Are You Still Writing?

Welcome to the first issue of Me Who Writes. As we transition into a new year, I find myself thinking about how endings are also beginnings. So here I am at the end of 2022, starting 2023 by launching a newsletter about writing and reading.

I’ve been a reader since I was a kid and my mom sent me and my younger siblings off to the library to get us out of her hair for a few hours. I’ve been a writer since I was a teenager lucky enough to have a great English teacher in high school. Many years fill the expanse of time between then and now, years during which I roamed through numerous erratic work paths, years when I wrote both sporadically and obsessively, creating story fragments that I stashed in files and shoved into drawers. In 2009, I decided I was done trying to be anything else. It was finally time to be a writer.

To my surprise, it went well. Since making that decision, I have had three books published. I got involved with writing communities. I went to conferences and retreats and literary festivals. I found wonderful writer friends. I did readings of my work in bookstores, collaborated with other writers, led workshops, mentored emerging writers. I traveled, always with my notebook at the ready. And then everything stopped.

In the spring of 2020, three days after the World Health Organization officially declared that we were indeed in a pandemic, my husband George and I moved away from the city we’d lived in for over four decades, away from our daughters, from family, friends, everything familiar. Our move had been in the works for six months, so we carried on with our plans despite the unsettling virus news.

Somehow we made it through the chaos of a frenetic move-out day. Early the next morning, Geo pointed our vehicle west. March 14, 2020 was sunny and fittingly cold—crispy at -25 degrees—for our exit from Edmonton. As the miles slipped by, I settled into my role as passenger and we chatted about how exhausting the packing process had been, how hard it was to drive away, how much we were looking forward to our new life in the Okanagan. Around noon, we passed a brilliant Mt. Robson stark against the clearest and bluest of skies. Although I’ve seen it numerous times over the years, Robson’s majestic presence has never ceased to astound me.

A few hours later, we stopped for the night. When we woke up the next morning, the world was seriously shutting down. Over the next few weeks, as we unpacked in our new home, we watched in dismay as isolation, fear, and economic disruption changed everyone’s lives in what felt like a heartbeat. One of our daughters lost both her jobs on the same day.

Then something unexpected happened. Once I got used to the new pace, I found that I didn’t mind the locked-down existence. In fact, it felt good. But I was somewhat uncomfortable about welcoming the solitude. Was I wrong to feel relieved that I didn’t have to hug people I hardly knew, didn’t have to shake questionable hands, didn’t have to watch my beloved Geo surf a cocktail party with ease while I stood rooted to one spot glancing too often at the clock to see how much longer I had to stay? That I didn’t have to smile patiently as curious acquaintances quizzed me how about how many books I’d sold, or told me how lucky I was to have a ‘natural passion,’ or commented that they wanted to write a book someday when they had some spare time, or asked what my writing routine was, puzzled looks flitting across their faces when they heard that I didn’t get up before dawn every day and race to my desk for hours of continuous word flow? (Much respect to writers who do that. I wish I did, but I’m an undisciplined binge writer.)

When the world went quiet, I discovered that I liked not having to leave my house. I liked not having travel plans. I liked that it was okay to go for long walks by myself, that it was okay to go slow or not to go at all. When I looked back on pre-pandemic life, it seemed as if the world was heedlessly heading towards certain oblivion. I naively hoped that the pandemic-applied brakes on human activity might offer our world a chance for lasting change, perhaps even a chance to stop the destruction of our planet. I’m still hoping.

During the first two covid waves (I don’t capitalize covid, that feels like giving it too much power), I posted on my Twitter and Instagrams feeds quite regularly. Then the third (or was it the fourth?) wave hit, in the spring of 2021. Two weeks before we were scheduled to have our first vaccination shots, Geo and I got covid. This was in the time of breathtaking fear, back when politicians and chief medical officers still delivered daily news bulletins on the death count. When it became apparent that we would be among the lucky ones with mild cases we could handle on our own at home, I posted some thoughts on Twitter. The responses were mostly kind, but that’s when I decided I needed a complete social media break. I deactivated my remaining accounts and retreated even more.

It was a good move for me. Over the next year, I wrote a lot. I revised my new manuscript several times, completed early drafts of a poetry collection long in the making, started eking out new stories from raw nuggets. I also did as much reading and walking as writing.

As social distancing eased and personal contact with others increased, more than a few people, mostly non-writers, asked me the same question: are you still writing? I say non-writers because writers don’t usually ask that question. They know that if writers aren’t actually writing, they’re thinking about writing, preparing for what they’re going to write, taking a break from what they’re currently writing, or recovering from having written. I spend as much time in each one of those writing phases as I do at my desk. Writers are always engaged in some phase of writing—they’re just not always publishing.

Still, the question “are you still writing” sometimes lingers and works itself into my mind like a woodpecker on a tree. Why are they asking me that? Why wouldn’t I still be writing? Is it because it’s been five years since my last book came out? Is it because I’m older now? Am I too old to be writing? Is this what an older person should be doing? Who decides what an older person should be doing? I don’t feel old, but maybe I don’t know what an older person is supposed to feel like. And worst of all, who wants to hear what I have to say anyway? Maybe they’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t still be writing.

It takes precisely one seven kilometre walk to shake off all that nonsense.

I admit that for a while, I considered not writing any more. Or ever again. And I tried for a few weeks, but it turns out that I don’t know how not to write. When a writing thought pops into in my head, I have to work with it. If I don’t, it’ll haunt me until I do. So yes, I’m still writing.

And reading, always reading, sometimes with two or three books on the go. I just finished Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter, this year’s Giller Award winner, and deservedly so. It’s a strange and wonderful book, utterly unique, beautifully human, with a tenderly realized ending that warmed me for days. Books like this one make me happy to be a small part of the writing community, a community that takes the raw material of narrative and turns it into a tangible thing, often artful, created from hope.

Thanks for taking the time to read the first issue of Me Who Writes. Watch for the next issue of this newsletter in about a week.