NaNoWriMo

So. It happened. I finally won NaNoWriMo! Winning was like the cherry on top of an already awesome week in which I saw Amanda Palmer at her book signing tour in Toronto, switched to the iPhone and best of all – was accepted into the Doctor of Education program at the University of Western. But all of that is for another post. This post is my chance to reflect on what I did this time that was different than all the other times I tried and did not win. There are three main points, I think.

1. I kept trying

This was my third year participating in NaNoWriMo. I first heard about NaNoWriMo on the excellent podcast Writing Excuses back in 2009. I didn’t try it until 2012 and though at that time I barely managed to scrape together a couple thousand words, I was hooked on the idea of being able to write a rough draft in a month. The first two novels I wrote were written over a period of about two years apiece (a figure that I admit shocks me now). Looking back, I can see why it took me so long to write them. In those days I was taking long breaks in between writing and I was doing a lot of thinking, a lot of plotting, a lot of brainstorming, and a lot of imagining. Basically, I was doing a lot of everything except the actual writing. The reason I put trying as #1, was that I almost didn’t do NaNoWriMo at all this year. I had a major research assignment to complete, my short collection of stories and other writings had to be completed by the end of the month and I had more than enough editing to keep me busy for months. But I wanted to try and guess what? Thanks to the support of my family and the fabulous NaNoWriMo sprinting Twitter account, I did it-I actually won and managed to finish all the other work that I had to do.

2. I wrote even when I couldn’t think of what to write

This was a big one. I was tossing around ideas for my NaNoWriMo novel right until the day the contest started which meant that I didn’t have an outline, which meant that I often got stuck about where things were going. How did I get out of this? One thing I did, was let my characters help me. So long as they wanted something that they didn’t have, there were places for the story to go. The other thing I did, was condense huge and potentially complicated action points into a single, small paragraph that allowed the story to move from one place to the next. For example, when my characters got stuck transitioning from the village to the thriving metropolis they needed to be in, I just supplied some brief sentences to get them there, knowing that I could come back to this part and fix it later. This isn’t the text I used but here’s an example:

“Her sister Adelaide did not want to leave the village that had protected them for all these years, especially for the city-which was full of danger. Margaret knew both of these things. But she left anyways.”  

The next scene I wrote showed my characters arriving in the city where more exciting parts of the story needed to unfold.

3. I wrote everyday

This was probably the biggest thing that I did and I have to thank the many authors from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman who have suggested developing the habit of writing every day and working until a project is complete. I also have to thank the Monthly Writing Challenge writing community, who’ve managed to create such a wonderful and supportive environment for developing good writing and editing habits. I joined this group in mid-July of this year. Basically, this community was for those who wanted to write but could maybe not commit to 1,000 words a day. Instead, the idea was that writers could do 500 words or 1 hour of editing a day. This was a perfect fit for me. Some days I would write and some days I would edit. And by writing a minimum of 500 words a day, I managed to complete the first draft of a young adult novel called The Fortune Teller’s Daughter by mid September. I kept on with the challenge throughout October. By the time November rolled around, I had developed a relatively strong habit of writing everyday.

The December Writing Challenge is just about to begin. The hashtag is #DecWritingChallenge. The website is www.monthlywritingchallenge.org. It’s a wonderful online community. It’s the first online community that I’ve really participated in and the writers in the community are wonderful. They have some really great blogs filled with updates on their progress, helpful tips and encouraging words.

So there you have it! All these little things that when put together helped me to write the first draft of my novel in under 30 days. Congratulations to all who participated in NaNoWriMo, whether you wrote 500 words or 50,000-each and every one of them counts!

Happy Writing & Editing,

S.

Roots of Empathy

It has been quite some time since I made an education post and I have two coming up that I want to share. The first is something that I am very excited for – my daughter Ione and I are participating in the Roots of Empathy program! Today is our first day. The school that is hosting us is called J.C. Hill school. It is the school where both of my older siblings went and it is the school where my brother-in-law teaches.

For those of you who don’t know how Roots of Empathy works, there is a great website here that provides more information.

Why are we doing this, you might ask? The biggest reason is that I love my daughter very much and babies have such strong spirits and wisdom to share with us. She loves people and I can already tell that she is excited to participate. But another reason is that I love our schools and our communities. I care about what happens to the kids in our schools and I know that some of the kids in our schools suffer from bullying. Yes, kids in our own communities are suffering from bullying and I don’t think that’s okay. Sometimes though, (and people might get mad at me for saying this) – kids don’t have an awesome support system at home. Maybe their parents are hurting, or have been bullied or bully themselves. Maybe their parents or guardians are working really hard and don’t have time to teach their kids how to treat each other, or maybe parents don’t even realize that there’s a problem. Or -  maybe their home situations are awesome but they are still having these experiences. There could be a myriad of reasons. I won't pretend that I know why things are the way they are. I definitely don’t. But even though I'm not pointing fingers at anyone, I also don’t want to pretend that this isn’t an issue.

