1 Year Later: Living Hyphen on Diversifying Canadian Arts and Literature
Living Hyphen is celebrating its one year anniversary this month and I wanted to take a breath and take stock of all the incredible moves we’ve made this year.
To be perfectly honest, it feels uncomfortable writing this piece. It feels uncomfortable to list and elaborate on all the achievements and successes we’ve had, however big or small. It feels unnatural and unbecoming. It feels premature when there is still so much we can do.
But I’m doing it anyway.
Because in a world where there is always something more to chase, more to achieve, more to give, it is important that we pause and recognize our efforts.
Because in a world that downplays, ignores, and erases the contributions of those from marginalized communities, this seemingly simple act of speaking our accomplishments out loud is actually an integral and powerful act of resistance.
Living Hyphen is a magazine that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians — that is, individuals who call Canada home but who have roots in often far away places. It is, in essence, a magazine that explores what it means to live in between cultures, how ever that might manifest for you.
Our inaugural issue, Entrances & Exits, features artists and writers across 6 different provinces and 1 territory hailing from 30+ different ethnicities, religions, and Indigenous nations. These voices are at the very heart of this magazine’s success. Their stories are what has made this magazine so powerful, so mighty, and so moving.
And so, one rotation around the sun later, where are we now?
Selling Out, Reprinting, and Continuing to Sell!
We launched in mid-October of last year and sold out our first print run of 500 copies within one month. One month! That’s just four weeks!
We immediately reprinted and have continued to sell hundreds more over the last few months. As of writing, Entrances & Exits has sold nearly 800 copies across North America.
Securing Distribution in Mainstream Bookstores
When I first set out to create Living Hyphen, I told myself that I wanted to see this publication in the mainstream. I was tired of browsing through the Canadian literature aisles of bookstores and seeing the very specific homogeneity in authors’ names. I wanted to see names like mine, like my friends’, like those of almost everyone I had grown up with and continue to grow up with.
This photo and the one on the header of this blog was taken just a few months before Living Hyphen’s official launch. Filipina-Canadian photographer, Jessie Abrazado, was putting together an exhibit that highlighted young Filipinos in Toronto who were making moves in various creative sectors. She wanted us to wear the Barong Tagalog — the Philippines’ national dress—and put our own contemporary and individual twist to it. And because of my project with Living Hyphen, she decided to make a bookstore our location for the photoshoot.
While we were shooting, I asked Jessie specifically to take my photo in the Barong Tagalog next to the Canadian Literature aisle. At the time, it was my way of symbolically representing what I hoped to achieve with Living Hyphen and ultimately, what I had longed for for so long — to be recognized as part of the Canadian story.
What was symbolic then is a reality now. Today, Living Hyphen sits proudly in the Canadian literature section of many bookstores across the country. In a single year, we’ve managed to secure distribution in 21 bookstores, cafés, and other shops across 10 cities in North America. We’re now available all across the Greater Toronto Area, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Canmore, Montreal, Michigan, and California.
Perhaps most significantly, the voices of over 50 Canadians with roots all across the globe now proudly sit on the top shelf of the “Read the North” section in Indigo Bay & Bloor, the flagship location of this nation’s largest bookstore.
Circulation in Library Systems
Beyond bookstores, cafés, and other shops, Living Hyphen is also in circulation in select library systems across the country including Halifax and Guelph. Our latest and most recent win was securing circulation in the Toronto Public Library—the largest public library system in the country. And would you believe it, they’ve placed us in the Bennet Family Foundation’s Canadian Literature Collection!
Libraries have been a particularly significant achievement for us because it symbolizes the kind of equitable distribution that we aspire towards. Libraries pay full retail price for the publications they shelve, giving us an opportunity to recover printing costs while also offering the magazine for free to those who might not otherwise have the financial access to purchase one themselves.
Our magazine is not cheap and will likely never be. At a retail price of $30, our magazine is definitely on the high end of publications. This means that the cost of Living Hyphen is prohibitive for many, especially for the very communities we aim to serve. There is no skirting around this issue.
But in this (flawed and exploitative) capitalist system we live in, the voices and stories of marginalized communities have all too often been undervalued and cheapened. And in this (flawed and exploitative) capitalist system, value is recognized through price.
Our price point is a stand and a statement to recognize the worth of our voices and our stories.
Libraries have given us the chance to do all the things we aim to do — signal our worth, achieve accessibility, and strive towards financial sustainability.
*If you’re interested in helping us get into more libraries, please get in touch and I can tell you how to request a purchase at your local library system!
Recognition from Mainstream Media
Beyond the page and the bookshelf, Living Hyphen has also been recognized across various mainstream media. As word about our magazine launch was picking up, contributor Aba Amuquandoh and I were interviewed on CityTV’s Breakfast Television to share our individual processes as editor and as playwright/actress, respectively.
On the day of our launch, I was interviewed by CBC Metro Morning and CBC Ontario Morning to speak to our mission.
Since launching, our contributors and I have been interviewed for radio shows including CBC Montreal’s show Let’s Go and Radio-Canada International, as well as for print publications such as the Inquirer and the Philippine Reporter.
Last but certainly not least, our contributors Natasha Ramoutar and Pamela Dungao, as well as designer Joshua Layton, made national headlines with a special feature on CTV News!
To be recognized in this way has fuelled our fire and proven to us that there is a hunger for our stories.
Pivoting to Programming
This was a big one for us this year! Living Hyphen’s mandate has expanded beyond our publication and into cultural programming. We realized that in order to address the lack of diversity in Canadian arts and literature, we need to cultivate a culture that encourages those from marginalized communities to tell their stories in the first place.
We live in a society that tells hyphenated Canadians — specifically, those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Colour (BIPOC) — that their stories don’t matter or that their stories are not worth listening to. In that kind of environment, how can we expect a diverse art and literature scene? These stories from hyphenated Canadians aren’t just unheard, they are left entirely untold.
To cultivate diverse voices, we need tools, resources, and mentorship to encourage this practice of storytelling. And so since March, Living Hyphen has been hosting at least one event every month to encourage those from marginalized communities to share their lived experiences. From a writing workshop for BIPOC in collaboration with Culture Days and the Toronto Public Library to our storytelling event at Queen Books, from a Filipina-focused writing circle in Montréal to outreach talks with Grade 4 students in Brampton, we have been working on a grassroots level to create this change.
At Living Hyphen, we are now going deeper than representation on a page, but into creating programming where hyphenated Canadians feel compelled and confident to share their stories everywhere.
Creating Connections, Building Relationships
But those are just the glitzy, flashy, big-picture milestones. The kind of achievements and accolades that make headlines and are deemed “success” in a conventional sense. And by all means, they are no small feats!
But the true driving force of our energy is the precious conversations we’ve had at our storytelling events and writing workshops. It is the private messages of gratitude and expressions of healing that we’ve received in our inbox and Instagram DMs. It is the community we’ve built with and amongst our own contributors. It is, in short, the connections we’ve made and the relationships we’ve cultivated.
There’s no way to quantify this. No way to really share the big and small intimacies that have been shared between and amongst us.
Reshaping What We Consider “Mainstream”
There is nothing niche about the stories of hyphenated Canadians. With the latest census showing that Canada is now home to millions of people from 250 distinct ethnic origins, we have been the mainstream for a long time now. But the Canadian art and literature landscape lags behind.
Living Hyphen burst into the scene proclaiming a mission to reshape the mainstream by turning up the volume on voices that often go unheard. One year later and we’re making good on that promise and doing way more than we even anticipated.
What does the next year hold for us? Who knows! Whatever it may be — here’s to another year of continuing to defy even our own expectations.
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