February and March 2017 are going to be a busy time in the TIA House! Here’s a little preview of some of the events we have planned: Feb 15th – Paper Hearts II: Gender and Power in Turtle Island Literary/Canadian/US Literary Communities With a critical panel running from 12 noon to 1.45pm, followed by literary readings from 2pm to 3pm, … [Read more…]
Hold Your Fucking Communities Accountable: Defining and creating safer spaces for women, trans, non-binary individuals, and people of colour in literary writing communities by Nikki Reimer Note on the text and content warning: This essay is adapted from two talks I gave in fall 2016 with the same title. The first talk was presented at the Canadian Creative Writers and … [Read more…]
Session 632: Respect, Responsibility, Coalition, Relation Saturday, 7 January, 5:15-6:30pm, 110B Pennsylvania Convention Centre Philedelphia, PA In the wake of Idle No More and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, writers and scholars are called to self-reflexively articulate and act upon a politics or poetics of relation. What forms might such a politics or poetics take? How … [Read more…]
It’s that time of year to look back, and I’ve been asked to name all the things that TIA House has done since it started for more official purposes. I thought that all you insurgents out there might also like to know. We’ve been busy!! Paper Hearts: A Valentine’s Day Roundtable on Gender and Power in Canadian Literary Community February … [Read more…]
Relational Innovations: Creative Writing as Social Practice Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016 Innovative writing and socially-oriented writing are often imagined as incompatible practices. This collaboratively organized one-day symposium at The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing at the University of Calgary queries how social questions can be taken up innovatively. Topics for discussion include: urban poetic practices, visibility and invisibility, representation, … [Read more…]
One of the great joys of organizing TIA House events is the opportunity to bring together other writers and thinkers on questions of justice and aesthetics. This piece, by the Vancouver-based writer, instructor and organizer, Jill Yonit Goldberg, was originally delivered as a contribution to the panel “Equity Now”, sponsored by CCWWP and TIA House at the recent Canadian Writers’ … [Read more…]
Two poems by Rita Wong in honour of Sharron Proulx-Turner
[Read more...]Friday, June 17, 2016 10:00am-11:15am, Miss Lou’s Room, Harbourfront, Toronto Our present moment is one that inherits a long history of anti-racist/cultural diversity/cultural equity movements in Canadian/Turtle Island writing communities, movements that have spawned organizations and events across the space we sometimes called Canada. Some of these events and organizations include: the Aboriginal Writers’ Collective, Celebrating African Identity international arts … [Read more…]
TIA HOUSE GUIDE TO THE CANADIAN WRITERS’ SUMMIT Harbourfront Toronto June 15 – 19, 2016 Attempting to navigate the 68-page program for this year’s Writers’ Summit can be a challenge. TIA House has to make some hard choices about where to go and what to do. Here are the events we hope to catch, knowing that we can’t catch even … [Read more…]
Larissa Lai for Sharron Proulx-Turner May 29, 2016 playing with “why crow knows weendigo’s not all he’s cracked up to be” from What The Auntys Say down at the united nations train station museum with the old lady and her red hen where the mythic crow’s nest incubates fledglings of many varieties the canadian pan that troubles our valences state … [Read more…]
TIA House is involved with many events at the Congress of the Humanities in Calgary later this month. Please click “Read More” for a full listing.
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For this piece, Larissa threw three terms at me: justice, aesthetics, and writerly insurgency. I liked the last term best because its synonyms are brave: dissent, insurrection, revolt, uprising. However, never having been tested there, I mostly discuss the other two terms. “Justice” was partly why I wrote A Superior Man (ASM), because the Chinese role in helping to build … [Read more…]
Ken Belford was born in DeBolt, Alberta, and grew up in East Vancouver. As a young man, he worked on the log booms of the BC lower mainland, and as a lumber piler in the sawmill camps of the interior. In the 1960s he moved to Hazelton, BC, in traditional Gitxsan territory. For 35 years, as one of the first … [Read more…]
Dear Larissa,
Thanks for asking me to write something on ethics, aesthetics, justice, form (the words tumble around getting drier and drier) for this blog. As you know, I’ve been out of the academic loop for awhile so such terms feel distant, part of another thinking (clinking) world from elsewhere.
What is this TIA House anyway? Welcome to the Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing, online. No doubt many of you, my meat world and virtual friends, are wondering what wonders are transpiring here at the University of Calgary, the long time home of a vibrant, ever-shifting writing community that has been a hub over the years for so many … [Read more…]