Uninhabited Spaces

So, I’m no David Clark , but I’ve put pen to paper over the years. In 1988, my Grade 10 English teacher Ms Hunt, without my knowledge, submitted a piece of fiction I wrote into our graduation yearbook. It made the cut (thanks Rachel Welch O'Connor !) and I was incredibly touched. I kept writing into my CEGEP years, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, writing for Heritage College“ The Mushroom”. At Queen’s, I had op-eds published in the Queen’s Journal, and I actually came out in an op-ed in the Queen’s Gazette (more on that in a post to come). I later published some poems in a couple of anthologies, and was chuffed to be accepted, through peer review, into the Queen’s Anti Racism Review and Queen’s Undergraduate Review. A few years later, another peer review jury accepted my paper on philanthropy in the higher education education sector. Oh, and the Kingston Arts Council seemed to love a short story I submitted to their contest in 1997. I also ended up co-writing a fun trivia bo...

On October 22, 1984, I became “Stacy Kelly”. By the stroke of some pens in a judge’s office in Hull, Quebec, my late dad, Richard Kelly, adopted me. Prior to that day I had my mom’s surname, Hodgins. My mom had married my then step-dad, and my sister Angela came along in 1980, followed by my sister Marsha in 1982. I think it was important, both legally and symbolically, to have me join the fold properly and share my last name with my new dad and sisters. When I arrived back at my school, and a teacher announced my last name had changed, a fellow student asked me if I had gotten married (I did not know the term “unpack” then but, yes, lots to unpack there). To borrow from Johnny Cash, it has always been challenging to be “A Boy Named Stacy”. My mom can better regale you with my boisterous efforts as a youngster to correct those who assumed I was a girl, but I do recall saying to someone, “I am a boy, so my name is a boy’s name”. It was not until I joined The 519 in 2017, when I learn...

In 1997, the Arts & Science Undergraduate Society (ASUS) at Queen’s posted a call for someone to create, build, and launch a new arts day camp for youth. They kindly picked yours truly (during my misguided Tilley hat years) as the inaugural director, and I strove to quickly build a team. How lucky was I to find the brilliant Louise Lannan as assistant director, and amazing and passionate counsellors David Stewart and Hilary Sirman Allalemdjian . Louise led the design of our curriculum (with assist from David and Hilary), and I focused on fundraising, marketing, and outreach. Our home base was the ASUS house, but we spent a lot of hours at Agnes Etherington Art Centre , and other spots on campus. We called the day camp “Arts Adventure”, and we built a social sciences stream week and a fine arts/drama stream week, featuring a field trip to select cultural sites in Ottawa each Wednesday. We gratefully managed to secure seed funding from the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Queen...