Dear Rosa
I was born in winter 1960, in a Catholic hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnipeg is a
large urban centre in the middle of the country, in the prairies (or plains): grasslands:
cold winters, hot, dry summers, and springtime floods. Thunder storms every afternoon
in August. No mountains anywhere in sight. In contrast, the west coast area where I
now live is very mild, rainy and wet, thunder storms are very rare, and the cold season
snows for only days (as opposed to months) each year. Like you, I came to the sea later
in life.
I am the fifth of my parents’ six daughters, and they had two sons as well. After my
parents divorced, my father remarried, and had one son with my stepmother. Thus I am
#5 in a flock of 9. My father played guitar, and my mother painted pictures. All of their
children have some interest in the arts, whatever work we may do for day-to-day
survival.
The prairies have a very slow progression between the seasons: as a child, I was
waiting for the dirty snow to melt away, watching for buds on the plants and the first
signs of spring. The floods soaking into the ground and the plants coming alive, painting
the land green and lush. Everything fading to a dusty brown or yellow by late summer,
and the frost arriving to turn everything silver, followed by the brilliance of snowfall,
covering everything and making it all beautiful again.

the deluge of springtime
the slow conquering of green
the steady fade to yellow-browns until
in a guitar season
strings of silver frost call forth
the silence
of winter

We left urban Winnipeg for the west coast when I was 6, and lived in Vancouver for a
number of years. I attended Catholic and public schools. After my parents split up we—
my father and younger siblings— returned to Manitoba to my father’s place of origin,
rural Portage la Prairie Manitoba. In this period I observed that most branches of my
extended family were mixed race couples, Indigenous and non-Indigenous together, but
at that time I didn’t truly understand what I was seeing. We grew corn, potatoes,
radishes in our garden. We came together once a year to package meat, when
someone had sent pigs or cattle to slaughter, and shared the meat among the families.
One year we raised 100 chickens, and slaughtered them at home; my aunt attempted to
keep us interested and working by talking about the scientific aspects (anatomy) and
her own memories of growing up on the farm.
This period of rural living had a strong influence on me. We did not have running water
or flush toilet, we had an outhouse and a green hand pump in the kitchen, and burned
our garbage out behind the house. After my years with my father in rural Manitoba, I
went to live with my mother in southern Ontario, in Windsor, across the river from

Detroit Michigan. This is a factory town, and an area with many more people than where
I’d lived before. I completed high school and attended university, with a year out in
between to revisit Manitoba.
I left university after two years, and returned to Vancouver. The hardest thing about
adapting to the west coast was the fact that most plants remained green all year!
Without the seasonal rhythms I had grown up around, I felt out of step, uncertain.

I should introduce you to my late husband, Nick. I first fell in love with Nick when I was
18 years old, when we both attended the University of Windsor, in Ontario. We had an
off-again, on-again relationship for about three years. We hitch-hiked across Canada
together, from Windsor to the east coast, and then to the west coast.
I left school early, after Nick returned to his parents’ home in Evansville Indiana USA. I
relocated to the west coast, after experiencing an assault, to be close to my mother and
some of my elder sisters, and my grandparents. Nick and I spoke of marrying, and he
moved to Seattle to be closer to me. But I didn’t want to emigrate to the US. I lived with
my eldest sister, then with a friend (taking care of her young daughter), then I moved
into a rooming house. I met the father of my eldest four children in one of these shared
accomodations.
Brian and I lived together for about 11 years, and had four sons. We never married. He
was very supportive of me as a writer, and I supported him in returning to school,
completing his high school, and attending both college and university. I attended a Co-
operative Employment for Women program, and received training in computer skills and
organizational work. Brian received a scholarship to study in Taiwan, so we moved to
Taipei with our two small children. When we returned to Canada, I attended my first
Unlearning Racism workshop, and began connecting with other “women of unknown
and/or mixed heritage.” I participated in Women and Words writing summer school,
learning from Beth Brant (Mohawk), who directed me to co-facilitate my first Unlearning
Racism workshop for the community of writers, not long after my first attendance. My
first four books were published in this period, by feminist publishers (Press Gang in
Vancouver and Women’s Press in Toronto). I continued facilitating and co-facilitating
UR workshops in western Canada for the next seven+ years.

Brian and I had a rough break-up. The judge at family court sent us to mediation, and
we arranged a co-parenting schedule that worked well for all, and continues to this day.
It was at this time in my life that I threw myself headfirst into Indigenous support
programs, some four or five traditional parenting programs, and healing trauma
programs, and eventually connected with the Indigenous people working in the school
districts my children attended. I was a founding member of Richmond First Nations

Parent Support Group, which eventually merged with school district offerings, and later I
was on the advisory group for Pathways Indigenous Family Centre.
After a few years of adapting to my new feast-and-famine life as a single parent with
half-time custody, I got in touch with Nick again, who was still in Seattle. We began
dating again and married soon after. We showed our new maturity and patience in filling
out all of the forms required for him to immigrate. Nick and I lived for seven years
together, and had two children, alongside the four I had with my previous partner. We
separated and co-parented the youngest children for another seven years. In 2016, Nick
died in hospital, after just three months of medical support and family awareness of his
health crises (prostate cancer).

I make my living as a writer, editor, mentor, teacher, and adjudicator (for literary
programs), juggling many small contracts, a mix of paid and unpaid work. All of my work
is literary-focussed, and much of it is Indigenous-focussed, but not all. As a mixed-blood
person, I feel it is important for me to make a bridge between the settler and Indigenous
societies, and in particular between the immigrant-settler-Indigenous societies co-
existing in Canada.

Among my projects, I hosted some online writers groups for Indigenous mother writers,
and I organized two events for mothers, a storytelling session focussed on birth (with
Lee Maracle) and a writing retreat (with Maria Campbell) for Indigenous mothers and
grandmothers, provided without cost to the participants. Maria bade us all to go forth
and begin teaching, so, I co-organized the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast,
which brings established and emerging Indigenous writers together for social events
and for projects, including a few fundraisers, a few events honouring elder writers who
have passed, a special magazine issue, Salish Seas an anthology of text & art in 2011,
and— this year— a start-up magazine, Salt Chuck City Review.
One of the people I met through the collective was Vera Manuel, a playwright and poet,
we became friends in the final years of her life. We were working together on her first
collection of poetry when she passed. I connected with her sister Emalene and two
other co-editors, and together we brought a collection of her writings to press this year,
Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry by Vera Manuel (U of
Manitoba Press).
Over the years I have published six books of poetry, three chapbooks of poetry, a book
of essays and a children’s illustrated book about natural childbirth. I have edited four
books of others’ poetry, and an anthology of indigenous writings. I have a second book
of essays and talks forthcoming next year. I also have made a commitment to bring
together the book my dear friend Connie Fife (Cree Metis) was working on when she

died in early 2017. I have begun teaching in recent years, Indigenous perspectives in
Creative Writing and Poetry.
How best to understand my poetry? I write with a musical ear and a sensory or sensual
base, and I draw on many cultures to inform myself. This “many cultures” is not a
rejection of my Indigenous cultural heritage so much as an anxious response to being a
marginal or peripheral mixed-blood person (am I welcome?), and an expression of my
urban multicultural influences. While many of my poems engage with broad social and
cultural challenges, many celebrate my children, the grass, the moon, and other loved
ones.