Last night Elizabeth Bachinsky made me cry.

Not because she beat me up or called me names or anything.

It was because she opened up her reading by singing in Ukrainian.

Then she went on to reference Getrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in one of her poems.

And then she mentioned Winnipeg.

Pretty much there are 3 direct routes to my heart and she managed to take them all within her half hour reading.


Needless to say I was left feeling that very particular way that only some writing can make you feel.

It left me with the body memory of why writing is so necessary. Because it evokes a visceral response that goes beyond the intellectual processing that my mind loves to do.

It tells the internal chatter to shut up and sit down and all that is left is your body, and your being, responding to the tugging and weaving of words put together in such a way that everything else manages to fall away.


Mainstage last night was entitled In Between Places and it dealt with the ideas of home, belonging and connection.
I have been in love with another author for a while now, Marusya Bociurkiw, who also deals a lot with her Ukrainian identity.
(If you haven't figured it out yet, I am Ukrainian.)

When I think about home and belonging, when I think about the histories of my families, I find myself searching out the kind of work that brings me to a place of connecting with other writers who have stories of their baba and gigi, stories of having an empty place setting at Christmas Eve dinner for all of the relatives who have died.

Home is in the sharing of our stories and the ability to recognize some part of ourselves in other people's words.


It brings us back to a place we might not know we had left.


I'm sure there are some of you who connected with some of the experiences of the other writers last night, be it Cyril Dabydeen, Priscilla Uppal, Endre Farkas or Carolyn Marie Souaid. Each writer brought an element of their own experience of home.

The more space there is for this kind of writing, the more I am reminded of exactly why everyone that wants to, needs the space to write their way home.


It brings us back, and it has the power to bring the reader back too.


everyone deserves this.



Courtney Slobogian was born in Winnipeg and likes it that way.

She is a writer/understated activist/ irreverent feminist.

Some of her work can be tracked down in quiet corners of the internet.

She co-hosts a radio show on CKUW called Tiger Lilies are Poisonous, and dislikes cotton socks. She wrote a thesis once.