In the beautiful morning on Sep. 25, Multicultural Creative Writing Festival 2015 was hosted at Richmond Public library. Around 70 participants took the time from their busy schedule to attend this special event. We were really honored to have MP Alice Wong to address the event. Alex Tse from Richmond Cares Richmond Gives made a brief introduction of this event. Alan Hill did a welcome speech on behalf of City of Richmond. Congrats were also sent by Nazanin Shoja from BC Culture Days and Beverly Walker from Richmond Public Library.
Inspired by every participant’s enthusiasm and the beautiful Violin, keyboard and Guqin performance by 3 amazing musicians Diana Tong, YanYan Mo and Libby Yu, 20 participants read their original poems in their preferred languages, including world famous poets and individuals that were simply passionate about creative writing, and each of them contributed the best of their talent to the event.
All participants enjoyed Alan Hill’s poem Climbing the Language; Ashok Bhargava’s poem Ocean of Love; YaXian’s featured poem India and his Indian drum, followed by Tommy Tao for the English Rendition; William Chan’s poems from Poetic Stroll Through the Rocky Mountains; HongYun Chen’s poem I heard red scream, Michael Yetes’ Poem Doctrine; Cheonhak Kwon’s poem 2H2 + O2 = 2H2O; Han Mu’s Poem Carefree Heart; Meiyu Lao’s Poem Thoughts Arising with Music on an Autumn Night; JiaZhuang Shen’s Poem Dreaming of the Mooncake; ZongHui Cheng’s poem The Feelings of Maple Tree and Zhang Yue for translation; JingChen Zhang’s poems Autumn Drunk and Missing You in the Wind and Rain; Liang Chen’s poems Green River and Lonely Stone; Hu XianYou’s poem Lake Louise; XueShong Wu’s poem Hometown HangZhou; Shi Ni’s Poem Commemorate, and many more.
It is very impressive that Jason Qian, a 7-year old, read his original Poem To Miss Morden. One of our goals for this event was to build connection between people from different backgrounds, including but not limited to, European and Asian culture backgrounds; seniors, youth and kids who love creative writing. I am excited to see we achieved this goal. The event was finished with the beautiful singing When Will the Bright Moon Rise by Julie and 7 others.
The PowerPoint presentation combining English and other languages was found very helpful, especially for those who didn’t understand Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, etc. As planned, all the submissions for this event will be published in a book. Each participant can get a book as gifts once they are ready.
The enthusiasm from the participants is really touching. By the end of the event, they kept telling us that they look forward to attend this kind of event again in the near future. We are going to host another similar event from 10:30 am to 12:30 noon on November 21, 2015 at Richmond Public Library.
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