CCENA contributed to the production of Defy the Silence, a digital book of poems published by Hamilton Arts & Letters. Friends of CCENA have been involved in all stages of this work, from Kim Echlin, who was a speaker at our very first Long Table gathering and who did the English poetry translations, to Paul Lisson, CCENA advisory committee member and organizer of countless narrative arts initiatives in Hamilton.

Click here to read Omran’s collection.

Simon Orpana and Matt McInnes 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.

Click here to learn more.

Klyde Broox has the extraordinary gift of being able to philosophize the tradition of dub even as he performs it. He has been inventing a new form, which he performed at the CCENA Long Table gathering: the performance essay.

Sarah, Paul, and Jeremy studied the impact of CBC’s Canada Reads program on a wide public’s reading habits by tracking online blogs, book sales, book clubs, reviews, and other big data sources. You can view photos of their Long Table presentation on our website by clicking here.

Artist and photographer Margaret Flood asked people on the Bruce Trail in Hamilton to give her a round object they found on the trail, plus a little story about the object or the trail. She spoke at a Long Table about the exhibitions she assembled from the impromptu community that gave her objects. The first exhibition was at the Assembly in 2017, and a second occurred in the Summer of 2018 at the Hamilton Public Library.

View photos of her Long Table presentation and the series on our website.

CCENA brought inspiring social innovators Gord Tulloch (posAbilities, Vancouver), Nadia Duguay and Maxime G. Langlois (Exeko, Montreal), and Sarah Schulman (Inwithforward, Toronto) to Hamilton for a very special panel on the role of the arts in generating social inclusion, intellectual emancipation, and grounded change with these three out-of-the-box leaders in creating vibrant communities.

Klyde worked with a community of emerging poets, spoken word artists, and storytellers, creating a celebration of their codes & odes in a Long Table.

Jane Mulkewich and Scott Neigh headed up the project Red Hill Stories of Struggle. CCENA helped make connections with McMaster and public library archives to find the right home for the reams of documents retained from the actions of the environmental Red Hill protest groups of the 1990s and early 2000s.