2026 Schedule

9:15am Multipaper Session

Amy Bartlett, “Sharing Our Psychedelic Roots”

The podcast My Psychedelic Roots shares stories from people from a broad swath of lived experience to explore their psychedelic beginnings, or roots: what motivated them to start using psychedelics, what those early experiences were like, and how those roots have impacted their understanding of themselves and the world around them. This intimate and personal storytelling podcast serves both as a place for listeners to find connection in the experiences of others, but also for guests to make meaning of their own experiences in community. When it comes to sharing stories of psychedelic use, there are deep considerations of risk, power and stigma to navigate, simply for sharing their own—sometimes sacred, sometimes scary, but always meaningful—lived experience. The conversation generated through this public sharing circle allows people to witness and be witnessed, and in so doing, can create opportunities for both the storytellers and listeners to experience a sense of belonging, acceptance and community that can be deeply supportive of the human plight of navigating the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness and life’s meaning. This presentation will explore the important role of storytelling to community-building, research, advocacy and change-making, while also honoring the transformative personal and social impact of speaking one’s truth.

Jo Bear, “What Desire Makes Me: Arriving at a Personal Asexual Poetics”

“What Desire Makes Me: Arriving at a Personal Asexual Poetics” blends memoir, critical theory, and craft analysis to interrogate the possibilities of form and imagination presented by an asexual poetics. Engaging with the notion of a personal poetics to avoid a prescriptive and reductive framing of asexuality, the piece probes at the intersections between lived experiences of disability and desire inside of asexual relationship models and histories. It also looks to examples in contemporary poetics of poets already doing the work of relational and formal exploration. By reading the absences, elisions, and blank spaces in these poems, the essay wonders at an asexual poetics of absence-as-presence and presence-as-absence as a way of tending to the resonance of what is known and felt beyond language. In our current landscape of compulsory sexuality and relationship models molded by patriarchy and white supremacy, asexuality offers ways to imagine otherwise so that we can devise new ways of being and knowing.

Shane Neilson, “‘Poetry’ and ‘Medicine’: An Odyssey”

When the terms ‘poetry’ and ‘medicine’ are used in medical education, what exactly is meant? There can be no poetry at play if the speaker is not careful and precise with the terminology. Further: how can a poem be read properly in professional and health humanities contexts if we are not careful with what we mean by ‘poetry,’ ‘lyric,’ ‘narrative,’ and ‘medicine’? My paper will militate for scholars to know, in a deep way, both the transhistorical use of the word ‘poetry’ but also its specific history over time, with a specific focus upon poetry’s relationship to representing time itself. Using Aristotle’s own metaphor of genus and species, I will discuss the genus of poetry and the species of lyric poetry, explaining how, in the present moment in medical education, the misunderstanding of how poetry represents time has left narrative medicine as the hegemon, imposing a linear, flattening order upon the clinical encounter. I will show how contemporary tensions between lyric and narrative lead to concretized and overdetermined definitions that act to segregate lyric from narrative poetry. Or, more accurately, a binary is created in which one kind of narrativism is said to be discoverable in lyric poetry as ‘narrative.’ In short, I will argue that medical educators must know what poetry is, precisely, so that they can know what poetry can do, and thereby redress the imbalance between poetry and narrative in medical education.

9:15am Multipaper Session

Sokeyra Francisco, “The Parable of the Sower and Octavia Butler’s Literary Marronage”

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” In her work, Octavia Butler, contrarily, offers a playbook to do both. Through a reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I want to think about the ways Butler performs a form of literary marronage which draws on a historical legacy of freedom seeking to craft a speculative future in which freedom is being actively defined. Butler not only positions her characters and readers in new (yet familiar) settings but instructs them in the ways of spatially grounded and historically informed forms of community and freedom making. Scholars have written about the concept of change in The Parable of the Sower and how for Butler it is particularly informed through Black feminist theory. I am interested in extending this analysis to the options Butler gives her characters for escape. Drawing on the historical past and present, Butler offers predictions for the ways in which we might continue to survive and even start anew in a United States wracked by climate change and inequality. Through the differing story arcs of her main character Lauren and her brother Keith, Butler invokes the importance of freedom seeking, the journey at one point described as “a modern underground railroad”, to demonstrate that survival is neither a solitary endeavour nor is it static. Butler’s literary marronage demonstrates that seeds of hope must not only be planted, they must be sowed. After all, Earthseed, Lauren’s new belief system, is based on the fact that “God is Change.” Change is the way forward.

Phoebe Wang, “The Rising Tide of Community and Its Many Coloured Rafts”

The Chinese proverb, “水漲船高”which translates to, “rising water lifts all boats,” could be applied to the ways that an evolving community can support everyone who floats on its back. It’s well-documented that writers are uplifted by community, through mentoring, workshopping, collaboration, and acts of sharing industry knowledge and publishing connections. For writers who self-identify as people of colour, communities and collectives have historically been ways of advocating for greater representation, through activism, anthologies and critiquing Canadian literary canons. Despite these shared goals and identifications, the coming together of a group of highly creative and committed people can include tensions, conflicts and imbalances. For these spaces to be sustainable long-term, it is essential that we examine what it means to be in community, to acknowledge what kinds of labour goes into relationship building, and to reflect on the role of boundaries and trust. I wish to present a lyric essay that draws on my experience facilitating a BIPOC writers group from 2014-2017 that culminated in an anthology and a symposium in partnership with the Ontario Arts Council, helping to organize a number of BIPOC gatherings with Lillian Allen at OCAD University in 2018 and 2019, and holding a creative writing group for students who self-identify as writers of colour from 2018 until the present. This hybrid work will bring up some of the more unglamourous and logistical planning pieces of community building and address the challenges of overcoming tensions and issues of trust, especially among those who have different experiences of privilege and access. Yet the aim of this exploratory piece is to share ways of communicating and of nurturing wisdom, particularly for the next generation of rising voices.

