2024-2025 Season
Watch the recording of this event:
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The Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts (CCENA) warmly invites you to a Long Table Conversation:
Archiving and Educating about Sex Work in Hamilton
Reflections on the SWAP sex worker film and arts festival, featuring Jelena Vermilion.
Jelena Vermilion (she/her) is the Founder and Executive Director of SWAP Hamilton and Rights Not Rescue; a 2024 recipient of both the International Jose Julio Sarria Civil Rights Award & the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, and is a 2024 nominee for the Order of Hamilton. She is an independent scholar, archivist, and personal support worker with geriatrics and palliative certifications. Presented by the Sex Workers’ Action Program (SWAP) and Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts (CCENA) and recorded on February 12, 2025.
Watch the recording of this event:
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The Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts (CCENA) warmly invites you to join new CCENA Director Amber Dean in conversation with Cole Gately on storytelling and Hamilton’s queer histories.
Tuesday, September 24th
5pm – 7pm (Dinner provided!)
David Braley Health Sciences Centre, 100 Main St W
Room 1005A
In Person Event
For our first Long Table of 2024-25 we invite you to join us in person — we’ll return to hybrid events for our other long tables this year. CCENA hosts Long Tables throughout the year, featuring presentations from community narrative artists in and around Hamilton. For our meetings, we wish to create a kind of “anti-lectern” effect that extends hospitality, enacts mutuality, and allows knowledge to flow multi-directionally. The term “Long Table” has a distinguished feminist genealogy. Lois Weaver, the prominent American queer feminist dramatist, activist, and co-founder of the influential Split Britches lesbian theatre collective, coined the term in 2003 to describe a meeting that combines theatricality and public engagement. While our Long Tables are less consciously theatrical, they also seek to transform the experts’ panel into a dinner table conversation, and over food and drink we have experienced illuminating moments when the presenter/listener dynamic has been reconfigured.
Fittingly, the word cena means dinner in both Spanish and Italian. In this spirit, CCENA invites you to bring your creativity, appetite, and ideas to the table!
Free event, everyone welcome. Please RSVP here: https://hamqueerhistories.eventbrite.ca/
2023-2024 Season
November 16, 2023 | 3-4 PM
MetaNexus Hamilton blends oral and scribal literature, visual and oral art, dance, theatre, and music in a context of communal solidarity. The project explores Klyde’s emerging notion of dubpoetryology–the ology of dubpoetry, as it brings art, artist, artistry, and audience together to show, tell, interact, and share ourselves with each other in the spirit of communal oneness ‘Under the Influence of Dub!’
December 14, 2023 | 3-5 PM
Gritty City Theatre Company is a Hamilton-based company whose mission is to create and produce work that explores race and class issues theatrically. This year, GCTC has established a new playwrights collective called the Canadian Slavery Project, as well as a series of film industry and improv workshops that help emerging artists and actors develop their portfolio with hands-on learning and networking. Presented by: Lucy Reddy & Melissa Murray-Mutch
Red Beti Theatre’s Decolonise Your Ears Festival helps Indigenous, Black, and Racialised women to develop their own brand new stories and new ways of telling them. DYE offers dramaturgical support, compensation, and the infrastructure of a theatre company to enable playwrights to hear their work read aloud. Director Radha Menon will discuss DYE alongside her research on Canadian play publishers and diversity. Presented by: Radha Menon
February 8, 2024 | 3-5 PM
Authentikos is a project by filmmaker Abdo Habbani which documents the Green Block Growing, a local community initiative that aims to address climate change and create a communal space that encourages diverse expressions of knowledge.
Activist Lyndon George will discuss the revival of Two-Spirit Indigenous Queer Ceremonies in the region, which engage songs, medicines, dances, lodges, feasting, and other elements to ensure Two-Spirit Indigenous Queer youth have a safer space rite of passage, coming out ceremony they can look forward to.
April 11, 2024 | 3-5 PM
As CCENA’s co-directors retire from their positions, join us for a celebration of our accomplishments and a discussion of what comes next.
2022-2023 Season
October 25, 2022 | 3-4 PM
Unpacking the stigma of being a Black person on a farm, in relationship with nature, growing food for oneself that is not coded as poverty or slavery, is a personal and collective experience that is fruitful to the narratives of Black people. This project, culminating in a curated public walk, celebrates (situates, and stimulates) Black people having food, access, land, sovereignty, freedom, and returning to ways of eating and gathering that challenge colonialism.
February 28, 2023 | 3-5 PM
As an artist collective, VOKS aims to create an ongoing collaborative space for marginalized voices. This event will include a screening of their new poem film “Kassak,” which features disabled artists.
