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International Women’s Day: Sonya Littlejohn

Spoken word poet
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Sonya Littlejohn

For International Women’s Day, we talked with some amazing women around the Cariboo Chilcotin. There are enough incredible women in this community to fill several books, but please read on for International Women’s Day series on just a few of them.

Words have always been a part of Sonya Littlejohn’s life.

When she was 14, she worked for the Tribune submitting stories on Anne Stevenson Secondary and when she graduated she planned on becoming and English teacher. She submitted short stories to publications, but everything she did, never quite seemed to fit what she was writing naturally.

“What I would see in my journal was a lot more lines, which I guess would be verse, but I didn’t know it at the time,” she says.

In 2008, she was introduced to the world of spoken word at a festival in Calgary.

“That festival that I talked about showed me a variety of different styles of what seemed similar to what I thought I was doing, and it was the first time I realized you could actually say what you were writing, and not publish it somewhere on paper.”

Read more: International Women’s Day: Sue Zacharias

Now, Littlejohn makes a career of her spoken word poetry.

She works for the Vancouver Poetry House doing a program called Word Play, where pairs of spoken word poets perform and run workshops at high schools, to teach students creative writing and aid them with assignments.

She also performs — she recently did a collaborative performance piece called Where I am From about how being asked “where are you from” can impact people, based on their roots and ethnicity and cultural experiences.

For her part, Littlejohn was born and raised in Williams Lake, and recently returned to the community after realizing living in Vancouver was getting too expensive for her and her family.

She has two children, and also moved back to help with her aging parents.

Read more: International Women’s Day: Patsy Grinder

Returning was hard, she says, but she’s happy to be back.

“I’m really happy that I am back in Williams Lake because I have talked to a lot of people who came back and a lot of us never thought we were going to. I was really upset about it at first but I think we needed to come back, everybody who did, and I think there is a lot of hope in the fact that we have.”

She’s also looking at running more workshops and spoken word performances in the lakecity.

“With teaching, I know I am a teacher and I think when we know what our purpose is we should try and honour it as much as possible.”

She also wants to give back to youth in the same way that she was trained by elders in her community.

“The writing itself, that’s just instinct, I think. It’s just a thing I have to do. I have to garden, I have to cook, I have to play with my kids, it’s just a part of me.”

Read more: International Women’s Day: Cindy Chappell