A confession: my second book of poetry is coming out in 6 weeks, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid of bad reviews, I’m afraid of people not buying it, I’m afraid of giving readings. But mainly I’m afraid of people finding out I’m a fraud.
Sure, I wrote the book. But that was ten years ago this very spring — ten years! At 27, I was fresh out of two graduate degrees, and I wrote it while attending the Banff Centre writing studio for five weeks. Someone else made my bed. Someone else cooked my food. My daily routine looked like this: get up early. Swim some laps in the glassed-in pool. Sit in the hot tub. Go for breakfast and chat with fabulous, interesting people. Write for three hours. Eat lunch. Go for a long walk by myself along the Hoodoos trail and notice what new flowers had come out. Read. Meet with mentor. Maybe nap. Go for supper. Socialize with women who I had just met, but who are still my friends today (incidentally both are also launching books this spring, too) or go to the hot springs. Go to bed. Repeat.
At 27, with no children and no mortgage (but of course with student loans), I had Absolutely No Idea how good I had it. I did not know I would not have such freedom again within that ten year period. I had no idea that this book — inspired by a dream the very first night I arrived — would be completely written in that five weeks, and that now I would look at it as an absolute and complete gift.
Because somewhere in that ten years, I had three children, who are now 9, almost 5, and 2. And over the entire course of that ten years, I helped support my husband through medical training. Now I continue to work full time while helping pay off the mortgage on his head and put food on the table. On Saturdays I somehow find myself parking our beat-up mini-van in the Costco parking lot without knowing how I got there.
That’s not to say I haven’t written. I’ve written and edited all sorts of things for work—including about meeting women Fair Trade producers in Uganda and Kenya. In late March of this year, my editorial happy-hat was firmly on my head as I edited a piece about a young anthropologist who lived with the Dukha in Mongolia.
And I have managed to write creatively—but only a wee little bit. I went to a heavenly writing retreat for 2 weeks in Chile when my middle child was a year and a half (an excellent way to wean) where I finished a third manuscript that needs (or I realized late last year) some rejigging. And of course, with the most astute Beth Follet at Pedlar Press, I edited Barren the Fury. But writing generally comes in tiny bits and snatches. I’m writing this while sitting on a bench outside my daughter’s choir practice.
That’s not to say I’m not proud of Barren. I am. The benefit of having ten years between the writing and the editing is that I could hear my editor’s suggestions with far less ego. And, ten years later, it’s a book I still stand by thematically and line-by-line. I think that if I were a reader who happened across it, it would move me deeply.
It’s just that I’m not sure my life qualifies as the writing life — unless the writing life is living in constant negotiation trying to get more writing time. And maybe that negotiation is what the writing life’s really about. It’s not the romantic notion I had in grad school or at Banff. I am ever grateful to Jane Urquhart, who, at one festival, when asked at a festival what the Writing Life was like, responded, “I get up in the morning, and I unload the dishwasher.” I am also ever grateful to Don McKay, who said during that marvellous retreat in Chile, “a poet’s job is to observe. You won’t always be writing.”
Those words have been like calcium for my crumbling creative bones, and I will likely have to keep dosing myself with them for a few more years to come as the brain mortgage gets paid off and the children grow older. But I can keep observing. I can keep stealing those bits of time. I can keep my dreams open for the next gift.
Brenda Leifso’s poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Her first book, Daughters of Men , was published by Brick Books in 2008 and was shortlisted for Ottawa’s Archibald Lampman award for best book of poetry. She lives in Kingston, Ontario with her family of five.