Darrell Epp is a Hamilton- based poet whose work has appeared in over 130 magazines, including Poetry Ireland, Exile, and Queen’s Quarterly. He will be reading from his new collection, Permanent Smoke.
March 22, 2023 | 3-5 PM
YWCA Hamilton’s community-designed mural project, located in the main lobby of the Transitional Living Program and Carole Anne’s Place, memorializes, honours, and celebrates the lives of community members that the YWCA has served, who have lost their lives through their experience of homelessness.
Church Bells and Little Spells, the new album from Fünyboht musician duo Leo Dragtoe and Michael Myszkowski, is a perfectly synchronized Care Bear Stare in the face of the pandemic. In the hardships engulfing the world, these songs remind us of what we can accomplish with some sunshine, a cool breeze, a little spell, some medicine and an open heart.
2021 - 2022 Season
October 28, 2021 | 3-4 PM
This project involved CCENA’s partnership in supporting two hearing-impaired actors to participate in the Decolonise Your Ears New Play Festival (June 22-26 2021) by supplying ASL translators. The translation also meant that the entire festival was accessible to hard-of-hearing audiences.
November 18, 2021 | 3-4 PM
This film follows Hamiltonian Sharon Miller as she fights against displacement, trying to stay in her apartment and home despite numerous maintenance and pest issues. The transit agency Metrolinx became Sharon’s new landlord when they purchased her building to construct a Light Rail Transit system and have been trying to evict her from her unit without offering appropriate compensation and an alternative place to live. With nowhere affordable to move to within the increasingly gentrified city of Hamilton, Sharon fights back against displacement pressures and against a city that sees her as dispensable.
December 2, 2021 | 3-4 PM
CCENA is partnering with the Afro-Canadian Caribbean Association and the Hamilton Black History Council to hire a summer researcher, Aaron Parry, to research and assemble an online “one-stop shop” for locating Hamilton Black History resources and archives. At present, many historical sources exist in scattered places, and the idea here is to create a portal that can enable the community, who may not have inside access to various archives (McMaster, Hamilton Public Library, Stewart Memorial Church, etc.) to find relevant materials on Black life in Hamilton.
January 20, 2022 | 3-4pm
Keeping Six–Hamilton Harm Reduction Action League is a community-based organization that defends the rights, dignity, and humanity of people who use drugs. It was formed in response to the ravages of the opioid crisis, and out of recognition of the need for an organized voice for people with lived and living experience of substance use at the many stakeholder tables attempting to manage and overcome the drug epidemic in the city of Hamilton. In addition to being a creative outlet, the zine is a tool for advocacy—building understanding and compassion for the community of people who use drugs. This event featured Arts Coordinator Kelly Wolf & Maggie Ward.
February 17, 2022 | 3-4pm
A Guelph-based, community-engaged arts organization serving Ontario youth and young adults, Art Not Shame speaks back to systemic forces that perpetuate cycles of shame and the undermining of self-worth. Art Not Shame seeks to shape the community by intentionally building supportive and transformative social spaces. The Rest and Resilience project curated a space for BIPOC youth and adults in Guelph, Hamilton, and surrounding areas to explore rest and resilience through arts-based practices in an environment of intersectional solidarity, celebration, and support.
March 3, 2022 | 3-4pm
Hamilton Arts and Letters is a biannual magazine and ongoing activist project with a community focus. At this Long Table, HAL‘s editors, alongside filmmaker in residence Sedona Micale, present “The Foundry”–a short film that premiered at the AGH Film Festival and features the poetry of Liz Tessier, the voice of Leo Dragtoe, and artworks by Clarence Porter. HAL builds infrastructure for artists, giving Hamilton artists and writers–emerging and established–opportunities to present new works alongside their peers from across Canada and the world.
2020 - 2021 Season
October 22, 2020 | 3-4 PM
The Ubuntu Music Collaborative is a music collective where the rich spiritual and oral music culture of the African community is cultivated and shared with the African diaspora and other communities in Hamilton.
November 19, 2020 | 3-4 PM
Stories from Hamilton is a community arts storytelling project with artist Lisa Pijuan-Nomura. Through workshops and storytelling sessions, participants learn how to research local history, develop, and tell their stories.
February 11, 2021 | 1-2 PM
Hamilton Arts and Letters (HAL) is a Hamilton-based literature and arts magazine. Issue 14.1 titled The Hammer presents community stories about Hamilton during COVID-19. Issue 13.1 explores the relationship between art and the natural world, and issue 13.2 explores Mennonite stories.
