4

SUNDAY, MAY 5

*TheWriter’s Writer’sHub, Hub, PaintNight, Night, *The Paint LiteraryHigh High Tea, WritingSprints Sprints Literary Tea, Writing andMicroworkshops Microworkshopsare are and NOT closed-captioned.

NOT closed-captioned.

STUDIO WRITING SPRINT with A.C. Yeboah

ONE-ON-ONE

with Waubgeshig Rice

VIRTUAL VIRTUAL

FRIGHTFUL INDIGENOUS FICTION

A LITERARY HIGH TEA AT ALDERLEA

Romance Writers Edition

:

E

ices

G

SESSIONSARE ARE SESSIONS CLOSEDCCAPTIONED* APTIONED* CLOSED

THEROSE ROSETHE THE ATRE THE ATRE TheatreLane Lane 11 Theatre PEELART ARTGALLERY GALLERY PEEL MUSEUMAND ANDARCHIVES ARCHIVES MUSEUM WellingtonStreet StreetWest West 9 9Wellington

MICROWORKSHOP: Fiction v. Nonfiction

THE SPOKEN WORD

- PERSON ININ - PERSON

ALDERLE MANOR ALDERLE AAMANOR ElizabethStreet StreetSouth South 4040Elizabeth

READ THE WORLD

THE MAKING OF RU Film Screening, Talkback and Networking Event

WORKSHOP/ WORKSHOP/ INTER AC TIVE INTER AC TIVE SCHOOLGROUP GROUP SCHOOL

EVENTS EVENTS

MICROWORKSHOP: Agenting + U.S. Market

BRAMPTON BOOKS IN BLOOM Celebrating 50 Years in Flower City

PAINT NIGHT AT PAMA

with Roshan James

THE GREAT READCEPTION A Literary Cabaret

THE SPOKEN WORD SHOWCASE

23

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE SUNDAY, APRIL 28 SUNRISE WRITING SPRINT 9:00am – 10:30am ET

Simone Dalton, founder and host of Island Scribe Writing Retreats, leads writers in a writing sprint to prompt reflection and creativity. Come to the virtual roundtable ready to join for an hour and a half writing experience. Space is limited and spots will be available on a first come, first serve basis.

FOLD KICK-OFF EVENT

Trivia Event 7:00pm – 7:30pm ET PANEL 7:30pm – 8:30pm ET

In this virtual conversation with Executive Director (and Canada Reads superfan) Jael Richardson, four of the 2024 finalists discuss what it was like to have their books selected for the show, and the highs and lows of watching the live debates. This event will be followed by a virtual meet-and-greet where fans can join a roundtable to meet the authors!

MONDAY, APRIL 29

11:00am – 11:45am ET

BACK TO SCHOOL WITH THE INDIGENOUS WRITERS’ CIRCLE

Celebrate the launch of a brand new season with our annual opening event. Meet the new FOLD team and participate in our opening trivia event for the chance to win book prizes. This session takes place in meeting mode, providing guests with the option to see one another by turning their videos on.

9:45am – 10:45am ET

FREADOM: AUTHORS ON ACTIVISM 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET

What is the role of writers in a turbulent world? In this conversation with Wildseed Executive Director Jessica Kirk, authors Farzana Doctor, Marjorie Beaucage, and Rodney Diverlus discuss the role of authors in times of crisis, including how to balance the work of writing with the demands of political engagement and activism.

THE SH*T NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT WRITING 1:30pm – 3:00pm ET

Bianca Marais, CeCe Lyra and Carly Watters, co-hosts of the popular podcast The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing, conduct their popular “Books With Hooks” segment live with guest host Tasneem Motala. Find out what it takes to capture the attention of literary agents in this behind-the-scenes review of query letters and opening pages from the slush pile.

This event is sponsored by Dundurn Press.

THE WRITER’S HUB: ROUNDTABLES 3:00pm – 5:00pm ET

Meet publishers, agents and editors at our unique virtual roundtables. Drop-in to a variety of virtual conversations and discover how to navigate the industry from a wide range of publishing professionals including Penguin Random House, Dundurn Press, Stelliform Press, the Literary Press Group, Westwood Creative Agency, and more.

24

CANADA READS 2024 REUNION

Writing involves constantly re-working and revising words.

In this panel of writers from Audible’s Indigenous Writers’ Circle, emerging writers discuss how writing groups and various writing habits help them hone their craft and learn new skills.

This event is sponsored by Audible.

LUNCH N’ LEARN: WRITING HORROR 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET

In this Lunch n’ Learn workshop, author Matteo L. Cerilli explores the ways politics and activism can be explored in horror writing, revealing strategies and techniques for how writers can navigate themes of fear and hope while challenging tired tropes in the horror genre.

THE BUSINESS OF BOOKSELLING 2:00pm – 3:00pm ET

In this Business of Publishing panel, three bookstore owners explore the challenges and triumphs of running an independent bookstore in Canada. Whether you’re a reader, a writer, or a book publishing professional, you don’t want to miss this critical conversation on the role of booksellers in Canada’s literary ecology.

THE BUSINESS OF BOOK INFLUENCERS 4:00pm – 5:00pm ET

In this Business of Publishing panel, book influencers from TikTok, YouTube and Instagram discuss their role in Canada’s publishing industry. They’ll also offer helpful tips and tricks for readers looking to review books and create engaging digital content.

