"Clinging to what saves me" by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

Tanya at work

 Clinging to what saves me

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

 

When I’m writing a novel,

there are certain things I can control:

who says what, and where, who gets to fall in love

and who must die a tragic death

alone, on a bridge, under a moonless sky.

 

I make wondrous things happen:

like finding hidden treasure

or a message in a bottle,

a new constellation

or a city hidden beneath the sea.

 

It’s exhilarating and exhausting

to exert such control, to be the mastermind

of my detailed maps and charts and timelines,

my lists of names and dates and perils.

 

But when the world beyond my desk tilts sideways,

slides off the edge and is swallowed into the abyss,

when catastrophe and plague threaten

like pirates to set my ship on fire,

grab me by the throat and rob me blind

 

my stories are the flotsam that will save me,

the driftwood oars that will row me to shore,

build a fire to warm my shivering body

and shelter me from the raging storm.

***

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt is an accomplished author. Her latest memoir, Carrying War, was published by Dundurn Press in August 2026 (see here). She’s also the author of her critically acclaimed memoir Peacekeeper’s Daughter, available through the publisher, Thistledown Press here or order it through your local bookstore (see here). 

Tanya has also published two volumes of poetry with Shoreline Press: Chaos Theories of Goodness (here) and The Hospitality of Trees (here).

Tanya’s award-winning essays, poems and fictions have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Grain, Prairie Fire, Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and Best Canadian Essays 2015 and 2019. She holds an MA in English Literature from McGill and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.

Visit Tanya online here.

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