Four years into Five years

This April marks the start of my final year in the 5-year journey that is my current Be-A-Writer plan: 2018-2023. And this May will mark the fifth time I set myself the challenge of writing a post every day that month. I started out in May 2018 sending my writing by email to only three readers and have progressed, since then, to casting my net wider via this blog. I find the daily posting over 31 days as challenging as it is rewarding (maybe, as a reader, you feel the same) and I surely love Day 31 when I cross the self-imposed finish line.

I have always been a planner, finding it satisfying to set a goal and inch my way toward it. For sure, this writing game is not about speed; it’s about persistence and self-confidence. The one begets the other, and feedback from readers spurs both.

As this 5-year plan has unfolded, I have incorporated the teaching of courses about writing and, through that, I have found others who are on their own be-a-writer path. On the final day of a recent course, I wrote a tribute to my fellow travellers, which I share (adapted) below. While it speaks specifically to the writing life, I think it can speak equally well to anyone on any path leading towards a life that puts creative energy and output at its centre. 

I offer the tribute here as thanks to you, dear Reader, for being part of my Be-A-Writer journey, which continues here on May 1st...

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The writer’s life: A tribute

It is said that a writer’s life is a lonely life, with long stretches of time alone at a desk, fretting, wondering, thinking and maybe, even, writing. I do all those things, but I do not find this writing life that I am establishing a lonely one. I find it rich with possibility and connection and community.

Through the courses Deborah and I are teaching, and with the people we meet through them, we are building a community that, since the fall of 2019, has been slowly, steadily finding its feet and putting down roots — a writing and thinking and creative community, evolving over time.

And it takes time — to make connections and to establish a bond through creative endeavour. Certainly, it doesn’t happen for every single person who comes to a class, but for those of us who see ourselves as writer reflected in each other, then for us, the journey begins. The journey that takes us, time and time again, to our notebooks and our daily logs and our keyboards to put words together that help show us what the story is that we have to tell.

‘Have’ to tell, as in must tell. Or ‘have’ to tell, as in it exists within our mind and maybe our heart and we want to tell it, because we like the spinning of words into story and we like the sharing of those words with others. The reader in us welcomes the readers out there into the pieces we weave.

Me at about age 10,
with my first manual typewriter.

And this is the writer’s life: A constant rhythm — or maybe an irregular rhythm — but a rhythm nonetheless of ordinary people telling stories that are maybe ordinary or maybe extraordinary and are created, always, for connection and contemplation and caring.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.