NAVIGATING GHOSTS: MEMOIRS AND MEMORIES

FUN WITH FICTION

Trivia Event 7:00pm – 7:30pm ET PANEL 7:30pm – 8:30pm ET

Trivia Event 7:00pm – 7:30pm ET PANEL 7:30pm – 8:30pm ET

Covering an array of genres and styles, authors Natalie Sue, Craig Shreve and Mai Nguyen discuss their most recent novels and the process of crafting an imagined story with incredible plot and characters. This event will be followed by a virtual meetand-greet where fans can join a roundtable to meet the authors!

This event is sponsored by Literary Press Group.

TUESDAY, APRIL 30

In this panel of memoir writers, authors Tara Sidhoo Fraser, Tania De Rozario and Tessa Hulls discuss the stories behind personal accounts that tackle themes of mental health, grief, disability, and loss. Discover the ideas that influenced three impressive works of creative non-fiction­­­—each with their own unique format. This event will be followed by a virtual meet-andgreet where fans can join a roundtable to meet the authors!

This event is sponsored by Penguin Random House Canada.

SCHOOL GROUPS: NAVIGATING REALIST FICTION FOR TEENS 9:45am – 10:45am ET

In this panel conversation for high school students, three young adult authors—Maya Ameyaw, Sarah Mughal Rana and Emily Pohl-Weary—discuss how they navigate realistic subjects with care and sensitivity and how they create in-depth characters which allow teens to see themselves and their peers on the page.

LUNCH N’ LEARN: MANAGING WRITER’S BLOCK 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET

Farzana Doctor brings a unique perspective to the page as both an author and psychotherapist. Join her for this practical workshop on how to incorporate emotion-based strategies to improve your writing and deal with writer’s block.

SCHOOL GROUPS: THE WRITER’S LIFE WITH BRIAN G. BUCKMIRE 1:15pm – 2:15pm ET

In this edition of The Writer’s Life series, young adult author and lawyer Brian G. Buckmire discusses how his life as a criminal defense attorney influenced the creation of his debut novel, Come Home Safe, in conversation with fellow author and educator, Matthew R. Morris. Learn about Buckmire’s experience as a public defender, his writing routine and more.

NAVIGATING NEW NARRATIVES: INSIGHTS FROM MUSLIM DEBUT AUTHORS 4:00pm – 5:00pm ET

Two Muslim writers share their journey as debut authors with the Executive Director of Toronto’s new Muslim Literary Festival, Narjis Sheikh. Exploring their path from the beginning stages to publication, Salma Hussain and Alina Khawaja discuss their participation in mentorship programs and provide valuable insights into the publishing industry, fostering a dialogue on diverse voices in literature.

VIRTUAL

IN-PERSON

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1 SCHOOL GROUPS WORKSHOP: CRAFTING CHARACTERS 9:45am - 10:45am ET

To write believably, writers need to know their characters as well as they know their real-life BFFs—from the way they speak, move, dress, and argue, to the way they fall in love and decorate their bedrooms, details are critically important. In this workshop for teens, author Emily Pohl-Weary explores how to develop great characters by determining their big secrets and everyday habits.

LUNCH N’ LEARN: ON DIALOGUE: WRITING DISTINCT VOICES 12:00pm - 1:00pm ET

Whether you’re writing an epic fantasy, an emotional love story, a suspenseful thriller, a dramatic family saga, or a charming romance, it’s important to build characters who are complex and distinct—characters with unique backstories and personality that provide dimension. In this workshop, writers of all levels explore different ways to enhance character voice through dialogue with author and literary agent Taj McCoy.

SCHOOL GROUPS: MAKING MONSTERS 1:15pm - 2:15pm ET

What goes into making monsters? For readers of the fantastical or the horrific, monsters can be easy to spot but how does someone write an iconic creature? Three young adult authors of speculative and horror novels—Matteo L. Cerilli, Clara Kumagai and Teen Writer-in-Residence Nafiza Azad—breakdown the monsters in their most recent work and discuss how teens can create (and defeat) their own.

The Teen Writer-in-Residence is made possible by Simon and Schuster Canada.

WORKSHOP/INTERACTIVE

SCHOOL GROUP EVENTS

CLOSED CAPTIONED

25

RE-IMAGINING HORROR Trivia Event 7:00pm – 7:30pm ET PANEL 7:30pm – 8:30pm ET

RJ McDaniel, Tiffany Morris and Adam Pottle discuss the inspiration for their latest novels, exploring the structure of genre work and the role of horror in navigating important subject matter like race, gender expression, disability, culture and more. This event will be followed by a virtual meet-andgreet where fans can join a roundtable to meet the authors!

This event is sponsored by ECW.

THURSDAY, MAY 2

FRIDAY, MAY 3 THE GREAT READCEPTION: A LITERARY CABARET 7:30pm - 9:30pm ET

In this popular annual event, six authors appearing at the festival read a sample of their work accompanied by a live jazz band. Whether you’re a regular FOLD attendee, a casual or compulsive reader or simply a lover of live entertainment, witness the power of storytelling and the magic of a live musical performance at this collaborative event composed by Brampton’s own Carmen Spada. $20/person or included as part of the Rose Weekend Pass.

