Meeting the Mentees

One of the loveliest pieces of being associated with Diaspora Dialogues are the parties to which I get invited. Helen Walsh, head of DD, and her trio of assistants, Julia Chan, Aisling Riordan and Natalie Kertes, have mastered the art of hosting soirees that are both casual and elegant. The food is always simple but edgy, the wine well-selected, and the locations both classy and comfortable.

But it's the conversations that happen that at these events that truly make them memorable.

The party to meet and greet this year's participants in the mentorship program was no exception. There, one of the mentees, Sarah (far right in the picture to the right), confessed it was her birthday that day, so a spontaneous cake - consisting of a slab of chocolate and a decorative candle (picture above) was fashioned to celebrate her day.

Rishma Dunlop, poetry mentor, did what poets do - at least as I imagine them. She entered gracefully, left her elegant imprint on each of the emerging artists she'll be working with as well as others among us, and then exited with equal style. Tara Beegan, drama mentor, was the antithesis of 'drama' (in the negative) as she unobtrusively circulated the room engaging in conversations that were pleasant and insightful. When I first spotted him with pen and notebook in hand talking to a mentee, I mistook fiction mentor, David Layton for a journalist. Although I didn't get a chance to talk with him, I did observe that as sole representative of the four mentors in that genre (Karen Connelly, Rabindranath Maharaj, and Martin Mordecai were out of town), he did hold down the fort with the questions from the fiction mentees, the majority of the emerging artists in the program this year. Perhaps that explains the note-taking?

In the following weeks, I will be blogging about each of the mentors

As well as the mentees. There are twenty in all, each of them a character unto his or her own right. Like Pradeep (fiction), an editor at Descant, who tells a hilarious story of how his visa to India was processed before that of any other member in his family because he has the same first name as the Indian consulate. And Tish (poetry) who teaches English as a Second Language to adult Tibetan refugees has done something I want to do - serve on a jury. Malikah (poetry) spoken-word artist of no-slouch fame casually mentioned that she has three children under the age of twelve. And Dorianne (drama) argued convincingly that working full time for the provincial government does not in fact suck the soul out of you.