As the end of the Creative Non-Fiction Collective Society (CNFCS)’s annual conference crept closer to its end the evening got more interesting. The event was held in the lavish ambiance of the Palliser Hotel on the night of May 3rd.

While you may not know who the CNFCS are, the integral item here is that Dale Kwong and Denise Chong performed Kwong’s 2005 poem "L-Berta Rainbow", which prosaically combines observations about the 2005 Calgary floods and how the changes in the city’s awareness of its sexuality was sweeping through the streets like those unstoppable floodwaters.

Don’t be misled by the Chong/Kwong collaboration: Denise and Dale are not related or dating. Their synchronicity as writers is based more on their investigations of identity as Chinese-Canadians, with Dale also chronicling her growing freedom to express her inner lesbian. The poem’s verses, with which she demonstrates this mixing of sexuality and forces of nature, wander together like disparate streams that meet in the joined power of the river in its exultant closing lines: "I choose to live my life victoriously."

"I took a writing workshop from Fred Wah at the Banff Centre about 10 years ago, and he was teaching a Japanese style called utanniki, where you take two texts, chop them up, and put them back together again," Kwong says. "In the weekend of the floods in 2005, I walked with my dog all up and down Memorial Drive, and (as described in the poem) I really did witness a street church baptizing people in the underpass beneath a bridge, and the other strange things I mentioned in the poem (water-weary dog; imprisoned wooden corpses). That week Ralph Klein threatened to invoke the ‘Notwithstanding Clause’ over the bill that was for same-sex marriage (2005’s Bill C-38, Civil Marriage Act), and I just felt that Mother Nature was pissed off: like, How DARE You?!"

So it was remarkably appropriate when "L-Berta" finally made it into Calgary Poet Laureate Chris Demeanour’s collection. The Calgary Project simultaneously capped his stint as the city’s official creative scribe and amassed visual and literary works focused on our 2013 natural disaster.

Kwong notes that so much has changed in the last nine years, and yet so much hasn’t.

"We’ve come so far, but we haven’t gone all the way," she says.

It’s clear what she is postulating in the burst banks of the Bow: "fount of insurrection gush forth and break all barriers."

In the same vein Kwong has come out with a work called "Created By Choice," which was featured in the anthology A Family By Any Other Name earlier this year. This collection is part of a series by Touchwood Editions of Victoria,  "about the idea that the 21st century family isn’t necessarily the traditional family we’re familiar with," she describes.

Her titles include "Nobody’s Mother" (on childless women), "Nobody’s Father" (on childless men), "Somebody’s Child" (on adoption) and "What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting" (on unplanned families).

On "L-Berta Rainbow", which explores queer relationships, and "the diversity within queer families," Kwong says "I just took my whole experience, summarized by it takes a whole village to raise a child, with my adopted family, my extended family, my co-workers, my friends, and my condo neighbours."

"The essay is (also) about how I came out to my mom (she was a little shocked), and how I didn’t come out to my dad, but he tried to let me know it was okay." Kwong’s father passed away before she had the opportunity to tell him outright.

"Even now, when I read that passage, I’m still not 100 per cent sure, but everyone who reads it says He knew. How could he not have known? He was telling you! But for me, there’s still that little grain of doubt."

Now Kwong is working on a comedy possibly called "Freedom 53" which is basically a non-fictional play or memoir "about a Chinese-Canadian lesbian who gets a buy-out (at work), and reflects back as she’s packing up her office on how she started her job in 1988, as the Olympics had just started, and she was working on Beta-tape; it wasn’t even computers. And she believed she was heterosexual, and was one of two Asians that worked at Global TV."

So maybe it’s a tiny bit autobiographical...

"And 26 years later, I can’t even count how many Asians work at Global... and I’m completely out at work."

Comedies, you know, have happy endings.