Background/purpose:

This performance-based workshop presents selections from Ripping Down Half the Trees (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), a poetry collection rooted in the lived realities of northern health work, education, and community care. Drawing from over a decade of frontline experience in remote and Indigenous communities, my poems engage with themes of addiction, grief, systemic neglect, and resilience.

Methods/process:

As a creative autoethnography, the poems explore how poetic storytelling can illuminate the emotional and ethical complexities of working in northern health contexts, particularly in adult education and with homelessness. This work functions as both upstream health interventions and, often, involves front-line emergency healthcare work.

The session will begin with a curated reading of poems that reflect the tension and tenderness of this situation. These readings will be followed by an interactive conversation inviting participants to reflect on the dual nature of health work with vulnerable populations: its profound emotional toll and its deeply rewarding human connections. The discussion will center on how art—especially poetry—can serve as both a processing tool and a positive outcome of challenging experiences.

As a PhD student in Health Sciences at UNBC, my research continues to explore northern literature as a lens for health equity. This performance bridges my academic inquiry with my creative practice, demonstrating how art can contribute to health humanities, medical education, and even policy discourse.

Artist’s Statement:

My work is a response to the realities of northern life, shaped by my identity as a queer settler and community collaborator. Through poetry, I seek to honour the stories of those I’ve worked with, while interrogating my own positionality. In a region where identity is often shaped by survival, displacement, and resistance, poetry becomes a means of witnessing, documenting, empathizing, and imagining new futures.

Evan J (he/they) is a researcher, writer, and community collaborator whose work engages the intersections of northern literature, northern health, and socio-ecological justice. Evan holds an MA in Literary Studies from York University and has worked extensively in northern communities. Their roles have spanned from front-line social services to nonprofit managerial work. For several years, Evan managed an arts-based Indigenous literacy initiative in Northwestern Ontario, working primarily on reserve. Now a PhD student at UNBC and a researcher with the university’s Health Arts Research Centre (HARC), Evan’s current research explores how northern art—specifically literary fiction—can illuminate the intricacies of northern health inequities and potentially offer unexplored solutions. Their writing spans academic and literary genres, reflecting a deep commitment to ethical land relations and collaborative knowledge-making. Evan is also an experienced literary curator and workshop facilitator. From 2023 to 2024, they served as Programming Coordinator for the THIN AIR Literary Festival in Winnipeg, curating events that foreground marginalized voices and community storytelling. They have facilitated poetry and creative writing workshops in remote First Nations schools, at literary festivals, and through national arts organizations, often focusing on the therapeutic and educational power of art in health contexts. Outside of research, Evan is an avid birder with over 400 species seen, and a passionate long-distance runner who, last year, ran 484 kilometres across Manitoba in seven days.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations