Last week I read through the proofs of a creative nonfiction story and interview questions now published with SmokeLong Quarterly, How to Mourn Your Mother. I teared up reading the story because seeing my work reflected on this publication’s website, with their familiar font and set alongside a gorgeous photo by Olivie Strauss, feels like…being held and seen.
And though the story sits with my name attached as its author, the writing is the culmination of many people who read earlier drafts and provided suggestions and impressions. And its subject, my mum, she’s also a co-creator in a way too, if only as an unwilling participant suffering dementia and dragged into story chez moi.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into an Oscar like speech listing all you wonderful people here, but I do want to address how much art making is co-created with community as opposed to work being produced singly, individually[1]. We do ourselves a disservice perpetuating the myth of solo creator…and who knows, maybe our bodies are simply an instrument through which the universe—by which I mean collective creativity—sings.
The first writings of How to Mourn Your Mother arose out of stream of consciousness writing to interrogate an emotional moment: dropping mum off at a long-term care home. But wait, that’s not quite right. The first stirrings of this story were written in emails to loved ones…fragments and phrases and images…those stand ins for my grief and sorrow It was winter 2023, about 6 months after I’d moved mum into the facility, a place she vehemently refused ever to set foot in prior to her cognitive decline.
In the spring of 2023, I completed the first draft of the story, entering the material from the side, slyly, bypassing my guilt and dissonance by writing my feelings into the container of a How-to Manual form. I workshopped that story draft and received six different writers’ thoughts and suggestions for improving the piece. In 2023, I re-drafted three more versions, receiving additional feedback from at least eight additional unique readers, as well as a large handful of family and friends.
The story was a runner up in a small contest that fall, where it received professional editorial feedback. Then I sent it out for publication twice, reworking it each time. It was rejected twice. I didn’t look at the story again until July 2025 when I was searching for a short story to read for a local reading event. The reading needed to be less than 5 minutes (and, uh, that draft—reworked again—at 817 words, took more than 5 minutes to read). Something happens during a reading when a story is voiced to an audience – there’s a transfer of energy, a vibration I can feel from the room…I feel where and when the bits of the reading touch people or don’t. Audience participation (maybe thirty people?) helped me shape the story again.
Then I sent the story to SmokeLong Quarterly where it was accepted for publication. But it still required tweaks; I emailed back and forth with Christopher Allen, a wonderful editor with a wicked sense of humour, to finalize the version published this month.
Here’s a recap:
| Number of people providing editorial feedback | Number of drafts (this is a conservative estimate) | Time from inception to publication |
| ~ 24 (plus an audience ~30) | ~ 10 | ~ 3 years |
This much time, this many drafts, this many supportive people with their own time and suggestions gifted to the creative process of making, this for a story of 800 words. It’s wonderful to experience this collective.
This exercise of recounting (actually counting) is a powerful reality check: making art takes time and the support of many different people offering their attention, their love, as well as their faith and belief in the work (art). And when I think of it this way, I’m reminded my own responsibility is to show up each day and pour attention and love into the work with the understanding I’m one small component of creative process[2].
I practice being part of creative community too. It’s integral to creative process. Over the last few years, I’ve slowly incorporated writing community work into my days. It’s incredibly rewarding. Here’s a list:
- Participating with two writing groups where we share and provide feedback on each other’s writing. We meet every month or two, in person. I love that I’m working with writers of fantasy and romance and essay and poetry and short stories and long stories…how I’m learning about genre but also ‘story’ in general and how all of us aim for literary beauty and clarity in our work.
- Volunteering to read for Folly Journal, a literary magazine out of Wellington, New Zealand. It’s an annual, print-only anthology of short stories, non-fiction, poetry and art aiming to publish emerging writers. I love this work for many reasons. It provides an opportunity to practice reflecting what each writer is trying to accomplish with their work…this stretches my mind, makes me think differently. It has been great to learn and understand the back end of the Submittable platform, but also the backstage processes of a group of people working together to curate a tangible object of beauty for sharing and reading. It’s interesting to experience the selection process for pieces that “hang together”, created through different voices and literary approaches. Submission readers, a small handful of us, connect from around the globe through the digital submissions software yes but also through spirited chats on WhatsApp and monthly zoom meetings. At editorial meetings we dialogue about specific pieces, selecting the ones with wildly disparate ideas and reader interpretations about the creative work. Soon, we’ll be moving into supporting editorial work with specific pieces. I’m also beginning an essay which is a planned co-writing project with two other writers, for (fingers crossed) inclusion in this year’s issue (more to come on that when we’ve moved it further along).
- Facilitating writing sessions with the Writer’s Collective of Canada. Weekly sessions online most Monday nights over the last year or so and started an in-person session at the local library in January. These sessions have me practicing coming to the blank page and writing with abandon. Also practicing deep listening. These workshops are more about creating a space for people’s voices to be heard and held; there is no ‘critique’ of what is written, no suggestions for how writers might improve their piece. Instead, the group listens to writers read their response to a writing prompt and, in turn, reflect back to the writer what stays with us, what we’re most struck or surprised by, what we find most beautiful in their work. Approaching writing this way, I’ve witnessed the power of positive feedback. I love we write together in silence and then share. I’ve learned everyone is a writer, that every voice is beautiful and unique. My most-loved part of these sessions is at the end, where each writer chooses their favourite sentence they wrote and we move round the circle and listen to each person read their favourite sentence aloud. Always (always!) the writer plucks the sentence I would have chosen as “their best”…it has little to do with technique and everything to do with “feeling it”. Experiencing this over and over and over each week, I’ve learned (and practice!) that all of us know, with keen instinct, what “is best” in our own work[3]. It’s about learning to trust ourselves.
