Reclaiming Our Mother Tongues: A Multilingual Poetry Workshop

Reclaiming Our Mother Tongues: A Multilingual Poetry Workshop is a three hour poetry workshop open to anyone in Toronto/GTA whose mother tongue is not English. Priority will be given to BIPOC new-generation artists (15-29 years old) who experience social, cultural, and economic marginalization. Especially welcome are women of colour, immigrants, refugees, and second generation Canadians.

This workshop will teach participants how to use language appropriation strategies to merge their own linguistic and cultural experiences with Standard Canadian English. Language appropriation is a linguistic technique used by cross-cultural or multilingual writers. It refers to the process by which the [Standardized English] language is taken and made to ‘ bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience” (Ashcroft et al, p. 38, The Empire Writes Back). Such techniques include codeswitching (switching between dialects), glossing (providing a parenthetical translation of non-English terms), and syntactic fusion (merging of English and non-English terms to create hybrid terms). These techniques allow participants to privilege their mother tongues over English.

The workshop will be held at The Margin of Eras Gallery* (1684 Queen Street West) on Friday, July 27th from 7:00pm to 10:00pm.

The workshop is PWYC at the door (Pay What You Can - suggested donation is $5 to $25).

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/reclaiming-our-mother-tongues-a-multilingual-poetry-workshop-tickets-48140818484

Registration for the workshop is free. Please register to confirm your attendance as there are a limited number of spots!

*Please note that the MOEG is not a fully physically accessible space. There is a ramp at the front door, but the washroom is in the basement which is down a flight of stairs. The closest accessible washroom is McDonalds at Queen and Roncesvalles.