STUDENTS AT THE ROSE: ONE-ON-ONE WITH WAUBGESHIG RICE

This event takes place at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton. It’ll include light hors d’oeuvres prior to the event and a short intermission.

10:00am – 11:00am ET

This event is sponsored by TD Bank.

Building on the success of his novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, Anishinaabe author Waubgeshig Rice returns to the FOLD with his sequel, Moon of the Turning Leaves. In this in-person event geared towards high school students, fellow dystopian author Jael Richardson, interviews Rice on exploring the process of writing a sequel and creating an apocalypse story with an Indigenous lens.

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

STUDENTS AT THE ROSE: THE SPOKEN WORD 12:30pm – 1:30pm ET

SATURDAY, MAY 4 STUDIO WRITING SPRINT 9:30am – 10:30am ET

Start the day off in the Rose Studio with some quiet writing time. With a guided prompt and an opportunity for reflection, this writing space is open to all virtual + in-person passholders.

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

FRIGHTFUL INDIGENOUS FICTION In our annual teen spoken word showcase, three poets will take the mic and present incredible poetry. This event is geared towards high school students and will feature a Q&A with the poets!

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

PAINT NIGHT AT PAMA WITH ROSHAN JAMES 7:30pm – 9:00pm ET

Enjoy a memorable night of painting at Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives as the PAMA team lead guests in the creation of canvas art inspired by the poetry collection Pink Moon by Indo-Tibetan artist Roshan James. No experience necessary. 14+.

This event will take place at Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives at 9 Wellington Street West in Brampton. Street parking and public parking lots are available within 50–200 metres of the entrance.

11:00am – 12:00pm ET

Alicia Elliott, Jessica Johns, and Waubgeshig Rice discuss their new novels, which mix Indigenous storytelling with themes of science fiction and horror. In this much-anticipated panel of best-selling authors, discover the stories and inspiration behind their latest novels that are perfect for your next book club.

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton and is sponsored by Penguin Random House Canada.

This event is held at theMICROWORKSHOP: Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

FICTION VS NONFICTION WITH ALICIA ELLIOTT 12:30pm – 1:00pm ET • Rose Theatre • festival passholders only

READ THE WORLD 2:00pm – 3:00pm ET

Three incredible authors bring places from around the world to life in fiction that pushes boundaries and conveys important truths. Meet Kazim Ali, Balsam Karam and Christine Estima in a fascinating conversation moderated by BookTuber David Yoon (aka ThePoptimist).

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

26

MICROWORKSHOP: AGENTING AND THE US MARKET WITH TAJ MCCOY 3:30pm – 4:00pm ET • Rose Theatre • festival passholders only

ECW Authors

BRAMPTON BOOKS IN BLOOM: CELEBRATING 50 YEARS IN FLOWER CITY 5:30pm – 7:00pm ET

At FOLD 2024

Celebrating the city’s 50th birthday, three Brampton authors sit down with Brampton-raised literary agent Léonicka Valcius for an in-depth conversation on what it means to write place and home in young adult fiction, romance and speculative fiction.

CHRI

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton and is sponsored by HarperCollins Canada.

STINA

WO

N

G

THE SPOKEN WORD SHOWCASE 7:30pm – 9:00pm ET

Spoken word host The Wild Woman returns to the Rose Studio to host an incredibly curated event of spoken word performance inspired by music entitled “Poets in Refrain”.

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

SUNDAY, MAY 5 A LITERARY HIGH TEA AT ALDERLEA: ROMANCE WRITERS EDITION 11:00am – 1:00pm ET

The annual Sunday brunch is back! Don your Sunday best, assemble your fascinator, grab your friends, and join us for a delightful high tea with three incredible romance writers. This special-tea event includes fun trivia with incredible prizes.

This event is held at the historic Alderlea Manor at 40 Elizabeth St South in downtown Brampton. City of Brampton parking garages are available within 300 metres from the venue at 41 George Street South. Parking at Alderlea is reserved for service vehicles and guests with mobility needs. Please email info@thefoldcanada.org if you require a space at Alderlea Manor.

RJ

Mc

DA

NIEL

This event is sponsored by Harlequin.

THE MAKING OF RU: FILM SCREENING, TALKBACK, AND NETWORKING EVENT 2:00pm – 5:00pm ET

Join us for a screening of RU, the film adaptation of the awardwinning novel by Kim Thúy, which explores the journey of a wealthy family fleeing Vietnam and landing in Quebec.

The film is presented in French with English subtitles and includes a talk back with the author. A film networking event will follow the film presented in partnership with Brampton Arts Organization (BAO).

This event is held at the Rose Theatre in downtown Brampton.

ROSHAN J

E C W

AM

ES

P R E S S

27

FESTIVAL PARTICIPANTS AUTHORS, POETS & PRESENTERS afrakaren is a critical thinker and contemporary philosopher, focused on the language of narrative, who is deeply invested in claiming spaces of healing and rest for #theblackbodypolitic.

TASNIM GEEDI, a 24-year-old Somali-Canadian and content creator known as @groovytas on TikTok, champions ownvoice stories and promotes diversity in publishing.

