Reflections on the Horizons Writers Circle by Naomi McIlwraith

Fourteen Alberta writers recently concluded their participation in the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Horizons Writers Circle, its mentorship program for writers within the Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) community, ESL, and underrepresented writers living in Edmonton. The program ran from October 2022 to March 2023, under the coordination of publisher and writer Luciana Erregue-Sacchi. Writers from diverse backgrounds in the early stages of their careers received mentorship from experienced writers in a series of workshops, panels and one-on-one activities. The program introduces new writers to the wider Edmonton community, helping them make new contacts in the industry, and thrive in their writing careers. We asked two of the participants, mentor Naomi McIlwraith and mentee K’alii Luuyaltkw to reflect on the experience for the EAC blog. (You can read mentee K’alii Luuyaltkw’s guest blog article here).

Inward Journeys and Saskatoon Pie by Naomi McIlwraith

Writing is a journey from an urge to an idea to a crafted composition. It’s this process that both intrigues and inspires me when I think of how the human brain goes from the tiniest little seed of a thought to a finished piece that has been nurtured with water and sun and love into a polished whole that is now a Saskatoon bush, bows bent with juicy fruit, in the full flush of the last two weeks of July. This to me is what mentoring looks like too, especially mentoring newer Indigenous writers with their own writing. When I went a few years ago to a strange bar somewhere in Edmonton for the 30^th reunion of my high school graduation, I was struck by the bizarreness of it all. As I ruminated over the fact that we were all 48 winters old, a really rich guy from my high school days came over to commiserate with me that he’d had to settle for being a plain old doctor when he couldn’t invest all that time into being a specialist. Now it’s been 42 winters since I graduated high school, and I’m still fighting the same old battle of how to make a living as a writer, as my really rich doctor friend contemplates retirement. I am, however, the luckiest woman in the world with all the beautiful opportunities that have come to me because I chose writing, the most recent and most important a Mentorship opportunity with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Horizons Writers’ Circle for BIPOC writers. A thinker, a teacher, a writer, a poet, – all these roles I love doing as I mentor new writers. I love how the Mentor/​Mentee relationship is just another glorious example that the real world is better and infinitely more interesting than all being the same age at the same time. My need for Saskatoon bushes and rivers and mosquitoes and bright yellow warblers with skinny little red streaks on their feathery breasts means that I don’t fit well into a classroom with four walls. But I get to be a teacher in other creative ways. Writing has helped me find my voice, and I am vibrating with glee that I get to mentor new writers as they find their own voices. A speechless wisp of a girl 42 years ago, I’m not quite so wispy anymore and I’m not quite so speechless, and this is all because I have been blessed with the best of Mentors who have helped me not only find my voice but find myself. Voice is identity too. Part of my voice is Indigenous and part of my voice is Scottish, English, Norwegian, French, ….. And I now take quite seriously my responsibility to share all that I’ve learned and all that I’ve gained from my Mentors as I help my Indigenous Mentees find their voices and discover who they are. As a Métis woman, I am a peacemaker negotiating all of my identities, and to my role as a Mentor I bring my skills in negotiating and talking, listening and laughing and cajoling my Mentees into planting for themselves all the seeds that will ripen as their composition germinates and is refined into a delightfully finer form than the first draft. This is absolutely essential that the Mentor reject expecting perfection either from herself or from her Mentee. Perfection means paralysis: as a Mentor, therefore, I encourage my Mentees to get their words down onto paper in whatever form they land. As a Mentor, I am duty bound to show my Mentees the way to get their ideas down onto the first draft and then to point them in the direction down the trail through the second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts until they have nurtured their thoughts into the exquisite form that is now a Saskatoon bush reaching high into the sky. Writing is by nature an interior journey: thoughtful people we writers are. nêhiyaw philosopher Willie Ermine’s comment about the inner journey makes a great deal of sense to me:

The relentless subjugation of Aboriginal people and the discounting of their ideas have hurt those aboard the Aboriginal voyage of discovery into the inner space. The tribal crews, along with their knowledge and secrets, came precariously close to aborting their inward missions. Meanwhile, the Western world-view and the concomitant exploration of the outer space continued unabated for the next five centuries. Acquired knowledge and information were disseminated as if Western voyages and discoveries were the only valid sources to knowing. The alternative expeditions and discoveries in subjective inner space by Aboriginal people wait to be told (Ermine ​“Aboriginal Epistemology” 1995)

Subjective inner space indeed. This is what being a Mentor in an Indigenous artist context means to me, and I aim to help my Mentees find their voices and themselves in their own subjective inner spaces. My Indigenous Mentees’ stories are waiting to be told!

Nearly twenty years ago, I served as the Conference Scribe for an Indigenous Feminism Conference at the University of Alberta, and Dolores van der Wey, an Indigenous presenter, said something that became a gift and has stayed with me since. She spoke about ​“pause time,” which is the time a listener takes to absorb and process what she has heard from someone speaking to her. Rather than interrupt her duty to listen deeply, the listener maintains her commitment to attend to the speaker. The listener refrains from checking out of the conversation to think of how she will respond to what is being said to her, she resists the urge to impose her own thoughts on what she hears, and she accepts the invitation of the speaker to journey inward.

The listener listens, truly listens. What a gift!

This pause time is rich with potential, and this is another powerful motivator for me. I do fiercely believe that listening deeply is an Indigenous cultural practice that must continuously resist the noisy forces of a colonial world that makes it difficult to hear and to listen. I am a peacemaker, and I want to hear my Mentees thoughts fully and completely, so that I may coach them forward in the best way possible. This pause time is a gift that the listener gives to her interlocutor. It is a gift to be heard above the cacophony, and the Horizons Writers’ Circle offers Mentors and Mentees an important opportunity to hear each other deeply and meaningfully as they venture inwardly toward those tiniest little kernels of thought, thoughts as nascent as a cluster of seeds and help them grow into a beautiful juicy Saskatoon pie of a composition that we simply cannot resist!

Thank you to Ellen Kartz for being such a champion of writers and for inviting me to apply to be a Mentor, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Program Coordinator of the Horizons’ Writers Circle, Giorgia Severini, Executive Director of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, and to Rona Altrows, the Edmonton Community Foundation, and the Edmonton Arts Council for supporting this important program that is so vital to the health of our community!

A writer, a teacher, a canoe paddler, a trail walker, and a deep street talker extraordinaire, Naomi McIlwraith is a Métis poet who reads and writes and listens and talks to figure things out. Moreover, Naomi writes to honour her ancestors both Indigenous and European, her Mom and Dad and the rest of her family. She also writes and talks to make peace in a dangerous world. You will find ​“Peacemaker” on Naomi’s resume. Her favourite words are ​“imagine” and ​“tawâw.”

Work cited Ermine, Willie. ​“Aboriginal Epistemology” in Southern Door: Connecting With and Maintaining Our Relations. Eds. Marie Battiste and Jean Barman. First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1995.

van der Wey, Dolores. ​“Pause Time.” Women Writing Reading: Indigenous Feminism Conference. Edmonton: University of Alberta, August 2005.