February 26, 2021 | 3-4 PM
Art in Hard Times is a new, community-engaged, art project that will use visual art and digital platforms to engage and support a cross-section of Guelph and area residents virtually in the wake of the current COVID-19 global pandemic. Led by mural artist and Art Not Shame collaborator Melanie Schambach, Art in Hard Times is a co-creative, virtual mural, designed to build community, bridge diverse experiences, decrease isolation, and imagine alternative futures together during this time.
2019 - 2020 Season
October 24, 2019
In her photo-poetic project Home X Work, Ashley Marshall revisited Hamilton, walking to explore themes such as home, distance, and return. Ashley presented her experience of this project and its exploration of everyday experiences of both liberation and oppression. Paul Lisson read from his new collection of poetry, The Perfect Archive, an exploration in poems of how documents and information can, have been, and continue to be manipulated to tell or erase events that occurred or are occurring. Paul acknowledges and thanks the League of Canadian Poets, the Canada Council, and the Ontario Arts Council.
November 1, 2019
Hamilton Arts and Letters is one of this city’s most integral journals, a vital ongoing showcase for a range of literary, academic, and cultural submissions. Many guest contributors to this year’s publication will present at this launch, which includes a focus on McMaster University’s Discovery Program, original music from the Mohawk College ArtPop ensemble, and remarks from Johannah Bird, Guest Editor of this year’s “Re:Creation Stories” issue along with Shane Neilson, Guest Editor of the ʺImaginary Safe House: Canadian Disability Poeticsʺ issue. Featuring readings from Kaitlin Debicki, Roxanna Bennett, John Hill, Leo Dragtoe, and more.
November 21, 2019
John Hill (Oneida nation from Six Nations of the Grand River) presented his epic poem/performance essay on queer Indigenous poetics entitled “With Tongues Like These . . .” Placing Attention II was the second in a themed series of Long Tables on the ways art both help shape and is shaped by, our sense of place. This installment featured Tuscarora artist Waylon Wilson who makes video games that draw attention to Indigenous places and histories.
2018 - 2019 Season
April 24, 2018
Long Table: “Performance Essay II” and Ode to My Postal Code
“Performance Essay II”: Dub poet Klyde Broox delivered the second phase in the evolution of his “performance essay” genre. Philosophy as spoken word! Spoken word as philosophy!
Ode to My Postal Code: Klyde has been working with a community of emerging poets, spoken word artists, and storytellers. This was a critical celebration of their codes and odes.
March 6, 2018
Long Table: “Art, Philosophy, and Community-Based Innovation”
Gord Tulloch (possAbilities, Vancouver), Nadia Duguay (Exeko, Montreal), and Sarah Schulman (Inwithforward, Toronto) presented on the work of their respective organizations in this panel. The panel explored the role of arts in generating social inclusion, intellectual emancipation, and grounded change with these three out-of-the-box leaders in creating vibrant communities.
February 27, 2018
Long Table: Canada Reads and Something Round
Sarah Roger, Paul Barrett, and Jeremy Haynes gave the presentation “Digitally Reading Canada Reads” on Canada Reads and reading habits.
Artist and photographer Margaret Flood discussed her exhibit Something Round and experiences of walking the Bruce Trail.
To read more about this event and see photos, click the link above.
January 18, 2018
Long Table: The Brightside Project and “Inventing the Performance Essay I”
Simon Orpana, Matt McInnes, and Friends discussed“The Brightside Project.” Simon and Matt have been conducting interviews and focus groups with people who lived in the remarkable neighbourhood of Brightside, which lies under what is now the Stelco lands. They have been connecting stories with mapping methods to re-animate our memories of this key neighbourhood in Hamilton’s history.
Klyde Broox has the extraordinary gift of being able to philosophize the tradition of dub even as he performs it. Over the past couple years, he has been inventing a new form, which he performed at the CCENA Long Table gathering: the performance essay.
November 2017
Long Table: “Visual Narratives, Creating, and Creation Stories”
Simon Orpana and Rob Kristofferson discussed their 2016 graphic novel Showdown! Making Modern Unions.
Dr. Rick Hill discussed his work on The Creation Story Project and the book he has been writing on Haudenosaunee creation story.
To read more about this event, click the link above.
March 20, 2019
Art Not Shame offers tools and programming for youth and other community members to express and address mental health challenges through collaborative art‐making and storytelling. Michelle Peek and Jeremy Hannah led us through exercises and activities, showing us what they do in their workshops.
Click here to see photos of the event and read more about Art Not Shame.
November 20, 2018
Peter Cockett and three student filmmakers, Jamie, Khalil, and Claudia, represented Agile Films Collective and discussed their collaboration on a short film.
