You are invited to the 11th session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings curated by writer JF Garrard at Barrett and Welsh on Friday, June 1st, 2018, from 7 pm to about 10 pm.

Theme: This event celebrates the preceding month of May – Asian Heritage Month – by featuring writers of Asian descent. The theme for this evening will be “Light and Darkness” and writers will share works that illustrate the highs and lows of life.

“In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” -Francis Bacon

Curator JF Garrard is the founder of Dark Helix Press, Marketing Strategist for Ricepaper Magazine and an Assistant Editor for Amazing Stories Magazine. She is an editor and writer of speculative fiction (Trump Utopia or Dystopia Anthology, The Undead Sorceress) and non-fiction (The Literary Elephant). Her contributions to business, diversity and health subjects have been published in Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, among others. Her background is in Nuclear Medicine and she has an MBA in Marketing and Strategy. Currently, she is pursuing a Creative Writing certificate from Ryerson University. Her company offers phone consultation services starting at US$5 for a limited time to writers at fiverr.com/dark_helix

Terry Woo is the author of Banana Boys, a novel first published by Riverbank Press in 2000. Riverbank is currently an imprint of Cormorant Books, which re-issued the book in 2005. Banana Boys was short-listed for the 1999 Asian-Canadian Writer's Workshop Emerging Writer Award and was adapted for the stage by playwright Leon Aureus in 2004, with the most recent mounting at Factory Theatre in Toronto, Spring 2017. Other literary achievements also include winning First Prize in the 2006 Robert Stewart Essay Competition sponsored by the Montreal Press Club. Terry recently completed a second novel in winter 2017, All Along The Southern Front, which is as of yet unpublished. http://www.bananaboys.com

Thea Lim's An Ocean of Minutes was named "a work of Canadian fiction to watch out for" by the CBC, and will be released by Penguin Random House in June 2018. Her writing has been published by the Southampton Review, GRIST, the Guardian, Salon, the Millions, Bitch Magazine, Utne Reader and others, and she has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing.

Koom Kankesan is the author of The Panic Button, The Rajapaksa Stories, and The Tamil Dream. Currently, he teaches high school and writes comics journalism on the side. You can hear his interviews on the Deconstructing Comics Podcast or read his interviews on Comicon.com

Arun Nedra Rodrigo was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada during the civil war. She is a co-founder of the Tamil Studies Symposium at York University, where she is completing her PhD and developing an archive of Tamil Resources. She was a Spoken Word artist who has been featured at Scream in High Park, Desh Pardesh and Masala Mehndi Masti, and whose poetry was published in various anthologies. She has translated works by R. Cheran, V.I.S. Jayapalan, Rashmy and others. Her essays have been published in the International Journal of the Humanities, Global Tensions, Global Possibilities; Human Rights and the Arts: Essays on Global Asia; and Studies in Canadian Literature.

Anupama Mohan teaches English at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. She completed her PhD in 2010 at the University of Toronto, and subsequently, published an academic monograph, Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her first book of poems, Twenty Odd Love Poems, was published in 2008 by The Writer's Workshop, Kolkata. Her short stories have featured online and in print publications, and she is currently working on her second book of poetry, where she revives classical forms (such as the rondeau, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, among others) for a modern sensibility. Godhuli which she will read, is a prose poem a la Baudelaire, with a twist.

For updated information, follow us on our Facebook group.

We hope you will come, read, share and listen, but if life/the evening/your acrobatic gerbil has other plans for you, we completely understand.

We encourage you to support our featured writers by buying signed copies of their works at the reading. (Cash only please).

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Open mic sessions:
Anyone attending is welcome to read or perform (if you are a musician) in our open mic sessions.

If you are a writer or musician who would like to perform in the open mic session, we ask that you listen in to at least one session to get the flavour of the evening and join in on your next visit. To participate in TTSR #11 please contact JF Garrard — the evening's curator — beforehand as this will allow her to line up the readers and manage the evening efficiently.

Open mic readers are given 4 minutes in total — you may read a work of creative writing (fiction/poetry/drama/screenplay) - or a work of reportage or creative non-fiction. This is not a lecture or motivational speaking series, so no academic or self-help works, please.

Your reading doesn't have to fit into the evening's theme and it doesn’t matter if it’s not in English or French - one of our open mic readers read a stunning series of poems in Spanish based on interviews with jailed murderers in Mexico. Simply accompany your readings with an explanation of the context and a brief translation in English.