LAREINA ABBOTT is a writer who pens Métis themed speculative fiction, essays and memoir.

CALYPSO HAINE is a mixed Cree, queer, transsexual, twospirit poet with a special love for writing about the transsexual experience.

KAZIM ALI’s most recent books are Sukun: New and Selected Poems, and Indian Winter: A Novel.

MAYA AMEYAW is the YA contemporary author of When It All Syncs Up and Under All the Lights, published by Annick Press.

CASTOR ANGUS is a Victoria-based writer that puts his Indigenous and Filipino roots into his work and explores stage plays and YA fiction.

LAURA ASH is co-coordinator at Another Story Bookshop.

HILARY ATLEO is the co-owner of Iron Dog Books.

NAFIZA AZAD writes books featuring fantastic creatures and magic.

MARJORIE BEAUCAGE is an artivist who tells stories as medicine for good relations and change.

BRIAN G. BUCKMIRE is a ABC Legal Contributor and Trial Counsel at Hamilton Clarke LLP and the author of Come Home Safe.

CECE/CEDRIC BUSTAMANTE is a poet who writes with vivid imagery, momentum, and abstraction of the mundane.

MATTEO L. CERILLI (he/him) is a transmasc author and activist specializing in speculative fiction for all ages.

SIMONE DALTON is an award-winning author, teaching artist, and playwright. Her work is anthologized in Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, and more. Simone holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is working on her first book.

TANIA DE ROZARIO is a writer and visual artist working in poetry and memoir. Her essay collection, Dinner on Monster Island, was published by Harper Perennial (2024).

DAVID DELISCA is a Haitian-born writer and performer based in Toronto.

RODNEY DIVERLUS is a Haitian-Canadian artist and bestselling author.

FARZANA DOCTOR is a Tkaronto-based author, activist and psychotherapist who has written four critically acclaimed novels, a poetry collection and a self-help book for helpers and activists.

ALICIA ELLIOTT is an award-winning Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. Her debut novel And Then She Fell was released in September 2023.

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TARA SIDHOO FRASER is a queer writer and creator of South Asian and Scottish ancestry.

CHRISTINE ESTIMA’s debut book The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society was named one of CBC’s Best Books of 2023.

TESSA HULLS is an artist/writer/adventurer who spent a decade making her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts.

SALMA HUSSAIN’s funny novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan is about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey. It was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.

ROSHAN JAMES (she/her) is a Tibetan-Indian poet, interdisciplinary artist, and musician, living as a settler in southwestern Ontario.

JESSICA JOHNS is a queer nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation.

BALSAM KARAM is a Kurdish author writing in Swedish, current with the novel The Singularity.

ALINA KHAWAJA is a Canadian-Pakistani author, and when she’s not writing, she’s desperately trying to keep up with her list of K-dramas.

CLARA KUMAGAI is from Ireland, Canada and Japan. Catfish Rolling is her debut novel.

CATHERINE LEROUX is the author of three highly praised novels and an innovative sequence of short stories.

CECE LYRA is a literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency representing adult fiction and nonfiction and the co-host of the popular podcast The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing.

SAMITA MANHAS (she/her) is the co-creator of Wildfires Bookshop.

BIANCA MARAIS is a bestselling author, award-winning creative writing instructor, and cohost of the popular podcast, The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing.

TINA MAY is a passionate reader and bookstagrammer @tinamayreads in Vancouver, BC. Law grad, literary agent, and higher ed consultant TAJ MCCOY is the author of several romantic comedies, her newst one being The Good Ones Are Taken.

RJ MCDANIEL is the author of All Things Seen and Unseen (ECW Press, 2024).

MATTHEW R. MORRIS is an educator, anti-racism advocate, and writer based out of Toronto.

TIFFANY MORRIS is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning and the Elgin Award-winning horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars.

An Assistant Agent since 2021 under The Rights Factory, TASNEEM MOTALA has a keen eye for stories that resonate on deeper levels.

ALYSSA GRAY-TYGHTER is an educator, academic, writer, and speaker. She is also a wife, mom whose doctoral work explores identity formation in multiracial Black Canadians.

TÉA MUTONJI is the award winning author of Shut Up You’re Pretty. She lives and writes in Toronto.

JESS KIRK is an artist, organizer, and Executive Director of Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism—a community hub that nurtures Black creative possibilities.

MAI NGUYEN is the author of Sunshine Nails.

LOUISA ONOMÉ is a Nigerian-Canadian writer of books for teens and adults, including Pride and Joy (2024) and The Melancholy of Summer (2023).

EMILY POHL-WEARY is the award-winning author of eight books, and her latest young adult novel is How to Be Found.

ADAM POTTLE is an award-winning Deaf author whose works span multiple genres, from horror novels and memoirs to plays and children’s books.

SARAH MUGHAL RANA is a Muslim author who graduated from the University of Toronto and is now pursuing her MPhil in Asian studies at Oxford. She works at the intersection of human rights and Asian policy.

WAUBGESHIG RICE is an author and journalist originally from Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. JAEL RICHARDSON is the founder and Executive Director of the Festival of Literary Diversity and best-selling author of the novel Gutter Child. Her debut middle grade anthology, Today I Am, arrives August 2024.