10:45am Mark Blagrave - Reading and Q&A

Mark Blagrave’s novel Silver Salts (Cormorant Books, 2008) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize for First Novel (Canada and Caribbean). Lay Figures (Vagrant Press, 2020) was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize, and Felt (Cormorant, 2024) was shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Always a bridesmaid and never a bride, he has nevertheless been very grateful and honoured to be in the parties. His plays have been produced at university theatres and professionally in New Brunswick and his short fiction has not only appeared in several Canadian literary journals (including being shortlisted for the Malahat Review Novella Prize 2026) but also in a collection of linked short stories Salt in the Wounds (2014). After a long career in university teaching and administration, Mark now lives in Saint Andrews N.B. with his wife Sheila.

12:00pm Kitchen Demonstration with Khalil Akhtar

1:30pm Writing the Sensory World Workshop - Catherine Bush

In this workshop we’ll engage in generative writing prompts that invite us to activate our senses as a route to deeper connection with the world and to enliven our writing. “If we’re not paying attention through our own senses, we have disengaged from the primary mode in which every creature since the origin of life has connected to its environment,” says acoustic ecologist David Haskell. As humans and writers, we tend to prioritize sight over our other senses. The loss of complex natural soundscapes is a specific form of ecological loss. To be out of touch with nature is to be literally out of touch – not touching. We’ll head outside for some sensory encounters with the more-than-human world. Then we’ll bring our attention to the page in order to awaken a more embodied writing practice.

We’ll begin our work with memory prompts drawing on particularly vivid memories of sound in relation to the natural world. We’ll also cultivate playfulness by while creating our own collective lexicon of sound words and trying out ways to recreate non-verbal sounds on the page. I’ll also set up the basic parameters of the Quest Narrative as a frame for our experiential and writing practice (desire; challenge; breakthrough).

We’ll head outside to take in the world as an acoustical environment. If we need to stay indoors, I’ll offer up examples of natural acoustical environments from online sources. Back inside, participants will be asked to use the quest narrative structure to shape a short piece of writing created in response to their listening experience.

Volunteers will share their experience and writing as they wish. If we have time, we’ll do this a second time, focused on touch.

1:30pm PIVOT: Lessons for Life and Your Writing - Donna Jones Alward

In this session, bestselling author Donna Jones Alward shares the lessons learned from her genre pivot from romance to historical fiction. Learn about the changes to her writing process and how it has affected her career, and also get a glimpse into what she now considers her new Rules for Life. Finish with guided journaling to help identify your own opportunities to pivot. If you’ve been thinking of changing things up, this might just be the inspiration you’ve been looking for.

1:30pm A Place at the Roundtable: Attentional Friction - Stephany Peterson & Tony Klipin

Not knowing has become difficult to admit. We are pressed to decide what we think, where we stand, whom to believe, and what something means, often before we have had time to understand. Literature can give us that time. We form impressions as we read, but need not settle them at once. We can dislike a character and remain in their company; believe a narrator, then begin to doubt them; hold conflicting accounts together; or discover, fifty pages later, that what seemed obvious no longer is. What comes next can alter what we thought we knew. Literature does not stop us from judging. It keeps judgment answerable to what comes next. A Place at the Roundtable asks what happens when we carry that attentional friction beyond the page.

Co-led by a scholar-practitioner and a fine craft wood artist, the workshop gathers participants around a table to sand and finish handcrafted hardwood eating boards. Working with grain, pressure, and resistance, we talk about judgment, curiosity, and what it might mean to allow another person - as with story - to remain unfinished in our understanding. The finished boards become part of a shared meal and then go home with their makers, along with this provocation:

What if we gave one another the same chance to keep unfolding that we give good story?

4:00pm Khalil Akhtar in Conversation

Khalil Akhtar is a Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and cooking instructor. Akhtar was born in the United Kingdom to a Punjabi family and grew up in small-town Atlantic Canada. He has spent two decades working in radio newsrooms across the country. He is the host of CBC Radio’s Information Morning in Moncton, New Brunswick, and a past co-host of CBC’s On the Island in British Columbia. He created and hosted the CBC summer radio program The Main Ingredient and developed a long-running syndicated food column that aired on CBC morning shows across the country. How to Eat with Your Hands is his first book.

7:30pm Elamin Abdelmahmoud in Conversation

Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the host of CBC’s daily arts, entertainment, and pop culture show Commotion. He is an award-winning culture writer who has written for the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, the Globe and Mail, and others. Elamin is the author of the No. 1 best-selling memoir Son of Elsewhere, a New York Times notable book and a Globe and Mail 100 book. He is the recipient of the 2025 Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing.