Author Archives: Sanchari Sur

Breaking Down Glass Walls: Naming an Unnamed Trauma by Angela Wright

The pressure I feel as a Black woman to consistently write about my experiences with racism, and of a trauma that is supposed to come from those racist experiences, feels restrictive like a glass wall; a barrier to break through to take up space and exist.

Writing Home by Fathima Cader

She used to buy her mother flowers. They used to live in an apartment building crowded with flats, in a neighbourhood crowded with apartment buildings. In the previous decade, they’d moved five times – six if you count that first move across the Atlantic. Frankly, that first was the easiest of the moves, a pale […]

Creating Community through Creativity: An Interview with Whitney French

Whitney French is a writer and arts-educator. Her writing has been published in Quill and Quire, Geist, Descant Magazine, CBC Books and anthologized in The Black Notes: Fresh Writing From Black Women and Girls (2017) and The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry(2010). Whitney is also the founder and co-editor of the nation-wide publication […]

Thinking in Arabic, Writing in English: An Interview with Ahmad Danny Ramadan

Ahmad Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-born author, storyteller, and LGBTQ-refugees activist who calls Canada home. His debut novel is The Clothesline Swing (2017). He also translated Rafi Badawi’s 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think, and published two collections of short stories in Arabic. His work in activism has supported the arrival of over 18 Syrian queer […]

Coming-of-Age through Poetry and Art: An Interview with Hana Shafi

Hana Shafi is a writer and artist who illustrates under the name Frizz Kid. Both her visual art and writing frequently explore themes such as feminism, body politics, racism, and pop culture with an affinity to horror. A graduate of Ryerson University’s Journalism Program, she has published articles in publications such as The Walrus, Hazlitt, […]

Reconciling Academia and Creative Writing: An Interview with Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Dept. of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. THIS WOUND IS A WORLD (Frontenac 2017) is his first book, for which he won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. NDN COPING MECHANISMS […]

Writing Worlds Anew by Phillip Dwight Morgan

Phillip requires a great deal of individual attention to follow through on written assignments to complete them on time. He demonstrates good general knowledge orally, but seems to have difficulty putting his ideas in writing.                                                             –an excerpt from my Grade 4 report card Long before I could read an analog clock, I knew intimately […]

Closer Still: On Reading What I Could Not Understand by Isabella Wang

Some artists first learn to draw by tracing the work of others – sentence structure, tone, plot, word play, imagery. Until I found my own voice, I wrote in the voices of other writers that I read from and tried to mimic. If I were to name one most influential title in my early life, […]

On Queer Sexuality and Canadian Theater: An Interview with Erum Khan

Erum Khan is a film and theatre maker. Current and recent projects include: Writer and performer for Noor (The Aga Khan Museum/ Generous Friend); creator and performer for Becoming (Rhubarb Festival & Ottawa Fringe Festival, 2018); assistant director for Acha Bacha (Theatre Passe Muraille/ Buddies); production assistant and collaborator for 7th Cousins; performer and assistant director […]

Mistaken Longings: When I Write of Calcutta, I Don’t Write of “Home”

Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, India. Dec 25 2011.   “I have a question,” a middle aged man says, his bald pate shiny against the afternoon light filtering into the Lakeside Terrace room at Harbourfront Center. We are at “Safar: Journeys to South Asia” panel of Toronto International Festival of Authors. He addresses the authors, “Do you […]