CATERINA SAURO is a poet, multi-faceted artist and selfpublished author based in Mississauga, ON. LISA SHEN is a writer and spoken word artist, and the 20232025 Youth Poet Laureate of the City of Mississauga.

CRAIG SHREVE is the author of One Night in Mississippi and The African Samurai.

LEANNE TOSHIKO SIMPSON is a Yonsei writer and psychiatric survivor from Scarborough who teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto and mental health spaces across the city.

NATALIE SUE is a Canadian author of Iranian and British descent. She lives in Calgary with her family.

At the age of 10, KIM THÚY left Vietnam and came to Quebec as a refugee. She has received many awards and her books have been translated into 31 languages.

CARLY WATTERS is a Senior Literary Agent at P.S. Literary and co-hosts The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing podcast.

OPAL WEI is the author of Wild Life, a screwball rom-com, CHRISTINA WONG is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, primarily working as a playwright and prose writer.

DAVID YOON is a Waterloo Region native working in Canada’s high tech hotbed with a side hustle as an avid reader and semi-prolific booktuber focused primarily on literary fiction.

A.C. YEBOAH is a Canadian writer, facilitator, and quiet disruptor whose writing explores identity, self-acceptance, growth, and playful discovery.

MODERATORS WARREN CARIOU is a Métis writer, artist and professor based in Winnipeg. In addition to his own creative work, he has edited books by numerous Indigenous writers.

ALEXIS KIENLEN is a mixed race writer living in Edmonton on Treaty 6. She is a journalist, poet, fiction writer, novelist and essayist, an associate member of the Horror Writers Association, and the author of 4 books.

Born and raised abroad, LAVANYA LAKSHMI’s love for storytelling guided her to a career in the book publishing industry and as a soon-to-be author.

AMANDA LEDUC is the author of Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability and Making Space and the novel The Centaur’s Wife.

She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

ARDO OMER is a writer and serves as the Kids Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD).

JASON PURCELL is a writer and musician from Treaty 6 (Edmonton, Alberta). They are the author of Swollening and was co-founder of Edmonton’s Glass Bookshop.

NARJIS SHEIKH is a Muslim, Pakistani American women’s fiction and romance writer. She serves as the founder & executive director of Muslim Literary Festival in Toronto, Ontario.

MONICA TANG (she/her) is the Director of Adult Programming at the FOLD, and a Bookstagrammer where she shares her love of reading on Instagram (@goldfishreads).

LÉONICKA VALCIUS is 2024 graduate from the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, and a Literary Agent at Transatlantic Agency. She represents books for children and adults with a focus on commercial and genre fiction by writers of color.

Rooted in her intersections as Black, woman, and queer, award-winning spoken word artist, THE WILD WOMAN uses poetry, spirituality, and sensual self-introspection to instigate waves of change.

PUBLISHING PROFESSIONALS MARILYN BIDERMAN is a Partner, Senior Agent, and Chair of the Professional Development Committee for the Transatlantic Agency.

BRENNA ENGLISH-LOEB joined Transatlantic in 2019 and works with authors of adult genre fiction and journalistic nonfiction.

BRIDGETTE KAM is an associate agent at Westwood Creative Artists and represents writers of literary and upmarket fiction, narrative non-fiction, YA fiction, and children’s books.

HANA EL NIWAIRI is a literary agent and Rights Manager at CookeMcDermid Literary Management and one of the cofounders of BIPOC of Publishing in Canada.

MEREDITH PAL is Assistant Editor at Penguin Canada whose list includes authors Yasuko Thanh, Matthew R. Morris, Helen Oyeyemi, Kim Echlin, and Charlotte Runcie.

PIA SINGHAL believes that reading is one of our best tools to build empathy, and stories with diverse perspectives in particular have tremendous potential to do that.

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original poem.

MAHDIA

BY AMANDA SHUMAN In place at school to learn Far from home and all I yearn.

In place a spark comes to life Spread quick from cloth and paper alike.

In place Call Out! Rouse More!

Smoke billows filling ceiling to floor.

In place …turned…around…

Am I facing North or laying on the ground?

In place who’s this, asleep?

She is spared this misery of intense heat.

In place at last, a way out!

Follow black ribbons that billow without.

In place a window, what fate Bars bolted tight, to keep me safe.

In place steadfast cement Hold tight as rescuers attempt.

In place my blood boils

In honour of the May 21, 2023 Mahdia School Dormitory fire victims and survivors, their families, friends and communities mourning such preventable devastation.

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A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original essay.

MY NOT-SO-SECRET IDENTITY

BY JUDITH L AM TANG “You Chinese?” a voice said in a thick mainland Chinese accent.

I looked up from the screen in the hectic McDonald’s where I scrolled through the icons to find the chicken nugget meal my daughter wanted. A middle-aged Asian woman stood in front of me with an expectant look.

“Sorry, I don’t speak Chinese,” I replied curtly, and turned back to the screen.

“Ni hui jiang zhong wen?” she urged, asking if I spoke Mandarin. I shook my head emphatically and looked back pointedly at the screen, signalling that our interaction was over. She stood looking at me a moment longer before walking away, muttering in rapid Mandarin.

In those few seconds of interaction, a plethora of emotions bubbled inside me.

Annoyance: It was a very busy lunch rush at this McDonald’s and my daughter was exhibiting signs of being hangry.