Bjarke and Emily of Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network presented their CCENA-supported newsletter.
To see photos of and read more about this event, click here.
October 18, 2018
This Long Table, organized by HAL editors Paul Lisson, Fiona Kinsella, and Shane Neilson, involved artists and poets with disability or who engage in a significant way with the topic of disability as a result of caring, loving, and living with persons with disability. The Long Table kicked off with Music Professor Dusty Micale and the ArtPop music ensemble. This Long Table was part of the AbleHamilton Poetry Festival 2018, hosted by the AbleHamilton Poetry Collective and HAL magazine.
Following the Long Table, Paul and Fiona invited all attendees to a viewing of Der Himmel über Hammer ist blau (The sky above is blue hammer), an exhibition by Paul and Fiona at b contemporary gallery.
You can read the 10th Anniversary issues of HAL on their website.
2017 - 2018
April 24, 2018
Long Table: “Performance Essay II” and Ode to My Postal Code
“Performance Essay II”: Dub poet Klyde Broox delivered the second phase in the evolution of his “performance essay” genre. Philosophy as spoken word! Spoken word as philosophy!
Ode to My Postal Code: Klyde has been working with a community of emerging poets, spoken word artists, and storytellers. This was a critical celebration of their codes and odes.
March 6, 2018
Long Table: “Art, Philosophy, and Community-Based Innovation”
Gord Tulloch (possAbilities, Vancouver), Nadia Duguay (Exeko, Montreal), and Sarah Schulman (Inwithforward, Toronto) presented on the work of their respective organizations in this panel. The panel explored the role of arts in generating social inclusion, intellectual emancipation, and grounded change with these three out-of-the-box leaders in creating vibrant communities.
February 27, 2018
Long Table: Canada Reads and Something Round
Sarah Roger, Paul Barrett, and Jeremy Haynes gave the presentation “Digitally Reading Canada Reads” on Canada Reads and reading habits.
Artist and photographer Margaret Flood discussed her exhibit Something Round and experiences of walking the Bruce Trail.
To read more about this event and see photos, click the link above.
January 18, 2018
Long Table: The Brightside Project and “Inventing the Performance Essay I”
Simon Orpana, Matt McInnes, and Friends discussed“The Brightside Project.” Simon and Matt have been conducting interviews and focus groups with people who lived in the remarkable neighbourhood of Brightside, which lies under what is now the Stelco lands. They have been connecting stories with mapping methods to re-animate our memories of this key neighbourhood in Hamilton’s history.
Klyde Broox has the extraordinary gift of being able to philosophize the tradition of dub even as he performs it. Over the past couple years, he has been inventing a new form, which he performed at the CCENA Long Table gathering: the performance essay.
November 2017
Long Table: “Visual Narratives, Creating, and Creation Stories”
Simon Orpana and Rob Kristofferson discussed their 2016 graphic novel Showdown! Making Modern Unions.
Dr. Rick Hill discussed his work on The Creation Story Project and the book he has been writing on Haudenosaunee creation story.
To read more about this event, click the link above.
2016-2017
March 30, 2017
Spring Symposium: What have we learned so far?
Toward the close of CCENA’s second year, CCENA Community, Advisory, and Directorate gathered together for a Spring Symposium that explored the question: What have we learned so far?
This symposium folded together and presented all that we have learned from our various panels as well as literature on the topic regarding what constitutes community-engaged narrative arts. The format extended our usual “long table” gathering to a round table conversation wherein we invited community members to reflect with us on the evolving field of community-engaged narrative arts and to think ahead to the centre’s future in this arena.
In attendance we had past panelists from this and our inaugural year, members of the CCENA Advisory Panel, colleagues and friends from within the McMaster Community and a host of voices from within the larger artistic, activist, educational and governmental communities that have become a part of our extended CCENA network.
February 8, 2017
Writing Life: In Conversation with Eden Robinson
Bryan Prince Bookseller and CCENA joined to launch a new series called Writing Life, and Eden Robinson was the inaugural guest!
Click the link above to read more about the event and watch Eden’s interview with Kaitlin Debicki.
February 2, 2017
Long Table: “Stories from the More-Than-Human World”
This panel moved beyond people-stories to explore stories of the more-than-human world. Presenters included Kaitlin Debicki, Kanien’keha:ka PhD student in English and Cultural Studies whose research focuses on trees as instructors in Haudenosaunee tradition, John Terpstra, poet and author who has written for many years about the natural environment in Hamilton and is currently working on “daylighting Chedoke Creek,” and Randy Kay who discussed his ongoing work on restoring the Ancaster Creek valley watershed and the MacMarsh initiative. To read more about this event, click the link above.