I suppose my point is – no matter what the situation is, kids sometimes need help understanding how to have healthy, safe relationships and to treat one another with respect and kindness. This program allows kids to have a conversation about empathy and to reflect on how to have empathy for one another. I think that’s an important quality that I want my baby and other kids in our community to know. Empathy and time. It’s something we need as much (and more really) than anything else. Certainly more than designer clothes, iPads, iPods, iPhones, ATVs, or manicures and definitely as much as we need food, water and shelter.

I am also really excited to participate in the program because I know our schools have their challenges. I’m not talking about EQAO test scores here either – I mean basic, ‘this is how we treat and support one another as a community’ kinds of challenges. And because the settler colonial narrative is still saturating every element of our existence, it can be a harsh world out there for Ogwehoweh people. Dismantling that narrative is going to take sometime. But it can be done. We can transform that negative energy. We can be good to one another. I believe that. And I want to help make it happen.

In this program, the baby is the teacher. I’ve already learned so much from Ione and I look forward to learning even more from the class that we will be working with. I hope that it will help me better understand what our young people care about and hope for. I will try to keep updates as to how things go. Until then!

UPDATE:

Ione had a fantastic time in her first day of teaching! The kids in the class were awesome and the other teachers were really positive and inviting. They sang her a welcome song, weighed her and measured her. They talked about how she was developing (she liked to look outside, she could roll over, she could follow movements, she liked colours, she could grab onto things and put her bubbie, a.k.a. pacifier, in her mouth and take it back out again). Her daddy and I took a picture with the entire class. All in all, we are grateful and happy that we get to participate in this awesome program! Looking forward to our next visit :)

S.

Tales from Turtle Island

In the very first blog post I ever wrote, I talked about how I live on Turtle Island (what others refer to as North America, the United States or Canada). I didn’t always think that way. My education was very colonized. I grew up learning history that more or less precluded my own people and I looked at things very differently as a result. It wasn’t until I went to university and took Indigenous Studies classes that I learned more about the true history of the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous Peoples. It was many more years until I learned that my ancestors had a different name for this land, a name that also represented how we viewed ourselves in relation to the universe around us: through a series of interconnected and interdependent relationships.

This process of learning and unlearning has been my own personal journey of decolonization. At times, I’ve had to use language I’m not fond of to foster understanding with others. And while I think creating understanding is very important, I also realize that words are equally important – they are one of the vehicles that carry truth from one generation to the next. And the truth, my truth and the truth of my people, matters very much. My journey to decolonize and learn the truth has had a few bumps here and there, but on a whole, it has been the most transformative and happy experience I’ve ever had. I have learned songs and stories. I have started to learn my language. I have read books and developed theories. I have interacted with hundreds of wonderful people who are working in their communities in the area of education, art, and the environment. I have been inspired to create and encourage others to do the same. I have found my purpose.

Writing and telling stories, is a huge part of that purpose but it’s taken me a long time to have the courage to write, to apply myself to doing so in a serious manner and to then share what I’ve written. I didn’t know what kind of stories I wanted to tell when I first began writing and most of what I wrote - I tossed away. Even so, I never lost the desire to create. There are not many survivors of this period of writing save for a couple that I’m going to attach to this post (and probably separately under my writing tab).

The following two stories were written for a contest called Our Story: Aboriginal Writing Challenge. (Aboriginal being a perfect example of one of the words that I don’t like!) I wrote both of them in my mid-twenties. My writing style has changed a great deal since and though they certainly aren’t masterpieces, these early stories were a lot of fun. Some stories you plot, some just fly out of your imagination and onto the page. These stories were written relatively fast because back then I had a habit of writing things on the same day as they were due; I have since developed a healthy respect for making enough time in the drafting cycle for editing but believe me, it is still hard to do-I can be terribly impatient about wanting something to be finished when it could really use another round.

Each of them is about a different event that happened in my people’s history but since they were written nearly 8 years ago, they don’t have the benefit of some of the decolonizing work I’ve done since then. Still, I think they have some of my spirit in there, helping them along. The challenge is open to writers of First Nation, Métis or Inuit ancestry between the ages of 14-30. There is also a new category this year for artists age 11-13. Submissions are asked to be about a moment or theme in Indigenous history. And as fate would have it, this is probably the best description of the kind of work I love to do. It certainly describes everything I’ve worked on since then.

http://www.our-story.ca/winners/writing/310:going-the-distance

http://www.our-story.ca/winners/writing/259:recovering-ground

Without further ado, here are my submissions! I hope you find something to enjoy or learn in them - even if it's what not to do! Happy writing!

S.

