Dick’s programming includes collaboratively-crafted workshops, reading series, public talks, ephemeral reading rooms, and other events foregrounding the work of trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit artists and authors.
Writing Group
Starting in Winter 2024, Dick’s will host a bi-weekly writing group to offer a shared space to work on writing of all genres and meet other community members. Participants are welcome to come and go as they please. Details TBA. Sign-up to our mailing list to stay in the loop!
Reading Workshops
Dick’s reading workshops are guided by a constellation of questions on reading as a social practice and historical experience. What might reading together teach us about living together? How does sociality appear, or what forms does it take, through varied practice of reading? And what collectives, solidarities, and histories might be traced or forged anew through these practices?
Just as writing workshops offer the opportunity to practice and cultivate writing skills alongside others, so Dick’s reading workshops create a space to engage, interrogate, and experiment with practices of reading together. In each workshop, participants are invited to collaboratively assemble the reading list and further to devise prompts, propose strategies, and try out tools or techniques to engage the performance and potentials of reading. While varying in theme, structure, and content, these workshops all aim to stage the communal dimensions of reading, make the sociality of reading palpable, and inquire into the collective stakes of reading with others.
Past workshops:
What’s Your Pleasure: A Reading Workshop on Trans* Erotics
In this online workshop, we will share, read aloud, and discuss writing that addresses the pleasures & possibilities of trans* embodiment, sensualities & sexualities. Plan to come with your favorite sexy, smutty, or simply sensuous passages from texts of any genre, including but not limited to novels, poetry collections, zines, memoirs, essays, or hybrid texts. Online, Free/PWYC, April 13th, 2023.
Trans, Non-Binary, Two Spirit Poetics
A six-session reading workshop hosted by the Centre for Gender Advocacy in Fall 2022.
This online, collaboratively crafted workshop centers writing by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors in order to think and feel through how lived experiences relate to poetic practice.Over the course of six weekly sessions, we will share, read aloud, and closely discuss a selection of short texts chosen by workshop participants. These texts will cover an expansive range of literary & artistic genres, styles, and forms.
Alongside our chosen readings, we will ask: What do poetics have to do with trans, non-binary, and two-spirit experiences? How do these experiences shape ways of making? And what might reading together teach us about living together? No advance reading will be required for any session.
Past Events:
Come celebrate the launch of Danny McLaren‘s new chapbook The Enby Manifesto, published by Porkbelly Press!! Join us for a reading & conversation at Co-op Bar Milton-Parc on Friday, November 24th, from 5:30pm-7:30pm EST. Dick’s will be there with a lil’ pop-up library, and a pile of posters & flyers for Palestine. Masks are required and will be provided.
Danny McLaren is a neurodivergent, Jewish, queer, trans and non-binary writer and poet living in Katarokwi, what is colonially known as Kingston, Ontario. They have an MA in Gender Studies from Queen’s University. They write about living queerly, loving their friends, and their own trans body. They can be found on twitter @dannymclrn. The Enby Manifesto, their second chapbook, is part love letter, part manifesto, part dream for the transgender future.
Access info: This is a masked event. A limited amount of Kn95s will be available at the door, and one portable air purifier will be in the space. Co-op BMP is a wheelchair-accessible venue with gender-neutral bathrooms.