Creativity and its Intersections: On Poetry, Film and Asian-Canadian Identity

How do we understand and recapture love and hope in a time of anxiety? What does it mean to hold tender the self when fracture feels inevitable? How do we ground ourselves if the present refuses to stabilize? How do poetry and film explore these themes, and how do those disciplines intersect? The poems in Vivian’s debut chapbook, Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You (845 Press, 2022) yearn and reach for the answers to fragmentation and emptiness, in identity and in home. Meanwhile, her first short film, In Silence, We Sing (World Premiere at Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival 2022), highlights the truths of a family (including its ghosts) and the stories that have been repressed.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li is a queer writer, scholar, director, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. A third-year MFA candidate at the UBC School of Creative Writing, she is working on her thesis novel engaging with Chinese philosophy themes. Her creative works are forthcoming or can be found in The New Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, The Fiddlehead, filling station, and CV2, among others. Most recently, she was Shortlisted for the The Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award 2022, Longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020, Shortlisted for the Vancouver City Poems Contest 2022, and Longlisted for The Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest 2022. An editor for PRISM international and Augur, she can be reached @eliktherain.