Category: Author Bio

I am Paul Hogan, an Artist-in-Tuition from Canada who works with image, story, myth and theatre in collaboration with people from communities affected by civil disorder, natural disaster, poverty and social dislocation the world over. I was a founding member and performer in the Apparitional Theatre of the Chong in Toronto the early 1970’s. In 1983, I helped to establish the Spiral Garden at the Hugh MacMillan Rehabilitation Centre (now Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital) for physically challenged children. In 1994, working with the Centre for International Health at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario and local partners in Sri Lanka, I signed on as creative advisor for the Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka from 1994 to 2016 during a time of ethnic conflict and post conflict rehabilitation. At the same time and I assisted friends in Cambodia to set up the Mango Tree Garden for children who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. The Butterfly Peace Garden has been cited in the U.S. Congressional Records as a “Best Peace Practice” with war-affected children. I received an Ashoka Fellowship in 2003 for my work in Sri Lanka. I now live and work at Falling Sky Studio in Toronto where I wrote two books, Beautiful Nonsense and Playing for Real (commissioned by the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research) and collaborate with friends at Garden Path Serendipity (GPS) Inc. on creative projects with youth at risk in the city.

The Leap of Faith

Welcome, dear friends. We’re now a few days into the lunar New Year celebrated by the Chinese as Year of the Fire Monkey! I...

Moguls of Mud Mountain

The mother of the Butterfly Garden in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, was the Spiral Garden in Toronto, Canada, may mother and child both rest in peace....

Damned by the Rainbow

In 1875 when he was just twenty-one years old, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, exhausted his muse, tossed his pens and hit the road....

Disarming the Image Arsenal

The world is presented with some big questions these days when, almost exclusively, the corporate domain determines the answers and and defines the nature...

Monkey Business Outlook

The main obstacle for developing Monkey’s Tale / Out-of-the-Box programs is simply this: uncertain funding beyond the end 2015. Just prior to leaving Batticaloa. I...

Start with the Heart

  In Sri Lanka I seldom watch TV. That’s because I don’t live in hotels where the ubiquitous CNN / BBC / FOX feed...

Strange Only Gets Stranger

Masks are about the face we wear, how we manipulate it, and how it manipulates us. For the most part we live our lives...

Notes from the Monkey’s Uncle

Dear friends, apologies for my long silence, immersed as I am in the daily duties of an old doddler on the Garden Path. You know...

Ducks in a Row

Obliteration. The Ghost Dance. Flash back to when I first arrive in Batti. Kula and I sit on the rotunda at Monkey’s Tale after...

Shake the Snake Awake

There is a snake in the garden or, to be more specific, a Story Snake with two heads, one at either end of its...