The Ottawa Queer Arts Collective (Qu’ART) and Bruce House, an Ottawa-based HIV support organization, have teamed up to kickstart the Story Sharing program.
Launched in 2025 and facilitated by Velvet Wells, the bi-weekly program offers a space for creativity through storytelling exercises for people who have HIV. The program focuses on written and oral storytelling, with visual storyboarding to convey participants’ stories.
Artistically engaging spaces are important for fostering communities, Wells said.
Many of the participants are frequenters of Bruce House, Wells added, and the program is important to check in on frequenters who don’t show up consistently.
“There’s some people who’ve come to the Story Sharing that we haven’t seen in a while,” Wells said. “That’s a huge accomplishment that I see, with respect to helping support people coming out and feeling safe to share their story.”
The Story Sharing program has become an important part of Bruce House, according to the organization’s executive director, Linda Truglia.
“It’s about social isolation, too. That’s why we’ve had the art program going here because it has helped people come out and do something together,” she said. “People often think they don’t have any artistic talent, but you do.”
At meetings, the group enjoys a meal from different local restaurants, like Paradise Poké, and runs through creative story sharing exercises together.
This is not the first time that Qu’ART has hosted events for the HIV community.
In 2021, Qu’ART hosted an event with Ottawa Storytellers in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of when HIV first reached Canada, according to Qu’ART’s creative director Glenn Nuotio.
“A lot of people started recognizing [COVID-19] wasn’t the first pandemic for many people in the queer community because of AIDS, so people started ruminating on that and looking back on those times,” Nuotio said.
HIV was first detected in Canada in 1982 and claimed more than 12,000 lives by December 2000. Between 2013 and 2022, there have been more than 1,500 HIV-attributed deaths in Canada. Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), a medication that stops HIV from spreading throughout the body, and antiretroviral therapy, which suppresses the amount of HIV to undetectable levels are responsible for the dramatic decrease in HIV related deaths.
The Story Sharing program aims to connect people affected by HIV together to foster community through creativity, Nuotio said. The program is designed to provide an avenue for people living with HIV to grow artistically, but also to reduce the social isolation of people living with HIV, with programming tailored to the capacities of all participants.
As artists themselves, Wells, who does improv, and singer-songwriter Nuotio opened the program to many mediums, having participants share written works, spoken word and visual stories.
In one exercise, participants wrote words on cue cards relating to the beginning, middle and end of their stories. Another participant would draw representations of the words on the cue cards before they were guessed by a different participant.
Wells said the exercise revealed common themes between various participants stories.
“A big role of the work, and the most impactful stuff, is about a sense of connection and about reducing isolation with groups of people,” they said. “No one is going to be forced to perform.”
Nuotio said the participants do not have to speak about their experience with HIV in the program.
Instead, the program helps participants to develop building skills to become effective storytellers like collaboration, concision and revision, Wells said.
“We always have to chip away and make space to be able to tell stories,” Nuotio said. “Maybe we need more time to sit around and work on our stories and to let creativity have some nurturing effect.”
The Story Sharing program finished its first instalment in December. Wells said they kept the Story Sharing group small in the initial run.
Participants are encouraged to tell all stories that they are comfortable sharing, despair-ridden or triumphant. The program has a joyous effect to it, uniting those affected by HIV, Wells said.
“Joy in this program looks like relief, relaxation, laughter, sharing more details, sharing more of the emotion of your story.”
Moving forward, Wells said there are plans to expand the program to serve both Anglophone and Francophone participants, but the current focus is on creating a long-lasting program.
“I want to build a very good self-sustaining foundation here within Bruce House before trying to save the world,” Wells said.
While plans of expansion are underway, Nuotio added that there is merit to intimate creative settings for marginalized communities.
“Even though there’s a lot of progress and a lot more inclusion in stages, there’s still quite a ways to go,” Nuotio said. “It’s the idea that sometimes we need to create stages and communities amongst ourselves and for each other.”
For Truglia, programs like these are about addressing the stigmatisation of marginalized communities, like 2SLGBTQIA+ people and those affected by HIV.
“My heart is really full because I’m happy people can come here and feel safe,” Truglia said. “But on the other side, I feel sad too, because a lot of people don’t feel safe outside. They won’t talk about their [HIV] status anywhere else.
“I want people to know that HIV stigma is strong, it’s there, and we need to continue to fight it.”
The program is expected to pick back up in February 2026 and will invite new participants, Wells said.
But the numbers in the program never mattered to Wells – what mattered was the growth of the participants.
“There are people who are coming in with some fear, they aren’t used to sharing, to seeing them suddenly sing like songbirds,” Wells said.
Featured photo by Syd Robbesceuten/the Charlatan
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