This is how I’m making WRITING* my full-time career.

The laptop burns against my chest—3 AM again, the familiar weight of deadline pressure mixed with Zoloft and the particular anxiety that comes from knowing you have something important to say but not knowing if anyone wants to hear it. My heart does its usual palpitation dance, beta blockers keeping the worst of it at bay, and I realize: This is it. This is the moment I stop being afraid of putting myself out there.

Recently, I read another shallow take on Indigenous literature that managed to mention trauma three times and land acknowledgement zero times. The piece—by a well-meaning white critic from Central Canada—discussed “authentic voices” while somehow avoiding any actual Indigenous writers. Again. Similar pieces regularly get loud recognition online. Meanwhile, comprehensive analysis from NDN writers with lived experience struggle for visibility.

That gap—between what gets attention and what needs attention—is where I’m planting my garden. My flag.

## **When Literature Becomes Wallpaper**

Literary journalism has become wallpaper. Beautiful, sometimes. Intellectually decorative. But, ultimately, background noise in a world that desperately needs critical nuanced thought to matter again.

I spent four years getting an English Honours degree at Mount Royal University. 3.8 GPA. Golden Key Society. The whole academic validation machine. I read the theory, wrote the papers, learned to speak the language of literary criticism. But somewhere between deconstructing Derrida and analyzing settler colonialism in Margaret Atwood, I realized something crucial was missing from most literary coverage: **Bodies.**

Real bodies. Indigenous bodies navigating white institutions. Queer bodies finding home in hostile spaces. Prairie bodies existing outside the Toronto-Montreal literary axis. Bodies that bleed and sweat and panic and heal through words.

Most literary journalism treats books like museum pieces. Sacred objects to be analyzed from a respectful distance. Meanwhile, I use Fyodor Dostoevsky to understand my own suicidal ideation, finding my Mémère’s spirituality in Louise Erdrich novels, and building community through shared vulnerability in a university writing club that grew to over 100 members.

Literature is medicine. Not decoration. And literary journalism should reflect that urgency.

### **What My Hands Know About Writing**

My hands know the difference between the smooth plastic of my MacBook keyboard and the rough texture of the journal pages where I’ve writtensince age 14. Hands which know the weight of eight published books—from [*The Dogwood Verses*](https://www.amazon.ca/DOGWOOD-VERSES-Chapbook-Selected-2011-2021/dp/B09KN7Y9K1) (587 pages of poetry spanning a decade) to [*Prairie Boyspirit*](https://www.amazon.ca/PRAIRIE-BOYSPIRIT-Brenna