Sgę:no! Indigenous Language Challenge 2014 Ft. Ganyadę:

Sgę:no! Gadewayesta Gayogo̲hono. i: agyaˀda:sdǫh ne:gyeh! #IndigenousLanguageChallenge2014 in Cayuga (Gayogo̲hono)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nkMNdJOvNM

Nya:węh!

O.

The Age Old Magic of Naming

“Our native languages are of the land. The land gives us an identity; we also give it an identity with the naming of places.” - Basil Johnston, Anishinaabe writer & storyteller

Naming is one of the most difficult tasks I experience as a writer. Names speak volumes about our characters, about who they are and how they connect with their environments in our stories. What’s in a name? Shakespeare’s Juliet asked this question when she found out that she couldn’t be with Romeo on account of his. I agree with Juliet. It’s certainly not the sole basis upon which to prejudice a relationship. But for me, what Basil is saying is actually more important, it goes deeper - names denote relationships.

This reciprocity, this mutual locating of identity between us and the land is essential.

I’ve met so many different people who talk or understand a different aspect of it. Those who are savvy about the historical experiences of Indigenous Peoples know legal aspects of it. They understand how the Papal Bulls were utilized as a malicious tool to lay claim to the lands of Indigenous Peoples. Scholars of this ilk have been trained to recognize the patterns of extinguishment at work in the everyday. They see how the renaming of places became part of the settler colonial narrative, a means to erase and subvert the relationships that Indigenous Peoples have with the land by calling them something different altogether. They’ve also started numerous projects to reclaim those relationships and discover those places anew.

But political and legal knowledge notwithstanding, many of them also know it in a spiritual way as well, as a truth. My ancestors knew that we are in an interdependent relationship with Creation. That what we do to the lands, we do to ourselves. That it’s important that we continue to make offerings of gratitude to the earth, that we continue to say kind things to the water even when it looks murky. They passed this knowledge and understanding forward because they realized it was important that I understand that they were saying real and true things. It’s not a gimmick, a logo, or a marketing ploy. It’s insight about a relationship, and like any other relationship – it requires maintenance.

The language to express these relationships are (at least to me & many other people I know, both younger and older) just as Basil explains them to be - “a precious heritage”. Those who know the language intimately get to experience something, something that can’t be known by reading about a First Nation or our culture on a Wikipedia page. Intuitively, I know that learning the language and speaking it as often as I can will enrich the whole of me: as an individual, a spirit, a writer, an educator - even a parent.

Basil writes about this in “One Generation From Extinction”, found in a collection of his essays called Think Indian: Languages are Beyond Price. Here he urges scholars, teachers, and writers to learn the language as well.

“Without language scholars, writers and teachers will have no access to the depth and width of tribal understanding, but must continue to labour as they have done these many years under the impression that ‘Indian’ stories are nothing more than fairy tales or folk lore, fit only for juvenile minds. For scholars and academics Nanabush, Raven, Glooscap, Weesaukeechauk, and other mythological figures will ever remain ‘tricksters’, culture heroes, deities whose misadventures were dreamed into being only for the amusement of children...

Just consider the fate of ‘Indian’ stories written by those who knew nothing of the language and never did hear any of the stories in their entirety or in their original version but derived everything that they knew of their subject from second, third and even fourth diluted sources. Is it any wonder then that the stories in Indian Legends of Canada by E.E. Clark or Manaboozho by T.B. Leekly are so bland and devoid of sense. Had the authors known the stories in their ‘Indian’ sense and flavour, perhaps they might have infused their versions with more wit and infusion.”

This is a particularly beautiful set of paintings by Bruce Beardy which were made to accompany an Anishnaabe language teaching document. Bruce coordinates a Native Language Teacher Progam at Lakehead University. I met him only once but was very inspired by these paintings and the entire project these paintings were for.

Perhaps this is why I struggle to name characters and places too, for that matter. Even in writing, I’m conscious of how important these relationships are and how important language is - even when I’m at my computer making up stories, this awareness is within me. It matters for some reason I can’t explain and I kind of shudder when people get it wrong, when they write things that disregard this relationship so absolutely that I wonder if they even realizing they are doing it. I had this experience lately where a book I was reading suddenly and completely trampled on my world-view and it was just such a turn off. It might have been unintentional (it seemed unintentional), but it still rankled and that’s okay. If anything, it made me happy that I’m writing my own stories, that I’m learning a language and that I’m trying to connect my truth to the page. And once I do, I’ll return to the example I mentioned and talk about it more. But first, I need to write. And yes, I just might get it wrong too and that will be okay as well. It’s a risk I’m willing to take with a creative project. It’s a risk I’m willing to take to let my daughter and other kids know that our worldview is exciting and sophisticated and epic and respectful. Ganohonyohk. It’s all real, yo.

Happy Writing,

S