During her residency, Victoria Kuttainen will host an in-dialogue-with Q&A style event with psychologist Dr. Joti Samra, exploring the challenges of mental health issues as they affect families, the role of narrative in healing, the ethics of telling, and barriers to identifying and seeking help for mental health issues, in migrant communities.
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House
When: Tuesday, June 18, 7:30 to 9:00pm. RSVP at info@kogawahouse.com.
Dr. Joti Samra, R.Psych., is a national thought leader on issues relating to psychological health, wellness, and resiliency.
She is a founding and ongoing member of the CSA Technical Committee that developed the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, which is shaping policy development for workplace psychological health and safety internationally.
Some of her media career highlights include: host on Oprah Winfrey Network’s The Million Dollar Neighbourhood; interventionist on Animal Planet’s Confessions: Animal Hoarding; casting consultant and on-set psychologist for CityTV’s The Bachelor Canada; and columnist for the Globe and Mail’s “Ask a Psychologist” weekly column.
Victoria Kuttainen is the May–June 2019 writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House. Associate professor English and writing at James Cook University in Australia, Kuttainen holds a BA Hons and MA in English from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia.
Her books include The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Modernities of Colonial Modernity (2018) and Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (2009). Her emerging creative writing includes “This Is Rape Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen” (2017).
Kuttainen’s research and teaching in postcolonial literary studies focuses on the intersections of narratology, colonialism, trauma, migration, displacement, geography, identity, and settlement. These inform her experiments with the affordances of creative writing to explore how to tell complex and sensitive family stories around ways in which mental health issues—which were historically much less understand than now, have impacted families, particularly from migrant backgrounds.