Welcome to Passage. This newsletter will go out once a month, sometimes less, to people who have moved through my life in one form or another: former clients, colleagues, collaborators, community members, co-conspirators, and anyone else who found my work along the way. If you're reading this, you're one of them. You're also welcome to follow by RSS instead, or unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.

This first issue introduces some changes to how I'm working and what I'm carrying forward after several years of clinical practice. It also has recent writing, upcoming events, and the first card from the Rest Deck, which is how every issue will end. I'll explain when we get there.

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Where to Find Me

Most of my writing lives on my website, including Fragments, my long-form essayistic work in English and French. I'm also sporadically on Blacksky and Mastodon. If you’d like to follow my academic work, I’ve made the full text of my recent publications available on my CV. If you want to get in touch, my contact page has everything you need.

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Closing and Continuing

After several years of independent social work practice, I've made the choice to close that chapter, though it carries forward into what's next.

Confluence: A Reading Cohort. I'm forming a small, closed reading cohort around the things that show up in the silences that follow something hard: self-worth, toxic shame, accountability, emotional regulation, and love as bell hooks means it: a practice, something you have to keep choosing.

Cohorts will meet monthly in Tiohtià:ke for about three hours, with time for discussion, conversation, and food woven throughout. A separate online cohort will be available for folks who can’t attend in person. Each cohort is capped at 10 and stays that group for the duration.

Participation is free or pay-what-you-can. Priority is given to QTBIPOC applicants. Visit this page to learn more, and fill out the interest form to be considered for a spot.

Navigation sessions. A lot of the people I worked with were students, navigating institutions that weren't built for them. As a PhD candidate I've spent several years learning how to move through those structures and find what they owe you. I'm offering free or pay-what-you-can virtual or in-person sessions for anyone trying to find their footing in an educational institution. Book a session here and add a short comment mentioning what you’d like to discuss.

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What I’ve Been Writing

These are the most recent pieces I have published on Fragments. Read, share, and leave a comment if something lands.

Trophies. Officers from a police precinct in Montréal-Nord have been stopping Black men on the basis of their ethnicity, issuing tickets, making racist remarks inside a unit culture that treated all of this as ordinary. Some of them had been cutting locs during interventions and keeping the pieces. This essay asks what the trophies accomplished that the stops and the tickets, for all their accumulation, didn't.

Saskatchewan! A freight car with the province's name painted in green, stopped on the tracks across the canal from Silo No. 5. A piece about what accumulates when you keep returning to the same water.  

Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment and Période de questions trace the disappearance of Kominote, a dedicated group for Black GBTQ+ men at RÉZO, from inside the organization's own statements, meetings, and annual reports, one from a friend's kitchen, one from a plastic chair at RÉZO's annual general meeting. Both are in English, despite the titles.

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Upcoming Events

With the submission of my dissertation this past month and my defence imminent, I'm taking some time off to recuperate. That means fewer commitments for now, but pride season always brings a small flurry of exceptions. I'll be running some ballroom workshops in PEI and New Brunswick this summer alongside Broadway 007. They're free and open to anyone curious. Details below.

31 July 2026
Walk For Me: An Introduction to Ballroom Culture and Vogue
PEI Pride, The Guild (Charlottetown, PE) 
Free Registration

1 August 2026
Ballroom Bootcamp: A Full-Day Immersion in Vogue and Ball Culture
River of Pride, Fierté Dieppe Pride (Moncton, NB)
Info will be available on River of Pride’s website soon

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Rest

I used to close every social work session with a card from the Nap Ministry's Rest Deck. Over the years, it became a ritual: a little moment of shared humanity with the folks I worked with. I'm carrying that practice forward here.

Tricia Hersey reminds us that rest is something we have to keep choosing, especially those of us who have been taught that our worth is measured by our output. Each issue ends with a card. Take it with you.

I will daydream a little.
I will make space.
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The ability to imagine has been stolen from you. It is radical to tap into a daydreaming practice. You must imagine what is possible. Your rest is possible. Thriving in rest is possible. Crafting space for rest is possible. Nothing can heal without imagination. It is your hope and desire to dream yourself free from grind culture.

À bientôt,

Vincent