Oh, Canada!

A "novel" year abroad.

Hello hello!

So much to say, and where am I even supposed to begin! I exclaim.

Forgive me my inevitable typos and bad ideas, this is a stream of consciousness post.

My family has been in Canada for a year now—and where does the time go? We moved here with a three year-old, and he’s careening toward five now. I’m renewing student health insurance. I’ve been chasing my MFA since this time a year ago. Friends graduated to make room for the new writers coming in now. I’m halfway done with the program. The world is on fire!

I’m drawn to reflection these days, for all these reasons and then some. When I started writing publicly, I was so earnest. Soft and serious. That’s still in me somewhere, surely, but so is hard-won good humor and hearty cynicism. Maybe you can relate.

When I came into my MFA program, I wanted to write poetry and essays about nature and autism and contentment. But the world is, while beautiful, also ugly, and as we rounded the corner from last year to this one, it became impossible for me to write about real life. I’m all tangled up in it day after day after day, and to have to put it all onto a page and then sit and edit it for eons felt like torture. I wish I was exaggerating.

So this year—with surprise and delight—I began writing a novel. I wanted to be a novelist as a kid, but I have always questioned my ability to tell a story. I kept putting off giving it a real go. Until this time around, when I honestly didn’t feel like I had a choice—what else was I supposed to write?

So I began my first genuine fiction. In it, there is still nature, still poetry, still a fat dose of autisticness. But there is also imagination, which I swear saved my life.

As I wrote in a reflection over the winter semester, “This is not to say poetry is never imaginative, nor that creative nonfiction is merely voyeurism. I have written poems and essays that I am incredibly proud of. But not since childhood have I spent so much time writing from a place of possibility; of what could be rather than what simply is… this idea that we can imagine a world that is not the one we are experiencing; that we can write it and then see it, in its way, come to life—that, I think, moves along using the same muscle as hope.”

So if you’ve watched me unspool on social media and have thought, “Oh dear, the poet Brené Brown used to recommend is losing her mind…” Maybe she is. Time will tell, won’t it? But she’s finding something else, or at least maybe this is the case. I imagine it could be. A little rage, a little unseriousness. A little, feral resilience. Hm.

Anyway, I’m not going to share too much about the project today because it’s too soon and I’m not ready. But I’m happy to tell you, at least, that it exists—the first draft is done and the second is underway. And I hope one day it’ll be something you want to read. Or at least something I’m proud of having written.

Lots more thoughts on all of this, on writing as a kind of transformation, on whatever else it is that being a writer has meant to my bodymind the last year. But that is a for-now too-earnest conversation for another day. Instead, I’ve left a little poem-blessing for you below.

Sending you all so much warmth and gratitude. May we each keep doing our best to do what is brave and right. Day by day.

x, t

IN DEFENSE OF THE LATE BLOOMER

Time is not a line,
a tether.
It is not a bridge

we must walk
from here to there.
Step into the crisp fall air,

the cooling sun the mums 
and autumn roses drink like ale.
Accept the ripe life offered you

from the generous arms of
the honeycrisp tree. The beetroot
and the carrots are ready.

Eat them straight from the dirt.
They grew in the dark, in the quiet, 
rumbling belly of the earth.

Delight is their soil-made color plucked
from their beds to show off their ambition.
Even the proud, loud mouths of 

sunflowers take the time they need
to open. Everything
in the season it is made for.