Kind Words

Writing was such an important part of my identity, but somehow it got lost in the fray of life. As the years passed, I started to notice that I didn’t just give up a potential career – I gave up my best coping mechanism. When I realized that I wanted to bring it back into my life, I got in touch with Firefly. I took the Memoirs class and over time, with great advice and inspiration, I started to write, and then I started to understand. Writing came back into my life as a tool for healing, and knowing. I’m so, so glad it’s back.

Emmanuelle Pantin
Co-Director, Community Story Strategies

I was in a period when my body went cold. I had health problems, I was disconnecting from my work, I felt lost. I loved to write, but did not feel like a “real writer” and then I found Firefly advertised on the now-closed Women’s bookstore website. When I sat at Chris’s table I immediately felt solidarity with her. She is kind, fierce and an ally. With her encouragement, facilitation and wonderful teaching style she gave me the courage to write, grow and explore. These classes have given me a way to say my words out loud, meet other great writers and most importantly understand my capacity as a writer. They’ve has given me the space to write for many people, but most importantly because it makes me feel good.

Salma Fatima Saadi
Social Worker, Writer

After taking this class, I had the courage to finally tackle a task I had long held in my heart – writing a memoir about a difficult time in my life. I left each class feeling optimistic, excited and encouraged about my writing. It was a gift to feel safe enough to take some risks and grow as a writer with the caring support of my facilitator and the community around the writing table.

Evelyn Steinberg
Writer, Editor, Career Coach, Retired Principal

This has been amazing. I never thought I would be doing what I’m doing here, much less have accomplished what I’ve accomplished. You have helped me to open and walk through so many doors and you have introduced me to a part of myself I thought I’d lost many years ago.

Ryan Baldwin
Software Developer and Surprised Writer

The summer writing retreat was a safe space that let me shed my roles and responsibilities and just be present with everything within and around. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to write words as they came, and to let thoughts and emotions express themselves into unplanned structures without my mind trying to contain or define them. I left the retreat smiling and exhilarated like having just spent a weekend with group of friends full of laughter, tears, warmth, sharing, creative sparks around the camp fire and vivacious storytelling.

Komal Rahim
IT Architect

Chris has a radiance that transcends the physical. In the on-line class I took, her passion for her students’ progress coursed through the cyber lines so that we felt her support and her caring, allowing us to explore deeply. Clearly she LOVES writing and loves to share the experience with her students. I found myself acknowledging that love which made me a better writer and transformed me as a person. Chris offers (and is) what this world needs more of — genuine, sincere, and full of love. Open yourself to her calm, soothing voice and your creativity will soar.

Cassel Miles
Actor

Taking classes with Firefly has been instrumental to waking me up to the journey that is writing; to finding clarity in what I want to write and to remembering why it matters. Now writing is less to me like a stray cat, only looking for short-lived cuddles before darting off again into the distant night, and more like a home, a part of the body, a daily need. Firefly Creative Writing is such a rare and powerful gift to me, and to the literary community in Toronto and beyond.

Kelsey Rideout
Poet, Actor, Facilitator

Taking a course with Firefly is what gave me the push to pursue my writing dreams. I have been writing consistently since the course ended and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I actually FEEL like a writer now.

Shorey Andrews
Freelance Writer

Firefly team are a special breed of ‘home’ on so many levels. I’ve participated in workshops both in person and online and I have always felt the comforting and reassuring nudge into my creative self that I so desperately needed and wanted. Aside from the amazing environment and community that they foster, the Firefly coaches have helped me move forward from an unsure pen-abandoner to a writer with my own writing-related startup business. What a gift they have, to be able to bring writers back home to their creative souls.

Josie Elfassy

There’s some kind of magic that happens at a Firefly session. I haven’t quite figured out what it is. I just know that I go in to a Firefly class thinking I have nothing to say. Then I get my cue to write, and I still have nothing to say. But I put my pen to paper anyway, and by sheer force of will get it to move, slowly at first and then gradually picking up speed so that mere minutes later it seems I’ve created something out of nothing. I’m not sure how it happens, this conjuring, but it does, and it surprises me each and every time. Thanks for the magic, Firefly.

Marieke Meyer
Radio Producer, CBC