I overheard someone in a restaurant say, “Humans are difficult.” I wonder, are we difficult? Possibly. Sometimes. Or are we enclosed inside our own worlds searching out common threads that will connect us beyond our own skin, and give us a sense of belonging?
Do the stories in my life carry shades of kinship to your life stories?
There is a story in all of us, because we are story-makers, and some of us, storytellers.
As I write another story, another novel, it’s clearer to me now, more than I’ve ever experienced that I need to tell stories, and that those I write are coming from deep within me. How does that make me any different from anyone else who lives a life, feels a story? It doesn’t. But my story is coming from where I live. My story holds particular people, particular ways of being inside a personal world that creates my unique being, just as your personal being is creating your unique self. No one, not one person has the same combination of events, the same coming together of experiences, the same colour of hopes, the same invention of a day, the same quality of regrets and yet, we all want to find the threads of connection, among us, whether with families, with friendships, with the check-out person in the grocery store. And…we want someone, someday to witness the essence of ourselves, and understand the remarkable bravery of being who we’ve chosen to be.
What disparities we experience.
Yet in the midst of my words as I sit here, surrounded by nature, I experience such connection and paradox.
Might it be that creating a novel about two women — Emmaline, a history professor in 2012, Kate a Loyalist woman in 1791 — who live in different eras, has opened a channel for me as a writer and a woman where I feel that the kinships with the past are possible, that a human closeness can be entangled within differences of times, of eras, of experiences — even though we are difficult humans.
Kate and Emmaline’s lives are my unique creation; their creation a composite of me.