Disdain: This woman was seeking some kind of connection with me when it was clear she was not Canadian-born, and I was. I hated being put in the same category as immigrants who didn’t speak English.

Shame: I was very much a whitewashed Chinese person, a banana, or a twinkie. Yellow on the outside and white on the inside. I was never Chinese enough for my parents, and even though they spoke Mandarin to me, I could not carry a conversation in the language. Even if I could understand what the woman said in Mandarin, it was highly unlikely I could reply.

Embarrassment: I hated being singled out as different from the sea of people around me based on my appearance. My black hair, flat nose, and squinty eyes were a dead giveaway that I wasn’t white. My appearance told people what I was before I could even utter a word.

Guilt: I felt guilty for not answering truthfully because I knew I was denying my ethnic background, and

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I was also denying this person whatever help they were looking for.

This kind of thing happens to me more often than I’d like to admit. I hate the way I react because I’m sure it comes across as rude or even cruel to the person on the receiving end. Typically I behave as a polite Canadian. I don’t hesitate to open doors for people behind me, especially if someone has a stroller or a wheelchair. I pick up something off the ground that someone dropped and make sure they get it back. I smile at a stranger passing in the street if they make eye contact. But when a fellow Chinese person tries to connect with me via a common language, I cannot help. I cannot stop myself from being curt and dismissive.

My daughter is often with me during these encounters, and she always asks afterwards, “What did that person say?” This is because she does not understand any Chinese dialects. She certainly didn’t learn any Mandarin from me because I barely speak it, though I can understand some. She barely learned any Cantonese from my husband even though he speaks it fluently with his family. I always claimed the identity as a banana but my daughter embodied this even more fully. *** “Ni jiang zhong wen?” an elderly Chinese woman tapped my arm amidst the bustling shoppers at the farmers market stand. I wordlessly shook my head and tried to avoid eye contact. Before I looked away, I saw the disappointment in her face. I watched out of the corner of my eye as she approached other Asian-looking people to ask the same question. I waited in line to pay for my peppers and cucumbers, and saw that the woman had successfully found someone to help her. Another Chinese woman

who looked about my age told her she could help, and acted as an interpreter between the elderly Chinese woman and the market stall owner, haggling about the prices of vegetables. I felt a sense of relief that someone helped her. But I also felt an intense sense of shame and guilt that I did not (or could not - could I even have spoken enough Mandarin to act as an interpreter? Likely not.).

This other woman was essentially another version of me, except her spoken Mandarin was flawless and she didn’t appear to be ashamed of being Chinese. I, on the other hand, continued to struggle with even saying the words, “I’m Chinese Canadian” aloud.

Whenever people ask me the dreaded “Where are you from?” question, I always reply, “I’m from here, from Canada.” They might follow up with “Where are you REALLY from?” or the slightly less offensive “Where are your parents from?” and I respond with something like, “I was born here, my parents immigrated here from Taiwan and Hong Kong.” It is always critically important for me to emphasize that I was born in Canada. The privilege a Canadian-born citizen carries is much greater than that of an immigrated citizen. Even immigrants who have lived in Canada for forty to fifty years, like my parents, acknowledge that I am a “real Canadian” in comparison because of my birthplace. And so I claim the Canadian identity as my own, holding tight to it like Gollum with the One Ring, entranced by its inherent and formidable power. *** “You are Cantonese, right?” I was in the office of the payroll administrator at my new job, and she was fiddling around with an error in my timesheet. I knew she was Chinese from her accent and her last name, but hadn’t interacted with her until now.

“Well, my parents spoke Mandarin, but my husband speaks Cantonese,” I answered.

“But your name, you are Cantonese,” she pressed.

“Tang is my husband’s last name, but Lam is my maiden name. But if you’re asking which Lam it is, it’s the one that means blue, not forest,” I replied. The anglicization of Chinese names has always been confusing to me. My family’s last name, Lam, is the Chinese word for “blue.” However, most other Lams I know represent the Chinese word for “forest.” The words for “blue” and “forest” sound slightly different in Mandarin versus Cantonese, so the anglicization could depend on what dialect the person was speaking when they arrived to Canada, and whatever the immigration people decided it sounded like. I have found some people with the “blue” last name to be “Lan.” I have also come across people with

the “forest” last name to be “Lum,” like the famous actress and comedian Awkafina, Nora Lum. “But because your name is Lam, it must be forest in Cantonese,” she persisted in telling me. She started to write the Chinese character for “forest” on a piece of paper.

“No, no, my Lam isn’t forest, it’s blue. My family isn’t Cantonese, they’re Mandarin. My mom is from Taiwan,” I attempted to correct her again.

“You speak Cantonese?” She really wasn’t letting this go. She needed to put me in the Cantonese box, because that’s what it seemed I was to her.

“I don’t speak Cantonese,” I repeated. “My family speaks Mandarin.” She looked at me blankly.

“Is the timesheet okay now?” I tried to get back to the task at hand.

When I talked to my husband about this later, he said, “I would have just nodded at whatever she said, and walked away.”

“But she was wrong!” I exclaimed.

“But if she’s insistent she’s right, why does it matter?” he replied.

