Photo by Brandi Bird
The Growing Room Festival is taking place March 11-15, 2020. Check out their website for upcoming events, as well as accessibility info and their community guidelines for the festival. Below is an interview with festival director Jessica Johns about her vision for the festival.
You’re the festival director for the Growing Room festival. What has been your guiding vision for the festival during the preparations? How did you go about curating the events?
The guiding vision has been two fold. Creatively, I wanted to open up the space to celebrate storytelling in ways additional to the written word. So creating space for music, film, performance, visual art, entrepreneurs, and food was really important and has been fully realized.
Our opening night party is called “The Movement” and was curated by Jillian Christmas to celebrate storytelling in music. It features Tonye Aganaba, Missy D, Chelsea D.E Johnson, and DJ Denise. We also have a really wonderful event called “Expanding the Boundaries of Writing: Animation and Coding as Composition,” which features visual art by Emily Carr University students and hosted by Jacqueline Turner. I’m so excited to feature a screening of the award-winning film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (dir. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn), followed by a conversation about Indigenous film by Jade Baxter and Justin Ducharme. We also have workshops dedicated to storytelling in different forms. Award winning musician Edzi’u will be facilitating a workshop where participants will be recording sounds and compiling them into a soundscape. We also have a flower crown workshop facilitated by Jillian Christmas, which is a free community care offering for QTBIPOC participants.
Our first ever marketplace will host vendors who storytell through beadwork, soap making, zines, and prints. And our food truck Tayybeh will be there to feed us, which is also, in my opinion, an art form.
The curatorial process took place over four months and involved an amazing programming team, Nav Nagra, Kayi Wong, Jillian Christmas, Carleigh Baker, Serena Bhandar, Chelene Knight, and myself. We also collaborated with artists outside of the programming team who pitched really thoughtful and exciting event proposals. We wanted to make sure we were involving the community we were making this whole thing for, so this process of collaboration was important. We also curated the festival with a mind specifically to highlight queer, Two-Spirit and trans artists, and Indigenous, Black, and people of colour. Art coming from QTBIPOC artists is hands down the most exciting work out there, so we just want to celebrate that.
How important is it for writers and readers to have a physical place to gather and connect?
I think community connection is ultimately what will save us all. So sharing space to do this is, in my mind, essential. I don’t think this needs to be a physical space always. I think having folks in an area to have these conversations is really great, but I also think the internet is a gathering space as well and we’re connecting in really creative ways there: meme-making, community groups on Twitter, curated Instagram stories. For this reason, we introduced an online webinar event this year which I’m really excited about: “Get some Lit Mag Love: How to Publish Your Fiction, Poetry, and CNF in Journals” which will host panelists from all over, Alicia Elliott, Manahil Bandukwala, Jasmine Gui, Doretta Lau, and Shashi Bhat, hosted by Rachel Thompson. It opens up the opportunity for folks who can’t come to the festival for a variety of reasons to still connect together.
Growing Room is doing a lot in terms of trying to creating safer spaces for marginalized writers. What kind of things can be done to make large events safer for participants and attendees?
We’re learning more and more every year what it means to try and create and maintain a safer space for our artists, attendees, staff and volunteers. In the end, it all comes down to consent. We’ve created community guidelines which we have put up on our website, have distributed to all of our registered attendees and authors, and will have posted at our venues, which acts as an agreement of sorts: folks agreeing to be in the space will follow the guidelines for being there. And if those guidelines are broken, we have outlined our own follow-up procedures for accountability.
I also think it’s the responsibility of an organization to present clear, consistent, and honest breakdowns about your venues accessibility, so folks can make the decision about whether or not that space is right or safe for them to be in. It’s also important that we’re open about our own limitations as staff, who while we want to attend to every access need, have to be aware of our own financial, emotional, and physical capacities. These are some of the informed consent processes that we’ve gratefully developed with the help of Cicely Blain Consulting and Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods for this year’s festival.
What is it like to try to balance the work you’re doing with Growing Room with your own creative work as a writer? How do you balance them? What are the ways, if any, in which these different kinds of work inspire/energize each other?
I want to say firm work boundaries would create a good creative work balance, but I’ve been pretty awful at keeping those boundaries in the leadup to the festival. I’ve found it really difficult over the past six months or so to find the energy to write creatively while I’ve been trying to find my footing at Room magazine and organize the Growing Room festival.
I think, ultimately, community work and creative work tap into different parts of my brain, so I think a balance is theoretically achievable. But community organizing takes an emotional toll that is unlike anything else. There’s a two-fold kind of labour that goes into it: there’s the workload labour and the emotional labour. It has definitely allowed me to think more critically about community relations and relationality in general, which might amount to an essay some day.
What is the first thing you’ll do when the festival is over?
I’m going to Toronto a few days after the festival to be a part of the BookNet conference there. But immediately after that, I’m going home to my family in Alberta and celebrating my 31st birthday with my twin nieces, who will be turning two. I’m going to turn my phone off and just hang out with them and my nephew for a week. I can’t wait.
What is something that makes you excited or gives you hope right now?
Indigenous youth all over so-called Canada are giving me hope. They’re standing up and leading solidarity rallies in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and Indigenous sovereignty, which is a movement in building futures for literally everyone’s survival. They’re the movement that we need. I want to be them when I grow up.
Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw aunty and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta and is currently living on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is the Managing Editor for Room Magazine, the festival director for the 2020 Growing Room Literary & Arts festival, and a co-organizer of the Indigenous Brilliance reading series. Her short story, “The Bull of the Cromdale,” was nominated for a 2019 National Magazine Award in fiction and her debut poetry chapbook, How Not to Spill, won the 2019 BP Nichol Chapbook Award.