Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre
Writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House in January 2024.
Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. Her writing has been published in WordWorks, Emerge 21, Ricepaper Magazine, Montecristo Magazine, and across various blogs. A graduate of The Writers’ Studio from Simon Fraser University, she also has a Master of Museum Studies degree (University of Toronto) which informs her folklore-related writing. She was was awarded a Mentorship with Annick Press (Toronto) in 2023 and selected as a Mentee for The Writer’s Union of Canada 2023 BIPOC Writers Connect Program.
While living and working at Joy Kogawa House in January 2024, Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre was aiming to complete the final draft of an upper middle-grade novel (8 to 13 years) with the working title “Kiko and The Dream Eater” of approximately 65,000 words. This own-voice fantasy features a Japanese-Caucasian teen growing up in small-town Ontario in 1988, the year the Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement was signed by the Canadian government. This project was a finalist for the CANSCAIP Writing for Children’s Competition in 2023.
Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre
Writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House in January 2024.
Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. Her writing has been published in WordWorks, Emerge 21, Ricepaper Magazine, Montecristo Magazine, and across various blogs. A graduate of The Writers’ Studio from Simon Fraser University, she also has a Master of Museum Studies degree (University of Toronto) which informs her folklore-related writing. She was was awarded a Mentorship with Annick Press (Toronto) in 2023 and selected as a Mentee for The Writer’s Union of Canada 2023 BIPOC Writers Connect Program.
While living and working at Joy Kogawa House in January 2024, Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre was aiming to complete the final draft of an upper middle-grade novel (8 to 13 years) with the working title “Kiko and The Dream Eater” of approximately 65,000 words. This own-voice fantasy features a Japanese-Caucasian teen growing up in small-town Ontario in 1988, the year the Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement was signed by the Canadian government. This project was a finalist for the CANSCAIP Writing for Children’s Competition in 2023.
This project in its completion would fill a gap in both Canadian literature and children’s literature featuring a mixed-race protagonist and their unique identity journey, while educating readers about the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, a period of history that has been largely under-represented in our collective history, particularly in the classroom. This project would benefit the Japanese Canadian community by having greater representation in Canadian literature and children’s literature and would speak to the largely untold experience of mixed-race people of Japanese descent in our country.
To share artistic practices with local writers while in residence, Shawne Yukimi MacIntyre presented the following community-engaged writing program:
In the Eyes of the Beholder: Art, Identity, and Writing
Part art-lecture, part free-writing workshop, it looked at historical artworks that feature mixed-race peoples and the messages they deliver. How has the depiction of marginalized peoples in imagery influenced our understanding of who they are when we develop characters and dialogue in our stories? Why are so few mixed-race people featured in art history given their long presence in global populations? How were they typically portrayed and has this changed? The author spoke to the 1665 portrait titled “The Batavian Senior Merchant Pieter Cnoll and his Family,” by Jacob Jansz Coeman which features the wealthy merchant with his Japanese-Caucasian wife Cornelia van Nijenroode, and their mixed-race children.
Held Sunday, January 21, 3:00 to 4:30pm, in the living room at Joy Kogawa House.