Email allows connection with readers

One of the things about the writer’s life that I love the most is the seclusion. I’ve always been a loner at heart and maybe it’s fitting that I found my way to this work.
There’s something about the private confines of the imagination and the intellect that fulfills me and I love nothing better than to sit at my writing space and create. We’re conjurers, we writers. We create whole worlds out of thin air or fashion messages that touch, enlighten and empower people.
But sometimes I get to actually step out into the world with my work or as a result of my work and meet the people who read me. It’s always fascinating. I never consciously consider who I’m writing for.
I write each story for the story’s sake. But when I go out into the real world I meet people of every stripe and background and I come away empowered to carry on.
In the last year or so I’ve allowed my email address to be attached to my newspaper columns and on my personal website. The result of that is that I get emails from people all the time; strangers and friends I’ve never met. Maybe they’ve read a newspaper column, heard me on the radio, saw me on television, attended one of my workshops, heard a speech or a lecture or read one of my books. Most of the time it’s really good to hear from them and some of their comments really make my day.
I got one from a woman in southern Ontario who wrote about rediscovering her Native family after almost 30 years. She wrote about the fascination of seeing her features on the faces of people she’d never met before. She wrote about the feeling of seeing people she’d only ever fantasized about, touching them, feeling them as real and vibrant. She thanked me for my first novel Keeper’n Me which speaks about the same experience. For her that story validated a lot of what she experienced.
Then there are the youth who write to ask about the craft of writing or else to ask me to do an interview with them for a book assignment. I get a lot of those. I always take the time to respond to those because it’s our responsibility as the older generation to be available and because it’s fun.
Our youth are smart and savvy and hip and they have a lot of really good questions like “If you weren’t a writer what would you be?” I don’t know if I’d ever considered that before.
Along with them are emails from elders who thank me for carrying on our storytelling tradition in different media over the years. Those mean a lot to me. To have your Elders tell you that the work that you do is important to the well being of the people is as high a praise as I’ve ever gotten. I received an honourary doctor of letters degree recently and that honour pales in comparison to the praise of those who taught me how to tell stories in the first place.
There are sad messages too – a brother who committed suicide, a young man off to prison for 20 years, a woman lost to the streets and drugs and prostitution, children disappeared into foster care, an alcoholic death in a snowbank and Elders who die alone in terrible conditions.
There seem to be a lot of those kinds of messages and they all touch me and make me wonder how we can help each other cope better than we do right now.
People want to share their stories. It’s why they write to a stranger and tell him what’s going on in their lives. Everyone has things they want to share, get off their chest or just let go of for awhile so they can carry on.
Everyone has the desire to be heard, to be known, to matter even if it’s only for the amount of time it takes to read a few dozen paragraphs. I recognize that and I enjoy the human contact even if it’s desperate or sad.
Everyone wants to be heard. Everyone deserves to be. There are millions of stories out there in the big wide world and that’s what makes it such an amazing planet. All those voices, all those possibilities, all those spirits engaged in the task of living. Even a lifelong loner like me has the inherent ability to recognize the need for folks to reach out and each of those stories make me more and less of a loner.
I think we become better people by our ability to hear each other’s stories. I don’t answer all the emails I get. I couldn’t but I’m touched by the humanity in each and every one – they make me bigger inside.