If you are reading at an open mic please read no more than:
4 pages of poetry or,
2 single pages of double-spaced prose, or
3 pages of a screenplay or play,
- up to a 4 minute maximum for any creative material, including a brief introduction to yourself and your work.
At the end of 4 minutes, there will be a simple buzzer to let you know your time is up, to save any reader the embarrassment of being stopped by a curator.

Don't let yourself be intimidated by these guidelines. They are designed to make sure the evening is enjoyable for all. The ambience at our readings is intimate, extremely informal and very supportive.

If you have published works that you would like to offer for sale, feel free to mention it when you finish your reading.

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About The Tartan Turban Secret Readings: Barrett and Welsh hosts a (not so) “secret" reading series on its rather lovely open-air office rooftop deck while it's warm, and in its large open concept studio space in cooler weather.

The Tartan Turban Secret Readings feature poetry, drama and prose readings that celebrate Canadian multicultural writing created by multicultural, minority and BIPOC writers. The idea is to provide a platform for minority writers who have very few such platforms while welcoming all writers who want to celebrate Canada’s multiculturalism, diversity and indigenous heritage, and have talent to share.

Curators change from reading to reading. If you would like to read or curate, contact Gavin Barrett or Mayank Bhatt who are co-curators for the series.

Readings ideally take place every 3rd or 4th Thursday or Friday, but this varies depending on what is convenient for featured readers and curators. The series has moved indoors for winter.

The hope is to also intersperse the readings with musical performances from multicultural/minority/BIPOC musicians eventually. Maybe a tabla or bongo player may pop in to accompany the readers or to play between readings. Maybe one of you will invite a Metis fiddle maestro.

Please feel free to bring any of your friends of every minority whether "visible" or otherwise – non-minorities are warmly welcomed too. Feel free to suggest others you think might be ideal as curators, participants or happy listeners.

The sessions may be photographed, filmed and possibly streamed on FB/YouTube live. (if we can arrange for a production partner to organise this.)

Readings may be collected for a book for publication at the end of the year, so ideally everyone will be reading unpublished work.
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Seating: For those wishing to attend, please note that our indoor space can comfortably accommodate no more than 35 people, including our features for the evening. However for TTSR11, if we have good weather on June 1st, we will host the reading on our beautiful rooftop deck. Rooftop seat is provided for 20 so if the attendance rises above that number on our Eventbrite page, we ask new sign-ups to carry their own folding/camp chairs.

Refreshments: Barrett and Welsh do provide complimentary refreshments and light snacks, but in keeping with the community-centric spirit of the series, we encourage attendees to bring and/or share their own beverages and snacks (and to carry their own drinking cups/glasses).

Entry: We’ll have someone posted at street level until 7 pm to get people in. (Ground level entrance is auto-locked by security after that.) Please arrive before 7 and encourage your guests to do same. if they arrive later, they’ll need to text one of us to let them in and we’ll swing by in 10 min intervals (sorry!)

Accessibility: Barrett and Welsh’s offices are at the top of an office building that was once a large townhouse, so there are a couple of steep flights of stairs to get in. If you (or any guests) have mobility challenges, please be aware that you may need a helping hand up the stairs, as there is no elevator. Please let us know if we can be of assistance.

Want to receive updates on the next reading? Simply follow our FB group for updates on the next session and the link to the Eventbrite registration page for each reading. (we do ask that you register if you plan to attend). You can also sign up for our email list here.

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About Barrett and Welsh: Barrett and Welsh is a minority-led, creativity-powered, change-making ad agency that puts ideas first to make ideas last. A certified B-Corp, it has speciality practices in inclusion communications (mainly multicultural/minority and persons with disabilities) and urban sustainable development (mainly transit).

About the series co-curators: Mayank Bhatt's first novel Belief was published late last year by M G Vassanji’s Mawenzi House press. The novel explores youth radicalisation and alienation, and the impact of terrorism on a family in the context of the failure of immigration and settlement framework in Canada.

Mayank Bhatt immigrated to Toronto in 2008 from Mumbai (Bombay), where he worked as a journalist. His short stories have been published in TOK 5: Writing the New Toronto and Canadian Voices II. In Canada, he has worked as a security guard, as the Chief Administrative Officer of the Indo Canada Chamber of Commerce and as an organizer for the Festive of South Asian Literature and Art. He lives in Toronto with his family.

Mayank co-curates the Tartan Turban Secret Readings with Gavin Barrett. (see organizer description below for more about Gavin).