Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #40

Featuring Chelene Knight, Sheila Stewart, Damian Tarnopolsky, and Luciana Erregue


Chelene Knight, author of Safekeeping: A Writer’s Guided Journal For Launching a Book with Love (House of Anansi Press, January 2025)

I wrote Safekeeping: A Writer’s Guided Journal For Launching a Book With Love because I saw a significant gap in the writing and publishing world. Few resources focus on building an aligned creative journey that truly makes sense for the individual writer—a journey that requires deep self-reflection, asking specific and honest questions about who we are as individuals. This kind of intentional work has been at the heart of my career since I left my day job in 2017. Since then, I’ve dedicated myself full-time to helping writers integrate writing into their lives in sustainable, personalized ways—on their terms and for the long haul.

I want Safekeeping to spark curiosity about what’s possible—to encourage writers to explore beyond the boundaries they may have set for themselves. My hope is that this journal will also teach the power of reflection. Within that reflection lies valuable insight into what we’re truly capable of achieving.

When I first started as a writer, I never imagined I’d have five books across five different genres. Yet, that’s exactly where my unique path led me. I’m so grateful I leaned into what first inspired me to write and allowed that passion to guide the way.

It’s easy to compare ourselves to other writers, but when we pause, embrace discomfort, and turn inward, that’s where the writing takes the wheel.

CHELENE KNIGHT is the author of Let It GoBraided Skin, and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award and longlisted for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her novel, Junie, won the 2023 Vancouver Book Award, was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction. Chelene is the founder of Breathing Space Creative, home to the Thrive Coaching Program.


Sheila Stewart, author of If I Write About My Father (Ekstasis Editions, June 2024)

The first night after my new job at the University of Toronto, I had a vivid dream in which my father’s clerical robes were hanging in the corner of my office. The professor I was working with came in and turned directly to the robes. He began exchanging the sacrament with my father who was hidden in the folds of the robes, only his hands appearing. 

While this dream is not the origin of If I Write About My Father, it prompted me to think about the parallels between hierarchies within the church and the university, and is reworked in one of the poems.

A few years later as I began my PhD, I wrestled with my authority as so many students do. I began writing about my father alongside other research interests, as academics call them. Such interests or obsessions are fuel to writers.

Years later my new poetry collection, If I Write About My Father, features poems titled “Robes”, “Gowns”, “Dad’s bowtie”, and “Stitches”. Imagery of threads and cloth supports an exploration of family disquiet, a teasing apart of entangled knots. I didn’t set out to write a book about my relationship with my father, but it was material I needed to explore. 
My first book, A Hat to Stop a Train, was about my relationship with my mother, her life as a minister’s wife, and her reluctant immigration from Northern Ireland. If I Write About My Father can be seen as the companion to that earlier collection. This collection dives deeper into gender roles, the restraint of our Northern Irish family, and the constriction of growing up in the church in small-town Ontario. It moves towards release — the pleasures of walking among trees and along the shores of Lake Ontario.

Sheila Stewarts publications include two poetry collections, A Hat to Stop a Train and The Shape of a Throat, and a co-edited anthology of poetry and essays entitled The Art of Poetic Inquiry. Awards include the gritLIT Contest, the Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words, and the Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest. Her poetry has been widely published in Canadian and international journals. She recently left teaching at the University of Toronto to devote herself to writing.


Damian Tarnopolsky, author of Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster (Freehand Books, September 2024)

I think we all start as readers. I mean as children, pointing at what we love, wanting to do it too. A good proportion of my life experience has happened between the pages of someone else’s book, where I’ve been shaken up and enchanted and calmed and stirred. That’s why I wrote it: to try and pass something like this on to someone else. Well, it would be nice to say so and leave it there, but there’s a lot of ego here too. There are a lot of things you can do with your time on this planet, and you really have to want to spend years of it writing a book. I should try to be honest about that.

But why this book in particular? In a way this is a 5 a.m. book: I mean I have a friend who can only write at 5 a.m., before emails and checking the news and being a person in the world with obligations and friends, before all that, in contact with a different version of himself, solitary and thoughtful. We all need something like this, I think; a way to contact and acknowledge things we hide and avoid, things that make us uncomfortable because they’re too profane or too holy or too beautiful or too serious. Some people do it through prayer, or drugs, or exercise. I do it through reading and writing. 

What happened was this: I was working on a novel, and put it aside. (This is a polite way of saying that I got to a point where only one of us was going to make it out of that that room, either the novel or me.) In despair, I opened up a folder on my old hard drive; old stories there. Hmm, haven’t looked at those in a while. Around this time, I joined a writing group which focused on short stories. Started reading some really good ones, not my usual reading. Started looking at my old ones differently. Started writing some new ones. I was thinking a lot about the self, about families, around this time, about what it’s all about. Got stuck, and read George Saunders’s book on the Russian short story, and he got me moving again. Started putting old and new stories together, looking at ways they might work together and against each other.  Got stuck, and showed it to Jane Warren, great editor, great friend, and she got me moving again. 

I don’t want to be too deliberately opaque, but when you get down to it, there’s only so much you know about why you write. Most of what you say is borrowed or inaccurate, and it’s all after the fact. I know some things about why I wrote Every Night…., but these days I’m being turned around by the unexpected things people tell me about what they think it means, and what it means to them. My part in this book maintains a little mystery for me too, and I like that, as it goes out into the world and changes and grows.

Damian Tarnopolsky’s most recent book is Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster. His work has been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Journey Prize, and he won the Voaden Prize for Playwriting in 2019. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto.  damiantarnopolsky.com


Luciana Erregue, author of Of Mothers and Madonnas (Polyglot, 2023)

In 2016 I had finished my MA in Art History at the University of Alberta. There had been lots of ideas, words, languages, and images left “on the cutting floor” of my dissertation. In 2017 I published my first ekphrastic poem in English and Spanish with Polyglot Magazine, then in 2018 more poems appeared thanks to my participation in the WGA’s mentorship program Borderlines Writers Circle under the guidance of Pierrette Requier and Anna Marie Sewell. I completed the manuscript that would become the chapbook Of Mothers and Madonnas in 2019 while participating in the Banff Centre Literary Arts writing residency under poet Liz Howard. The chapbook is an invitation to the reader to think of their own “Marvellous Museum” or gallery of images and languages. This ekphrastic mini memoir contains poems and short prose pieces on my childhood under the Argentinian dictatorship, immigration, family life in Canada, motherhood, and womanhood in the XXI Century. Rather than serving raw trauma narratives, my poems conceal and reveal with humour, melancholy, and wordplay. What makes this chapbook special to me are the collages of personal childhood photos brilliantly curated by artist Gianmarco Visconti who designed the entire chapbook, sensitively edited and published by Adriana Onita through her imprint Polyglot. 

Luciana Erregue-Sacchi is an Argentinian-Canadian art historian, visual artist, facilitator, speaker, cultural connector,author, translator and publisher. She is the founder of award winning Alberta publishing house Laberinto Press. In 2023 she published her poetry chapbook Of Mothers and Madonnas. Her work has appeared in Humber Literary, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Luciana is a Banff Literary Arts Program Alumna.
www.laberintopress.com
IG: @wearelaberintopress

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