June 27th, 2.30pm – 3.30pm at the Chinese Cultural Centre
(Featuring: Keiko Honda, Kagan Goh, Steffi Tad-y, moderated by Tariq Malik)
Can one allow vulnerability, contradiction, and care to coexist with artistic excellence? This session brings together a panel of Asian Canadian writers whose creative lives have been shaped by experiences of mental illness, disability, and healing. Rather than framing writing as triumph over adversity, this conversation honours it as a practice of survival and meaning-making.
This panel of writers reflects on how lived experience has shaped their craft, transformed their understanding of productivity and success, and complicated conventional ideas of resilience.. and challenged them in the face of dominant narratives of resilience. They speak candidly about writing through pain, navigating institutions not built with disabled bodies or minds in mind, and finding language for experiences that are often silenced or misunderstood. This discussion invites audiences into a generous, necessary conversation about how literature can bear suffering without spectacle, particularly about how writing can be a companion in the long, nonlinear work of healing.
Dr. Keiko Honda is an epidemiologist, writer, and founder of the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Health from NYU and worked as a cancer epidemiologist at Columbia University. At age 40, she began using a wheelchair permanently—an experience that redirected her work toward social connection and community health. In Vancouver, she transformed her home into a cultural salon space for artists and intergenerational dialogue, work that earned her the City of Vancouver’s 2014 Remarkable Women Award and the King Charles III Coronation Medal in 2025. She teaches aesthetics of co-creation and arts-based problem-solving at SFU’s Continuing Studies. Her writing includes the memoirs Accidental Blooms (Caitlin Press, 2023) and Hidden Flowers (Heritage House, 2025), and the translation The Broken Up Home (Caitlin Press, 2025). She lives in Vancouver, where she paints in watercolour and continues her salon tradition. Born and raised in Japan, she brings a cross-cultural perspective to her work, bridging Japanese and Canadian literary traditions.
Kagan Goh is a Vancouver-based Chinese Canadian multidisciplinary artist whose work spans memoir, poetry, playwriting, filmmaking, and mental health advocacy. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age twenty-three in 1993, he discovered the transformative power of the written word as a path to understanding and healing. What began as self-therapy evolved into a powerful artistic voice that has made him a prominent figure in Vancouver’s spoken-word scene, where peers affectionately call him “the bipolar poet laureate.” Through spoken-word performances, theatrical work, and published writing, he delves fearlessly into themes of mental illness, recovery, and self-acceptance, advocating for the validation of all emotional experiences as essential phases of the healing journey. His mission: to raise awareness of mental health issues and dismantle the stigma surrounding mental illness. His published works include Who Let in the Sky? (Select Books, 2012), a poetic memoir exploring his relationship with his father, and Surviving Samsara (Caitlin Press, 2021), which chronicles his journey with bipolar disorder and was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in creative nonfiction. Currently, Kagan is adapting Surviving Samsara into A Delicate Imbalance, a dramatic episodic television series that continues his commitment to breaking the silence around mental illness through powerful storytelling.
Steffi Tad-y is a disabled artist and writer from Manila. She is the author of two poetry books, From the Shoreline and Notes from the Ward, published Gordon Hill Press and a chapbook, Merienda, by Rahila’s Ghost Press. Her poems can be found in Room Magazine, Event, CV2, Midnight Sun, Open Minds Quarterly, and in anthologies such as Mandaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing and Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets. Her written work has received support from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
Chinese Cultural Centre Museum, 555 Columbia St, Vancouver, BC V6A 4H5
We would like to acknowledge that our festival takes place on the unceded traditional territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaɬ and xʷməθkwəy̓əm First Nations.
LiterASIAN 2026 