Five years into retirement "I have written a book!" are five words I didn't think I would be saying...

56 years ago, my parents gave me a typewriter for Christmas. 

38 years ago, I began my career in corporate communications. 
20 years ago, I began teaching communication skills to college students. 
5 years ago, I left full-time work to live the rest of my life. 

This fall, I will launch my handbook on how to be a writer in four steps.

I have never been pregnant but I am feeling the anxiety and thrill of that point in time when, if I were pregnant, I would be beginning to tell other people of this amazing experience taking hold of me and of what I will bring forth into the world in a matter of months. I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen, I can feel it, but so much can still go wrong between now and the expected moment down the line…

I hope the analogy is not in poor taste. I am quite definitely not birthing a baby, but I am planning to deliver my first ever book into the world this fall. This feels at once intensely personal and wildly public.

I have spent years saying that I won’t ever write a book, that I write short-form creative nonfiction, usually essays, and that I am not interested in writing a book…and, yet, here I am, with my manuscript at the designer’s, a printer sourced, and vague plans for a launch drafted in a notebook. Will anyone be interested? The perennial question plaguing anyone putting anything out into the world, of course. Time will tell.

I will give you the full spiel on the book another day, but today I will say this: My handbook How to be a Writer in Four Steps has been germinating in my mind and on my computer for more than three years. Finally, last September, I made the commitment to myself that I would finish it and that I would release it to mark the fifth anniversary of my retirement from full-time work, which was on June 30, 2021. That final day was crazy, with me working at my desk until the very last minute. The following weeks and months were challenging, as I settled into a radical new routine without external structure or obligations. Writing saved me. Teaching in the community inspired me. My growing writing community supported me, even if I didn’t breathe a word to them about my book plans until last summer.

More on all that another time. This post is about marking five years of work and play on my own terms, as a writer and community educator — a whole new identity that is fitting me well. It’s been grand. I have enjoyed having time to spare, but I have also learned just how quickly time goes by. I feel an urgency to harness it, to squeeze every possible opportunity out of it. Too many never get this chance. That is, maybe, the main reason I buckled down and realigned my sense of self as a writer who would never write a book. At the point where I asked myself, Why not me? Why not now? I had no better answer than, Indeed. Why not me! Why not now! And then I got to it.

What happens this fall is in the lap of the gods, as they say. I’m excited to see what unfolds then, and thereafter over the next five years. Stick with me as this wild ride called Amanda's Writing Life continues. The only person more surprised than you will be me! 

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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.