Workshop - Lens and Legacy: Writing Histories Through Photos with Preeti

This lesson will take place in person at The Cultch - Jim Green House Studio, located at 1885 Venables St, Vancouver, BC. Venue is wheelchair accessible.

Length: 2 hours

Max Participants: 15

Ages: 16+

NOTE: Bring a photo, pen and paper with you!

Sign-up required! No previous experience necessary.

Monsoon Festival's FREE community-based development workshops are excellent opportunities to immerse yourself into the artistic process. Learn valuable skills from accomplished industry professionals in areas including (but not limited to) script analysis, playwriting, acting, and music composition. Our workshops are a vital component of the Monsoon Festival of Performing Arts.

Join this year's community writing workshop with Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal. No prior writing experience is necessary but you do need to bring a photo—old or recent—that holds meaning for you, whether it's of yourself, your family, a childhood home, or cherished land.

In this session, we'll explore our histories through our photos. Preeti will take you through guided exercises and offer special tips to help you find your flow and delve into the details of your photos, uncovering stories that may have been forgotten or overlooked. Together, we'll step into what we know and what remains a mystery, using our senses, memories, and curiosity to deepen our understanding.

Join us in building a community of storytellers and the beginnings of a community archive as we discover how photos can illuminate and preserve our personal and shared histories.

Reminders:

1. Bring a photo, pen and paper with you!

2. Please do not attend if you have cold and/or covid symptoms (cough, runny nose, sore throat, etc.) or have been recently exposed to someone with covid.

3. This is a reduced scent environment. Please do not wear scented products (colognes, perfumes, spray on/scented deodorants and hair products or clothes that have been sprayed with such products in recent days). The facilitator has a scent sensitivity and will not be able to do her job if folks show up heavily scented. Please note that if you regularly wear scents, you probably won't notice how intense they are. Clothes that were sprayed in the recent and even distant past will still have scents on them. Here are a few resources that might be helpful to understanding how to reduce your scents:

- https://adriennemareebrown.net/2012/06/26/scent-free-at-the-amc/

- https://brownstargirl.org/fragrance-free-femme-of-colour-genius/

4. If you still mask, wonderful! We will try to keep windows and doors open for air flow as well.

About Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal

Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal (she/her) is a critical race feminist, writer, former lawyer, child of immigrants, and facilitator who grew up on the traditional, present and future territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen and Musqueam First Nations. With over 20 years of facilitation and teaching experience, Preeti is committed to arts-based methodologies as a source of personal and collective empowerment, transformation and community-building. She has led arts-based workshops across Turtle Island, and firmly believes that stories change the world by altering our ways of seeing, feeling and being with one another and the planet.

Preeti holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and her work has appeared in various publications, including PRISM International, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Humber Literary Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Looseleaf, Held Magazine and Arc Poetry, amongst others. Her writing tends to examine themes of touch, grief, power, diasporic Punjabi life, magic, prayer, love and sexuality. Prior to leaving her legal career, Preeti articled at a boutique litigation firm and clerked at the Federal Court of Canada. After that but before her MFA, she completed a Master of Laws at UVic where she used theatre and performance art to investigate how law lives in the body with a focus on race. Through and through, Preeti has always held community-building and social justice at the heart of her work. She has received over two dozen awards for community service and academic excellence (BA, LLB, BCL, LLM, MFA), as well as artistic support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and BC Arts Council. She has also had the honour of serving as a poetry judge for the League of Poets and being a two-time writer in residence at Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a Deer Lake alumna and a Banff alumna. Preeti holds deep gratitude for organizations and individuals who support the arts, as well as those who tell stories from the margins with love and integrity.

If you want to learn more about Preeti and/or her workshops (as if this bio isn’t long enough!), you can find her on IG @jadooberry / @write.with.preeti or at https://linktr.ee/Jadooberry.

Host or Publisher South Asian Arts Society