Crip Time & Fractured Realities: Embracing Nonlinearity Through Creative Writing

In this 1.5-hour-long virtual workshop, Mad/Neurodivergent Lebanese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator, and creative writing instructor Hanan Hazime moves participants through the rich history of non-linear storytelling, guiding them through creative prompts that will inspire their own non-linear narratives.

All funds raised will be redistributed to Ahmad, a 25-year-old Afro-Palestinian artist who relies on crowdfunding to provide for himself and his family as they survive Zionist-Western Occupation.

Ahmad's link: https://chuffed.org/project/187603-sustain-ahmad-and-his-family-in-gaza

Automated Zoom captions will be enabled. If you have any questions, concerns or access requests, reach out to collectivecrowdfund@proton.me

Materials needed: Pen and Paper

Crip Time & Fractured Realities: Embracing Nonlinearity Through Creative Writing

The experience and perception of time differs across cultures and communities. For some BIPOC cultures, time is not a linear concept; present, past, and future are interlinked or occur simultaneously. This is also the case for many folks within the Mad/Neurodivergent/ Disabled communities. Many spoonies (including the facilitator of this session) operate on crip time. We tend to distort and bend the clock to make it accommodate our bodies and/or minds, rather than forcing ourselves to conform to rigid, able-bodied and neurotypical standards.

Additionally, trauma (which, unfortunately, many Mad/ND/Disabled folks experience due to systemic barriers, precarious finances, and medical/institutional/personal abuse) can distort the perception of time as it is often experienced through fragmented memory loops. For many racialized folks, collective intergenerational trauma (e.g. slavery, forced migration, war, genocide, colonization) is experienced non-linearly.

How do we tell our stories in a way that reflects our perception of time? This workshop will introduce participants to the rich history of non-linear storytelling and will guide participants through creative prompts that will inspire their own non-linear narratives. Eurocentric Western literary traditions often privilege linear narratives with chronological “beginning-middle-end” structures. Within this context, non-linear storytelling becomes a decolonial act, one that disrupts imposed forms and reclaims indigenous and ancestral temporalities. By breaking these traditions, we can speak with our ancestors, heal intergenerational wounds, and imagine liberated futures.

Hanan Hazime is a Mad/Neurodivergent Lebanese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator, and creative writing instructor living in Tkaronto/Toronto. Hanan’s writing has appeared in several publications including The Windsor Review, Feckless C*nts: An Anthology of Feminist Writing, and on CBC Arts. Her poetry chapbook Aorta was published by ZED Press in 2018. Hanan is one of the co-editors of the anthology Muslim American Writers at Home, and the anthology Up:Rising- A Collection of Rebellious Imaginings from Authors with Lived Experience of Mental Health & Addictions. Hanan's interdisciplinary and visual artwork has been featured in several shows including the Bursting Bubbles exhibition at the Rendezvous With Madness Festival, the digital series Talking Back And Together at the AGO, and the CoMotion Exhibit at the Harbourfront Centre. When not writing or creating art,

Hanan enjoys reading poetry, romantasy, and speculative fiction, overanalyzing things, photo-blogging, dancing with faeries in the woods, swimming with mermaids, and drinking copious amounts of tea.

Instagram: between.the.wildflowers

Website: hananhazime.com