From December 1-3, Humainologie hosted its first ever Short Story Festival, hosting four workshops on writing, drawing, and storytelling and a community reading event to celebrate a selection of stories from the ‘Lost and Found’ Call for Submissions. The following five stories were chosen from over 200+ submissions and shared aloud by the authors. 

(clockwise left to right)

DRIVING BLIND
by Amelie Laura Francis (she/her)
Amelie Laura Francis is a freelance writer living in Port Perry. Her personal essays and articles have appeared in national magazines and newspapers. She writes frequently about race and racial issues.

COCOON
by Lisa Shen (she/her)
Lisa Shen is a chronically disabled, pansexual, Chinese-Canadian writer in Hamilton, Ontario. She loves examining the world through the lens of spoken word poetry, especially through the creation of imaginative worlds or scenarios. Her work focuses on women’s rights and abusive relationships, though she is quick to explore any topic that captures her fascination. Lisa was the first place winner of the 2021 Second Annual Mississauga Poetry Slam, as well as Britta Badour’s Open Drawer Poetry Contest in May 2020. Her work has also been featured at multiple poetry festivals, including the Voices of Today Festival and Hamilton Take Back The Night.

THE IN-BETWEEN
by Emily Yu (she/her)
Emily Yu is a first generation Chinese-Canadian born to Hong Kong immigrants. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she now lives in Calgary with her partner and two feline children. She works as a health-care professional most of the time, an aspiring author some of the time, and a dreamer all of the time. While her longer works are normally contemporary fantasy, many of her short stories focus on identity, often including queer or culture themes.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU MISS A SMELL
by Sambriddhi Nepal (she/her)
Sambriddhi Nepal is a Nepali settler living on unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver, BC. She is a fundraiser and communications professional by day and writes non-fiction and children’s books when everyone in her household has gone to bed. In her writing, Sambriddhi reflects on the particular pains and unique joys of being an immigrant and a parent. Her writing practice is an exercise in dreaming, allowing herself to create worlds and experience thrills that she denied herself for too long. She hopes her readers feel freedom and sensory indulgence in her works.

SORE LOSER
by Rachel Evangeline Chiong (she/her)
Rachel Evangeline Chiong is a multi-field author and performer. On paper, she is a music and culture journalist for publications such as Exclaim! and A.side. She has won the Norma Epstein Foundation Award (‘18) in poetry and published her short story as the national winner of the Young Writers of Canada Manuscript Contest (‘14). Her first comic book, “Dark Magic”, illustrated by Sven Comics, was published in 2019. As a spoken word performer, she gigs with her partner in the duo Konstangeline and has facilitated workshops with the Toronto Public Library and The Kapisanan. She is a member of the Pluma Collective, a group of Filipinx Canadian writers in Toronto whose work spans genres and generations. Most recently, she hosts the writing podcast “Rough Draft with Sarim & Rachel”, where she and her co-host, Sarim, disagree on just about everything.