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The Grassroots: Community Writing event, held on April 5 and 6, 2002, was once again part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, and was built around the festival theme of the architecture of language. The Centre for Literacy brought together storytellers and writers who have written and published in community-based settings rather than inside institutions, and who have built bridges among verbal, oral, and visual literacies. They included an accomplished writer/musician who collects alphabet songs and oral stories from rural Newfoundland, and a community poet who writes her life; an urban group of young men and women who have experienced and used violence but now write poetry and take photographs that move them in a new direction; two writers who have been homeless and publish a ‘zine to reach their brothers on the street to tell their stories from the inside; and a native survivor of residential schooling who writes his way out of despair and tries to bring community members with him. He won the 2001 Canada Post Literacy Award as a learner who has joined the ranks of published writers. Several of them have been adult learners, and all of them are involved in some way with literacy communities in their own settings. In these different contexts, literacy provides the building blocks for further learning and for community engagement.

In 2002, Grassroots coincided with an invitational national Symposium on Museums, Literacy, and the Arts, cosponsored by The Centre for Literacy with the Canadian Museums Association. This brought more than thirty participants from across Canada to discuss the possible ways in which the arts could work collaboratively with literacy organizations to strengthen their respective goals and engage more communitybased involvement. The participants attended Grassroots as an example of this type of linking; some of the readers joined the Museum symposium for part of the weekend discussions.

For the Blue Metropolis reading, we asked the storytellers and writers to choose some selections that reflected the theme of the architecture of language.

Readers and participants in Grassroots 2002 • Larry Loyie, and Constance Brissenden, Living Traditions Writing Circle, B.C. (Larry won the 2001 Canada Post Literacy Learner Award) • Michael Paul Martin and Robert Payne Toronto (St. Christopher House Meeting Point) Jim Payne • Carmelita McGrath, poetstoryteller, and Jim Payne, poetsong writer, Newfoundland • A group of writers from Leave Out Violence (LOVE), Montreal. (Source: ONE L.O.V.E. Vol.3 No. 2 Photo: Beth Babinchak) • Jennifer Ottaway, whose homeless woman’s diary was produced on CBC Radio as “Jennifer’s Story,” in May 2001. It won a Commonwealth Broadcast Award. • Open City Productions 2002, a community arts program on the street. They brought canvas and brushes with an open invitation to attendees to record their presence. All the sketches in this section were done by Jennifer Ottaway during the Community Writing event. All readings reprinted with permission.

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