Location: The Cultch – Jim Green House Studio, 1885 Venables St, Vancouver (map)
Doors: 6:00PM PT
Event Time: 6:30-8:30PM PT
Ticket Price: By Donation. Sign-up required.
Any donation amount, such as $5, is welcome and is just to secure a spot in the space. If payment is a barrier, please contact the organizer via Eventbrite or info@southasianarts.ca. Your support helps us deliver art to the community.
Capacity: 15
Age Recommendation: 16+. No previous experience necessary.
NOTE: Please bring printed or written lyrics of a meaningful song (or a few lines from it).
**Venue is wheelchair accessible
A writing workshop that weaves memory and music into new creations
Monsoon Festival's community-based development workshops are excellent opportunities to immerse yourself into the artistic process. Learn valuable skills from accomplished industry professionals in areas including (but not limited to) script analysis, playwriting, acting, and music composition. Our workshops are a vital component of the Monsoon Festival of Performing Arts.
Join Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, Upstart & Crow's 2025 Poet in Residence, for a generative writing workshop that invites you to honour the past through the songs that made you — the ones you danced to, healed with, or simply carried in your bones. In celebration of Monsoon Festival’s 10th anniversary, we’ll explore memory and the senses, bridging personal history and pop culture to create new writing that speaks to where we come from and what we carry forward.
Together, we’ll experiment with the cento — a collage-style form built from lines written by others — using lyrics from our favourite songs as the foundation and our own freewrites to fill in the gaps. Bring a song or two that shaped your life (in any language), and leave with a new piece of writing that’s uniquely yours.
We’ll begin with a sensory-based freewrite and then shape a more structured piece, which may include a refrain, a letter to the artist, or whatever form your creativity takes. You’re welcome to write in any style — poetry, prose, monologue, or something in between. This workshop is open to all levels of writing experience (i.e. you don’t have to identify as a writer to join!).
Whether you’re moved by Bollywood ballads, bhangra, ghazals, garage rock, reggae, 90s R&B, or something else — this is your invitation to celebrate and honour song and self through story, community and new meaning.
Masks will be worn during the session, and we strive to maintain a scent-free environment.
Space is limited!
About Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal - Writer / Facilitator
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal (she/her) is a critical race feminist, writer, former lawyer, child of immigrants, and facilitator who grew up on the traditional, present and future territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen and Musqueam First Nations. With over 20 years of facilitation and teaching experience, Preeti is committed to arts-based methodologies as a source of personal and collective empowerment, transformation and community-building. She has led arts-based workshops across Turtle Island, and firmly believes that stories change the world by altering our ways of seeing, feeling and being with one another and the planet.
Preeti holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and her work has appeared in various publications, including PRISM International, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Humber Literary Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Looseleaf, Held Magazine and Arc Poetry, amongst others. Her writing tends to examine themes of touch, grief, power, diasporic Punjabi life, magic, prayer, love and sexuality. Prior to leaving her legal career, Preeti articled at a boutique litigation firm and clerked at the Federal Court of Canada. After that but before her MFA, she completed a Master of Laws at UVic where she used theatre and performance art to investigate how law lives in the body with a focus on race. Through and through, Preeti has always held community-building and social justice at the heart of her work. She has received over two dozen awards for community service and academic excellence (BA, LLB, BCL, LLM, MFA), as well as artistic support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and BC Arts Council. She has also had the honour of serving as a poetry judge for the League of Poets and being a two-time writer in residence at Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a Deer Lake alumna and a Banff alumna. Preeti holds deep gratitude for organizations and individuals who support the arts, as well as those who tell stories from the margins with love and integrity.
If you want to learn more about Preeti and/or her workshops (as if this bio isn’t long enough!), you can find her on IG @jadooberry / @write.with.preeti or at https://linktr.ee/Jadooberry
Reminders:
Please bring printed or written lyrics of a meaningful song (or a few lines from it).
Please bring a pen and paper/notebook to write on, or a digital device if that is your preference. Pen and paper is encouraged.
Please do not attend if you have cold and/or covid symptoms (cough, runny nose, sore throat, etc.) or have been recently exposed to someone with covid.
This is a reduced scent environment. Please do not wear scented products (colognes, perfumes, spray on/scented deodorants and hair products or clothes that have been sprayed with such products in recent days). The facilitator has a scent sensitivity and will not be able to do her job if folks show up heavily scented. Please note that if you regularly wear scents, you probably won't notice how intense they are. Clothes that were sprayed in the recent and even distant past will still have scents on them. Here are a few resources that might be helpful to understanding how to reduce your scents:
If you still mask, wonderful, please bring your mask! If you don't mask anymore, we will provide masks. We will try to keep windows and doors open for air flow as well.