1030am-11am - Welcoming Ceremony

11am-1230pm - The Future Has Ancestors

How do we build new worlds from inherited stories?

This panel brings together fantasy, science fiction, horror, and genre writers to explore the imaginative power of worldbuilding through cultural myth and memory. From haunted houses to distant planets, mythic kingdoms to dystopian futures, speculative storytelling allows writers to ask what else is possible, and what older stories continue to follow us into the worlds we create.

Together, panelists will discuss how cultural heritage, folklore, family histories, spiritual traditions, monsters, myths, and ancestral memory shape their creative practice. How do writers honour the stories they inherit while transforming them into something new? What responsibilities come with drawing from cultural traditions? And how can the fantastical and the frightful help us confront real histories, present fears, and future possibilities?

At its heart, this conversation is about making worlds with roots. It considers genre as a portal: a way to reimagine power, survival, identity, and belonging through stories that are strange, wondrous, terrifying, and alive.

Authors: Tessa Barbosa, Michelle Tang, Nathalie De Los Santos. Facilitator: K.S. Villoso

1230-130pm - Across the Page, Across Canada: A Community Reading + Discussion with Renato Gandia

THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT.
This event will also be streamed live at the Museum of Vancouver.
To attend virtually, please RSVP through Eventbrite.

Join us for a cross-Canada community reading and conversation featuring award-winning Filipino-Canadian author Renato Gandia.

Recently named the first Filipino recipient of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and winner of the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize from PRISM international, Gandia’s work offers a powerful meditation on migration, faith, memory, sexuality, and belonging.

This special gathering invites readers, writers, and community members from across Canada to come together in celebration of Filipino literature and diasporic storytelling. Through a featured reading and open discussion, we will reflect on the ways writing can connect us across distance, hold our complicated histories, and create space for shared recognition, tenderness, and possibility.

Authors: Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez, Mark Sy. Facilitator: Renato Gandia

1:30-3pm - Writing in the Apocalypse

What does it mean to write when the world as we know it feels like it is ending?

Writing The Apocalypse asks what it means to create in uncertain times, when the future feels unstable and the direction we turn seems marked by the fires of a world in collapse.

Bringing together writers across genres, this panel explores writing as witness, resistance, survival, and hope. Panelists will reflect on the urgency shaping their work right now: what stories feel necessary, what fears they are writing through, and how creation can push back against despair.

But apocalypse is not only an ending. It can also be a rupture, a revelation, and a place where new worlds begin. This conversation will also honour the radical joy of making: the beauty of language, the pleasure of dreaming, and the communities that form around stories even in dark times. At its heart, this panel asks how writing helps us resist, remember, and imagine beyond the end.

Authors: Hari Alluri, Christopher Kawika Guillermo, Therese Estacion, Marc Perez. Facilitator: Brandon Wint

4pm - 5pm - Stories that Carry Us Home: Keynote Speaker Adrian De Leon

What are the stories that carry us home?

Join us for a keynote conversation with award-winning writer, poet, critic, and public historian Adrian De Leon

Across poetry, history, criticism, memoir, and food writing, Adrian De Leon’s work traces the movement of Filipino people, memory, land, empire, and belonging across oceans and generations. His books include barangay: an offshore poem, named one of CBC Books’ Best Canadian Poetry Collections of 2021, and Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, winner of the 2024 Sally and Ken Owens Award from the Western History Association, with additional honours from the American Studies Association and The Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington.

In this keynote event, De Leon will discuss the many forms Filipino diasporic storytelling can take: poetry as history, history as return, criticism as witness, and writing as a way of mapping what empire, migration, family, food, and memory leave behind. Together, they will reflect on what it means to write across genres, geographies, and generations, and how personal and collective histories can become part of a larger record of Filipino life.

In his practice, De Leon continues to expand the possibilities of Filipino diasporic literature and public history. This keynote invites audiences into a rich discussion on inheritance, return, and the stories that carry us home.