Five Years a Writer

Between last week’s loss of the submersible in the Atlantic Ocean and the earlier capsizing of the migrant boat off the shores of Greece, I have been thinking a lot about risks and rewards. If risk means “a situation in which one is exposed to danger” and reward means “something given in recognition of effort”, I have taken only very low-level risks in my life but have been rewarded with the privilege of security and success. To wit, June 30th marks the end of my second full year of retirement. By now, I am well settled into this next chapter, but making the decision to launch myself into it was a bit fraught. Herewith my reflections on getting myself from there to here. ------------- “No” the second time is no easier to hear. Possibly it is easier to say, but to hear it a second time is harder.  Like so many employees, I had turned on a dime when Covid struck and we were sent away from the office to continue our job from home. As a college administrator, this meant juggling multi...

Two questions asked of me recently gave me pause.  The first question came from a young neighbour who stopped by the other evening to ask, not for money for some fundraising effort, but a question as part of an assignment for her math class related to surveys, statistics and graphs. She asked, Is the job you did as an adult what your child-self thought you would be doing when you grew up? My short answer was, No.    The longer answer is that, as a little girl, I had fantasies of being a corner-office corporate boss — a Big Wig who had plans, gave orders, and commanded respect from everyone by virtue of her position in that corner office. I’m pretty sure this fantasy was more about telling boys what to do than it was about any specific work or skills! Fifty years on, I can say with assurance that I have never come even close to fulfilling this fantasy.  The second question came from a writing friend who asked if I would follow the same career path if I could do ...

Caveat : This post is about 'no' in response to a piece of professional work, for example a piece of writing; it is not about consent in a personal context.   When the response arrived, I was excited. When I opened it, I deflated. The message was one of rejection, of thanks for trying but no, we don’t want you. I had wanted it so much that I had not considered the possibility of not getting it, such was the confidence of my younger self. “It” was the annual Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference to be hosted by then Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, whom I admired in that position for her championing of the arts and her work with indigenous communities. But my wants didn’t matter; my application to attend the conference in the year 2000 was not successful. It would have been a fantastic experience and I wasn’t going to have it and there was nothing I could do to change that. That “no” was “the end”. That specific experience of not succeeding remains a visce...

I quite like people — not all people, not humanity as a whole, but, as a friendly outgoing person, I like connecting with others. Not everyone does, I get this. But, in my view, being able to respond to new people is a life skill. Whether the connection leads to a lasting relationship or is just a fleeting moment at the bus stop or with one's waiter, the bridge between aloneness and companionship has been crossed, if only for a minute. While I like my own company just fine, the energy that can arise from interacting with others is pretty fine, too. Though there are limits to the connections we humans can maintain. According to Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, human beings can have a maximum of 150 “meaningful social relationships” including family and friends. Note that “meaningful” doesn’t mean “close”; it means a connection exists in some way between the two of you that has meaning of some kind for you. However, within those many connections, people’s intimate friends...

This post is published the day after the May 29th Alberta election, so that province will have chosen, via the ballot box, which direction to take into the future. I’ll leave that there, as pundits, smarter and better connected than I, will assess the ramifications of the choice the citizens have made. But (my home province) Manitoba’s own election expected in October this year and our US neighbours’ in November next year have me thinking about democracy, community and service. Call me naive, but I think of democracy as an exciting concept that equates to ‘community service’ writ large and woven into the systems and structures that support the people who live in that democracy. For this concept to fly, democracy must be fuelled by citizen engagement, because when individuals withdraw from that engagement, democracy is weakened. And when democracy is weakened, opportunity is strengthened for those who seek power rather than connection and service. (The daily news is filled with evidence...

  It’s self-evident, of course: The more you roam with a certain pack, the more of them you’ll see. So it is for me these days. Everywhere I look, I see story-tellers, writers, authors. They are not behind the barrier of celebrity and distance. They are right there on my screen, right here in my own community, available, accessible, welcoming. Some of them write short posts on Facebook or Instagram, but many of them put their writing out into the world through more formal channels — blogs, online magazines or websites, and also in book form — actual books with covers and paper pages, published by a press or self-published, either way available for purchase. But writing and publishing the story is one thing (two things, really), actively promoting it to find readers is another thing entirely. Google throws up 1.2 billion hits in response to a search for “books published but not promoted”, the top hits making clear it is nigh on impossible for your work to find readers if you don’t ...

Amanda, age 1. Anne. Katy, my older sister. We each have a story to tell and, says Anne Lamott of Bird by Bird writing advice fame, we are not responsible for hurt feelings of those who disagree with how we tell it. Nonetheless, I asked my mother recently to read a piece about my father that I plan to submit to an online magazine for a themed issue on fathers. I was relieved when she gave me her blessing on the content and was appreciative of her feedback on the style in which I had written, though I disagreed with her comments on that point. It was a fine moment of respectful difference we shared as writers not as mother and daughter, and I will continue to work on the piece for submission next month. As I am, so is my mother a writer. My mother is a writer and I have become one, too. Either sentence is true, though each tells the story from a slightly different perspective. The result is the same: We are both writers. Would I be a writer if she were not? Would she be writing the fou...