THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED DUE TO FACILITATOR ILLNESS

The Heart is a Garden: Writing Grief and Transformation (Students)

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We are living in a time of immense communal loss and grief, and yet, it is often difficult to access a sense of belonging in the midst of grief, numbness, fear, rage. How can practices of joy and play guide us into community, as we tend to our grief? What power does grief hold to catalyze healing and collective resistance? What grows when we share our pain, our humanness, with each other? In this workshop, we will read and write our own poems, led by these questions. We will also experiment with collective composition as a way to witness and care for ourselves and each other. Our grief, held collectively, can transform the world.

About the facilitator:

Jody Chan (they/them) is a writer, drummer, community organizer, and care worker based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of sick (Black Lawrence Press), finalist for the Lambda Literary and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. Jody is a performing and teaching member with RAW Taiko Drummers, an editorial board member of Midnight Sun Magazine, and the 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab.

About Transformations: Grief Work Program: 
Grief comes in many forms. Over the past few years, we have collectively experienced a range of intense, heavy and complicated events. We recognize that these experiences on both an individual and collective scale have created complex and often unaddressed experiences of grief. These complicated experiences can be collective, anticipatory and often abstract for many of us living in a rapidly changing and unstable world. Transformations: Grief Work programming at the Multi-Faith Centre aims to create spaces where these nuanced and multi-faceted experiences of grief can be addressed, acknowledged and held.