November and All the New Projects
Hi everyone and happy November! I’m just wrapping up a short vacation and have been enjoying the chance to catch up on some of my creative projects. October was a hectic but interesting month. I travelled to California for the first time to attend the 2019 International Conference of Indigenous Libraries, Archives, and Museums, which is organized by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums. It was such a great conference and it gave me a lot of ideas for things to do and ways to move forward at my work (I work at the the Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre in my community).
I also attended a great event that Deyohahá:ge: cohosted with the Archives of Ontario towards the end of October. Over the summer and early fall then, I’d been busy thinking about and reading about archival practice, Indigenous knowledge and language revitalization, along with other interesting areas that have stemmed out of my various work and research projects. Because this blog is mostly a space for me to write about my (creative) writing and art, I’ve decided to create another place to write and share about these other areas in case anyone finds them as interesting as I do. In order to do that, I’ll be starting a new blog that focusses more specifically on my research. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes because I’ve always found so many intersections between what I do—writing, art, learning, researching, and trying to live a good, peaceful life, but I also recognize that each of these areas (writing, research, and art) has a life of its own. I’ve started to create the site and upload some content but it will be a few months or so before I launch it. So that’s something I’m looking forward to but in the meantime, I’m continuing on with my creative work—the work I treasure the most!
I’ve said before that being in school for as long as I was took a toll on my creative process. This past month, I’ve been in rebuilding mode. Getting reacquainted with how I outline stories, how I set daily targets, how I set aside time for editing. I have seven projects to write across three different series to work on and I want to finish all of them within the next two years (a few of them already have first drafts and outlines), but finishing them will take time and focus. At present, I’m currently doing NaNoWriMo to get a draft of the The Lightning Song done, which is the second Cora Solomon story after The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. The moment I’m done that, I’ll be doing final edits on The Wall of Bones (The Vampire Skeleton series) and The Fortunes of Ithaca (Fortune & Fall series). In short, there's lots of exciting new stories on the way but it will take me some time to finish them up.
Happily, there are other projects that I have finished that I’m really excited to share about. The first one is the follow up to the children’s book Treaty Baby. The new book is called, We Give Our Thanks. It’s illustrated (as Treaty Baby was) by my sister, Alyssa. I wrote the book two years ago, and she worked at the illustrations last summer. We released the book a few months ago and it’s one of my favourites!
The second project is a few poems and some art that appear in an upcoming issue of the Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine. I wrote a ton of poems over the last four years that I’ve been slowly putting together into a collection but for now, being able to share a few of them was nice. I’ll update with a link to the magazine in a future blog but in the meantime, here's one of the art pieces that was included in the edition.
A third project is Akwa:ji:ya', another book in our Cayuga language series, which I didn’t write but have been having a lot of fun illustrating. I love working on the Cayuga books. I’ve been really doubling down on my Cayuga language learning the past few weeks and making efforts to speak as much as I can. I’m determined to level up my speaking this year and so a lot of my spare time is going into that!
And a last bit of work that is forthcoming is a short story that's part of an anthology launching in December. The book is called Bawaajigan and features a lot of wonderful work by several Indigenous authors. I’m excited for it and really love the story that's appearing in it. I wrote it a few years back and it was inspired by dreams and some of my travels through Upper New York State.
Anyways, I’m very happy to share about these projects while I continue working on others. Being on vacation this last week has given me an opportunity to clear my head and sharpen my focus on what I want most and what I’m most grateful for: family, health, language proficiency, and creativity. There’s been a lot happening in our lives, in our community and in the world this year, and everyday there seem to be more and more reasons to think on and question how we can grow, change, make better decisions, and challenge ourselves to leave even less of an ecological footprint while still making a lasting, helpful impact on the people we like and love. For me, art, creativity and reflection is a huge part of navigating these questions and manifesting change in a positive way. I look forward to making more art for the rest of the year, and to start thinking about the projects the new year will bring! I hope you’re all well and until next time, happy creating :).
S.