My Canadian Camino
Soon to be published personal memoir of walking over 800 kilometres over 40 days
through the heart of Edmonton's river valley
Read about my pilgrimage here
 

I write because every story matters.

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I write because there is nothing else  that feels this important.

 

I have run the gamut of killing time and have come out to the other end, still breathing and wanting more. But not just writing words but reading words: essential, meaningful words, words that make me gasp, or choke, or close my eyes for seconds, minutes, or an hour; stories that may haunt me for days or weeks. And when, now and then, I can find those words myself, when I can reach so far into myself as to find something worthwhile to put down to paper, then nothing else matters until I can somehow do it all over again.​

 

One of the first novels I read as a teenager, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, revealed to me the passion of a writer, and I was transfixed. The book took me weeks to finish, and I kept on putting it down and picking it up again. At nearly a thousand pages, it felt daunting, impossible, and maybe, a bit too much. Yet, even at that age, there was an innate knowing that I must finish the book to the end, that something important and necessary was shifting within me while I was reading.

 

One passage from the book, in particular, helped wake me up from a teenage stupor I had been in for many years: "He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires." At fifteen years old, I had already begun to suspect this truth, but reading the words on paper sent my belief system spinning and dismantling.

 

Those two simple sentences changed my life trajectory, and the power that words hold over my life continues to the present day. If I were to paint a picture of the map of my life, it would be a series of suddenly shifting lines across the page, with book titles marking all the sharp angles.

 

More recently, A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, reminded me of how it feels to know that something must get put to paper, even if it is just a journal, and I am the only person who will ever read it. Even if it gets ripped out days or weeks later or the journal is put in a blue bin at year's end, there is the reminder that none of that matters; the words simply must get scribbled down.

 

It is at the beginning of the novel, and Vyshinsky asks Rostov, the poet, why he wrote a poem that may be deemed a "call to action" to the people and, therefore, a high felony and subject to life imprisonment. Rostov replies, "It demanded to be written. I simply happened to be sitting at the particular desk on the particular morning when it chose to make its demands."

 

Rostov's words remind me that nothing I write down is necessarily new, original, or even mildly witty, for that matter. For really, everything has already been said in one form or another.  But that the world continually needs reminders of what is relevant, meaningful, and necessary in that particular moment; that the writers all the world over are the very instruments of what is vital for change.

 

We are the vehicle in which words make their way back out into humanity to do the work they need to do, over and over again, through time and space, in this and that language, and in this and that country. Words hold great power, and when something grips us, anyone of us, that must get told, then we must step up and tell our story.

 

I have tried all the countless ways to ignore my call to words. But at the end of the day, my heart knows I am just killing time before the inevitable occurs; that I will shut off the TV, walk away from the refrigerator, or put down my phone, and I will open my computer, and I will once again begin to write.

 

Your story or my story, it does not matter: every story matters.