Indeed, why did it matter? The incident bothered me for weeks afterwards and I kept mulling it over in my head. I was irritated that this woman was insistent on knowing what box I belonged in. All racial groups have their own hierarchy, and within those groups, there are further hierarchies. China is a vast country with many different cultures and dialects, and people from different regions have different perceptions of who is higher on the hierarchy. It was annoying that she felt a need to decide where I was on the hierarchy in relation to herself.

We get enough of that from white people putting us in racial boxes, why do we need to do that within our own racial group?

I also felt a sense of conflict about why I needed to keep correcting her. I denied my Chinese background for the majority of my life, choosing rather to embrace the model minority myth and become as white-adjacent as possible. I couldn’t actually carry on a conversation in Mandarin, so why did it matter if someone thought I had a Cantonese background versus a Mandarin one? It’s not like I could prove I was one or the other by speaking either dialect. So why was I insistent on correcting this woman? I guess I must have felt some kind of connection with my family’s background if I had such a strong urge to make it clear.

I have been grappling with my racial identity over the last few years after realizing how much I allowed whiteness

33

to take over my life. I fully embraced being Canadian (i.e, white) and had ignored my Chinese roots. It was only when I learned the term ‘internalized racism’ that I saw what I was. I was ashamed of being Chinese, and I was ashamed of being associated with other Chinese people because of it. I was scared that the image of the perfect model minority I portrayed would be shattered if white people could place me in the same group as new Chinese immigrants who weren’t Canadian-born. I saw myself as better than someone who spoke with an accent because my native English tongue meant I was closer to white.

Chinese was my not-so-secret identity.

Knowing that I experience internalized racism was a revelation. But undoing it is an arduous undertaking.

Now when people ask me, “What are you?” I can finally answer, “I’m Chinese Canadian” without hesitation. But the unconscious biases continue to hold fast. I still avoid

eye contact when I see other Chinese people in white spaces, especially if I perceive from the way they look that they’re likely newer immigrants. I feel myself doing it and tell myself not to, but it’s too late, I’ve already done it. Even though I’m ashamed that my Mandarin skills are so poor, I don’t have the will to seek out opportunities to practice and improve. As Jen Sookfong Lee wrote in her memoir Superfan, “The most difficult part of my identity for me to grasp is the concept of being Chinese. The Canadian part has always been evident and tangible; it’s everywhere: on television, in the newspapers, part of what we learned in school. My Chinese-ness, on the other hand, has had to fit into smaller spaces, the ones left behind. And it resisted.” And so I continue to battle the internal biases I have about my not-so-secret identity. I am slowly uncovering the tiny places where pieces of it are hiding and bringing them into the light.

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original comic.

BONES

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BY JEM WOOLIDGE

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original essay.

THE CODE

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 9 original poem.

QAHR FOR BISSAN

BY PRITHA JAIN

BY AMAL EL-MOHTAR

point zero. faulty mechanical clockwork / the semester wraps itself with / rusted telephone cords / and yet again, I pack my existence / into the hard plastic of a crimson suitcase / a theatric breakdown of / neon-palette daydreams / the words ‘THIS IS NOT A DRILL’ / etched somewhere deep in cheap college stationery. /

they are doing all these things to destroy the depth of us… what does it mean, Qahr—Qahr, is to make someone— so sad—I don’t know what it means in English, I don’t know.

But they’re trying to Qahr us.

—Bisan Owda

point one. a prodigal daughter returns / laptop bag filled to the brim / with potential, uninhibited / the world at her fingertips, / her world, an overwhelming cascade of / possibilities and failures and possibilities of failures, / the backdrop of her conscience / a pulsating mural of her bloodline’s expectations, / a screaming siren going off in the distance. /

Qahr: a collapse. A caving in of the chest, a hollowing, a lit match burning in a stoppered bottle til the cork’s sucked in by void. Qahr, a stone in the mouth on fire, a coal swallowed whole and searing, crushed slag in the throat. they are doing all these things to destroy the depth of us

point two. when I tell my mother I am / meant to change the world, she does / not laugh, she takes my hand, callous / against callous, and walks me through the / dirty linoleum floors and sterile hallways of / our overdue electricity bills, / the world lies beyond these flickering peripheries / and my mother tells me knowing how to change a lightbulb is a basic necessity / tells me I am her entire world in the same breath. / point three. perhaps this is my legacy/ a fight or flight response to a lineage / growing hungry, its teeth bared in yearning, / the rebellion flowing thick in / my veins does not condone cowardice / so I draw weapons against my own blood / the boundaries between strength and stupidity a / moodboard of broken bones and charred meat. / point four. mother, I have not been home since the / day I left to build a life for myself.

Qahr, yaani—yaani shou? Bisan, I never learned this word. Children shouldn’t, and I was a child, six or seven, when I stopped learning our language. Qahr hid in my parents’ hands, my grandmother’s voice, while I learned to rhyme “leaf” with “brief”—learned to catch lizards and chase chickens, to be told that I spoke like a foreigner.

I am learning now, from children.

I am learning, Qahr is when my mother says she can’t function until she wraps a keffiyeh around her head. Qahr is the cratering in my heart that spreads like ink devouring the page, when I see a boy, so small, six or seven, outraged, crying, reach for his dead father, calling baba, baba, baba as if he could wake him, as if the world made sense, as if a single word in any language could hold all this wrecking grief.

