The writer I am now is an older white Canadian woman of Scottish, Irish, and Icelandic settler ancestry who is grateful to be living each day as an uninvited guest on the unceded territory of the Okanagan/Sylix people and wishes she could have known the halfbreed Cree great-grandmother hidden in her family’s history.

The writer I am now differs from the writers I’ve been in the past. The writer I am now wants to reach back to the others and say, whoa, chill, take it down a notch, don’t worry so much about making something happen, just do what you do and let it flow.

The writer I used to be had to work sitting at a desk, in an office or a library. The writer I am now prefers to write from a cushioned position: feet up, notebook or iPad supported by a pillow. My preferred writing chair is by a window overlooking the hills across the valley. In the mornings, the trees are many shades of green, soft and fresh from their night’s rest. On misty foggy mornings, the clouds hang low and the hills disappear. In the late afternoon, the hills turn gold as the sun retreats from the sky. I don’t make myself write at any particular time of day, but I do bribe myself when I feel reluctant to face the empty page. Just ten minutes, I say. You can do anything for ten minutes. And then of course, it’s always more than ten minutes. Sometimes it’s so much longer than ten minutes that I don’t stop until my stomach insists on food.

Even with the turmoils of the world looming larger and darker, I refuse to relinquish the calm of my days now. I am enjoying the backside of my life’s rollercoaster ride, relishing the space of time I have these days for being alive and massaging sentences and putting words together until something cohesive emerges. It’s so different than it used to be, with all those past internal and external pushes, the insistent need to get something out there, to write for others. Now I write for me. Most of my daily writing will stay with me, for my eyes only. The rest will find its way here.