- Offering creative writing sessions with colleagues at work. Working with two other writers (both ex-journalists), we’ve put together quarterly creative writing sessions open to anyone interested (they are online). We’ve done this for a few years now…attendance varies…it’s challenging in this space for people to feel safe to express themselves. This is learning too.
- I’m working with a mentor to support my long project writings, Kate Moses.[4]
- Attending, listening and reading at local reading events.
- And I love to read other writers’ work, inviting people to send me their work, asking them for what would be most helpful for them for me to consider and feed back to them. Reading others helps me practice many skills at once: structural considerations from the sentence to the paragraph to the whole; content considerations, what might be missing, what might be expanded, what might not be needed; clarity; rhythm and sound; point of view; most of all, listening to the writer’s intentions and honouring that as well as I’m able.
- And you. I write to you. With you in my mind and my heart. Too many times I have thought of giving up, giving in to my grief. Knowing you are here and reading …well, I will not let you down.
All this, to show, with so much proof, I do not create alone. I’m nested within a co-creating community, one that helps me hold up my eye and my ‘I’ to continue to work and believe in my work, to know and feel how important art is for us.
Quick (and exciting! and terrifying!) update: my year long sabbatical was (finally) formally approved. It begins May 1st.
[1] Serendipity. Was going to link to the shlocky music they play when someone’s Oscar speech has gone on too long, but instead I look up Chloé Zhao’s acceptance speech at the Movies For Grown Up Awards with AARP for her film adaptation of Hamnet (book written by Maggie O’Farrell). Zhao’s speech is beautiful. Humble. From the heart. And she communicates exactly what I am trying to write about here. Such a delight to discover this. Do take the 3 minutes, listen to her voice. Here’s the link again. I have not yet seen the film…I have heard it is very beautiful. Knowing the story, I’m choosing to watch the film when I have the space and time to cry.
[2] And to show up to the task of making with a body that is focused, well rested, well nourished, physically healthy and emotionally attuned. I’m aware too, living in our world of wasp nest systems designed for capital gain, the ability to show up this way for creative work is cruelly challenged. I do not take my privilege for granted; I work knowing others do not have the choices I have. I work, called to the important task of making art that synthesizes the impacts of our pain. And there are many days when I’m overwhelmed with sorrow and depression, thinking (wailing) what can I possibly make of all of it? It’s at these points I haul up this knowledge: I’m one small component of a larger creative process…with responsibility to simply show up … and get to work. Loop this message on repeat, get the fuck out of bed, keep working. Wasps are pollinators. Their mud-papery nests of hexagonned cells are works of art. Find the beauty in the sting. Work with it.
[3] I keep reminding myself of this as an antidote to my anxiety spirals and fears my writing isn’t “good”. Good gawd the inner critic is an obstinate bitch.
[4] I met Kate almost ten years ago (my gawd) and it was only by serendipitous chance! Another writer friend in Montreal had signed up for a writing retreat with Kate in Maine but had to fly to the UK last minute to attend a funeral. It was the week before the retreat and she couldn’t get her money back so she phoned me up at work and said, can you go? It starts Friday…all expenses paid. Yes! I would not have been able to afford that cost back then, and the fact M shouldered the cost was the key for convincing my then husband to look after our kids so I could go. I think it was a four- or five-day retreat, I don’t remember. I do remember it was wonderful and that, at one point, as a group of writers read our work to each other in a pale robin egg-shell painted dining room, Kate got out of her chair across from me, moved to stand behind me and gently pressed her cool palms to my cheeks to tilt my head around the room saying, “we want to see what you see”. It is only now, recounting this memory (I had forgotten it!) I understand the importance and interestingness and unique entertainment of reading the world through another’s experience (for, isn’t this what writing is? Getting into the head of a character to experience their experience?). And, if I’m honest, it’s an aspect of creative writing I continue to struggle with: believing what I have to say, how I see the world, is valid and interesting. This reminds me of a short story by Carol Shields, Absence, where the protagonist is a writer working with a keyboard where the letter ‘I’ is broken …so she writes the story without ‘I’ …enacting what it is to be absent (my goodness how the memories beget memories…). Will need to find and read that story again (it will have new meaning for me now). I loved working with Kate back then, and a little over a year ago, we connected again and I began working with her to support me through the development of my long project. I love that we love the same books and reference different techniques used by different writers in all our conversations. She turns my thinking inside out and progresses my thinking about my own project by leaps and bounds. When we zoom call, her dogs (salukis?) stretch out behind her on great olive velvet chaise-longues with rose-pink floral-patterned throws, lounging as if their bellies are filled with the most delicious sweet meats and I feel exactly like them.
Process Peace 