Becoming a Writer
Paperback published February 4, 2021 in UK by Canongate. Available in Canada March 30, 2021 by Doubleday, Canada
For several years on my annual visit home to Scotland to see Mum, she’d say, “Please clean out those three boxes of your stuff in the attic. One of these days I’ll toss them in the rubbish bin.” About five years ago, I finally obliged. Rummaging through one box, I came across a five-year diary.
I expected to see a few scattered entries when I opened the diary’s faded fabric cover, but much to my surprise, I found that I had written almost every day from the age of thirteen to seventeen. I could hardly wait to read an unadulterated account of my teenage years.
The diary bored me silly a few pages in. I was disappointed that my adolescence came across as so mundane. Where was the drama and the insights?
Sunday April 28, 1974 I slept in till quite late. I had breakfast as lunch. I’ve got two more days to do my maths so I worked solidly from about 12.30 till 5.30 pm. I actually got myself concentrating which is amazing.
My writing lacked emotion but at the very least I had demonstrated some commitment to writing. It’s hard to fathom that fifty years have passed since I wrote the first entry in that diary. For thirty of those years, as an oncology nurse and counsellor I have inhabited deep territories of emotion, conversing with people about how they choose to live life, under the shadow of death.
About ten years ago, I felt an urgency to write about those conversations. I believed that they might inspire hope in other families that they too could find a way through these terribly difficult and painful junctures of life.
I set out to write twenty stories each with a different perspective on dying. The main stumbling block however was that I wasn’t much of a writer. I lacked the confidence that I had enough nuanced language to accurately convey the wisdom I had been gifted. Even with permission and input from families, and confidentiality assured, I doubted my writing skill and felt the burden of responsibility as the writer of the stories of others.
I hadn’t taken any writing classes nor written very much except presentations for work and an occasional article for a nursing journal. In 2011, I found The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, a year-long writing program designed for people who work. I enrolled and committed to completing the first draft of a three-hundred page manuscript. I learned to write by surrounding myself with other non-fiction writers who also wanted to become better writers. We studied craft, we wrote ten pages every two weeks, we learned how to critique one another’s work, and we became friends.
Ten years after I started writing Radical Acts of Love: Twenty Conversations to Inspire Hope at the End of Life it was published in March 2020 in the UK (Canongate),and in Canada (Doubleday), right at the start of the global pandemic.
Today February 4, 2021, my book has been released in paperback in the UK and I must thank my stellar teams at Canongate, bks Agency, and Midas PR, for reminding me that perhaps now I can call myself a writer.