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Proudly supporting The FOLD and Ontario’s publishing industry

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Fun with Fiction Panel

April 29 at 7:30PM ET Virtual th

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May 4th at 11AM ET The Rose Theatre, Brampton

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Literary Cabaret

May 3rd at 7:30PM ET The Rose Theatre, Brampton

Romance Writer’s High Tea May 5th at 11AM ET Alderlea Manor

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It’s just one way we are helping to open doors for a more inclusive and sustainable tomorrow.

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Simon & Schuster Canada welcomes our authors to THE FOLD 2024

Nafiza Azad

Craig Shreve

Mai Nguyen

Teen Writer in Residence

More new reads from Simon & Schuster Canada

SimonSchusterCA

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ARTS FOR ALL ONTARIANS LES ARTS POUR TOUT L’ONTARIO

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PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE CANADA PROUD SPONSOR OF THE FESTIVAL OF LITERARY DIVERSITY

WELCOMES OUR AUTHORS

ALICIA ELLIOTT

CLARA KUMAGAI

KIM THÚY

MATTEO L. CERILLI

MATTHEW R. MORRIS

SALMA HUSSAIN

TESSA HULLS

WAUBGESHIG RICE

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BOOK LIST Kazim Ali

Tania De Rozario

Roshan James

INDIAN WINTER

DINNER ON MONSTER ISLAND

PINK MOON

978-1552454657 Coach House Books

978-1770417625 ECW Press

Maya Ameyaw

Rodney Diverlus

Jessica Johns

WHEN IT ALL SYNCS UP

UNTIL WE ARE FREE

BAD CREE

978-1773217819 Annick Press

978-0889776944 University of Regina Press

978-1443465489 HarperCollins Canada

Nafiza Azad

Farzana Doctor

Balsam Karam

ROAD OF THE LOST

52 WEEKS TO A SWEETER LIFE

THE SINGULARITY

978-1534485006 Simon and Schuster Canada

978-1771624039 Douglas & McIntyre

978-1771668897 Book*hug

Nafiza Azad

Alicia Elliott

Alina Khawaja

WRITING IN COLOR

AND THEN SHE FELL

MAYA’S LAWS OF LOVE

978-1665925648 Simon and Schuster Canada

978-0385684101 Penguin Random House Canada

978-0778305248 HarperCollins Canada

Marjorie Beaucage

Christine Estima

Clara Kumagai

LEAVE SOME FOR THE BIRDS

THE SYRIAN LADIES BENEVOLENT SOCIETY

CATFISH ROLLING

978-1928120360 Kegedonce Press

978-1487012335 House of Anansi

978-1774882764 Penguin Random House Canada

Brian G. Buckmire

Tessa Hulls

Catherine Leroux

COME HOME SAFE

FEEDING GHOSTS

THE FUTURE

978-0310142188 HarperCollins Canada

978-0771010682 Penguin Random House Canada

978-1771965606 Biblioasis

Matteo L. Cerilli

Salma Hussain

Taj McCoy

LOCKJAW

THE SECRET DIARY OF MONA HASAN

THE GOOD ONES ARE TAKEN

978-0735271494 Penguin Random House Canada

978-0778305422 Harlequin

978-1774882306 Penguin Random House Canada

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978-0063299665 HarperCollins Canada

RJ McDaniel

Emily Pohl-Weary

Natalie Sue

ALL THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN

HOW TO BE FOUND

I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL

978-1770417090 ECW Press

978-1551529356 Arsenal Pulp Press

978-0063320369 HarperCollins Canada

Matthew R. Morris

Adam Pottle

Kim Thúy

BLACK BOYS LIKE ME

APPARITIONS

RU

978-0735244580 Penguin Random House Canada

978-1958598184 Dark Matter INK

978-0345816146 Penguin Random House Canada

Tiffany Morris

Waubgeshig Rice

Leanne Toshiko Simpson

GREEN FUSE BURNING

MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES

NEVER BEEN BETTER

978-1778092664 Stelliform Press

978-0735281585 Penguin Random House

978-1443465533 HarperCollins Canada

Sarah Mughal Rana

Jael Richardson

Opal Wei

HOPE ABLAZE

GUTTER CHILD

WILD LIFE

978-1250899316 Macmillan Publishers

978-1443457828 HarperCollins Canada

978-1335475954 Harlequin

Téa Mutonji

Craig Shreve

Christina Wong

SHUT UP YOU’RE PRETTY

THE AFRICAN SAMURAI

DENISON AVENUE

978-1551527550 Arsenal Pulp Press

978-1668002865 Simon and Schuster Canada

978-1770417151 ECW Press

Mai Nguyen

Tara Sidhoo Fraser

SUNSHINE NAILS

WHEN MY GHOST SINGS

978-1668011256 Simon and Schuster Canada

978-1551529271 Arsenal Pulp Press

Louisa Onomé PRIDE AND JOY 978-1443468787 HarperCollins Canada

Listen to FOLD titles at audible.ca/ep/FOLD

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We are proud to elevate the next wave of diverse storytellers with the Audible Indigenous Writers’ Circle Learn more about the Indigenous Writers’ Circle at audible.ca/ep/IWC