A Single Bloom

On Books, Mentors & A Fire Horse Year

Dear Fellow Dreamer,

I like rituals. One of mine is to place a crystal paperweight on top of the most recent printed version of my current project. Inside the paperweight is a rose. “A single bloom.” Those are the words author Wayson Choy wrote in a card he gave me along with the memento back in 2013—on a cold night in January over dinner at Allen’s restaurant on Danforth Avenue in Toronto.

At the time, Wayson had read and endorsed my first novel manuscript, and placed it in the hands of his literary agent, who’d signed me. It was a moment when I suspended disbelief and imagined things might go easily. They didn’t. But that night at Allen’s, we were celebrating.

I’d learned of Wayson Choy’s work years earlier when I taught his novel, The Jade Peony, to my English students at the school where I’d been a faculty member for twenty years. It’s a novel told from the perspectives of three different children in an immigrant family growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the late 1930s and ‘40s. “Mingling with the realities of Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, paper uncles and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family.” It’s a beautiful book. One that highlights the tensions of being “‘neither this nor that,’ neither entirely Canadian nor Chinese.” But The Jade Peony also reveals what it is for one of the young characters to be gay in a time period when such a fact stayed hidden.

Wayson was an openly gay man. In his professional life as a longtime creative writing teacher at Toronto’s Humber College, then later, as a full-time writer bringing his books into form, Wayson championed gay Asian writers in Canada, as he did all LGBTQ2S individuals. He also championed the plight of immigrants, and other outsiders to the mainstream culture. He felt an alliance with and allegiance to such outsiders. As I do.

My first novel, The Shining Fragments, was about an Irish Catholic immigrant boy making his way in late Victorian Toronto—a city becoming modern, one of burgeoning industrialism and bigotry, with the attendant spectacles and private horrors. On one level, it’s a study of escapism and being haunted—of not quite fitting. Of wanting what you can’t have, but also something more. Something possible. One’s true path. My central character is an artist.

At the table that night in Allen’s, I remember the teacher in Wayson leaning forward and telling me that no matter what happened with my book, whether the agent could sell it or not, whether it ever got published, we needed to celebrate a single bloom.

Later in 2013 and 2014, my little paperweight sat on rewrites of The Shining Fragments. From 2014 to 2016, it perched on Birdlight. Sometimes it rested on poems. Since the pandemic, it’s remained in place on many drafts of my forthcoming novel, River of Dreams. After the manuscript was accepted for publication in 2024, I knew I’d need to wait in the queue for a couple of years for our turn to come around. On February 2nd I submitted the final version to the publisher.

Here it is, in its penultimate recurrence as a stack of paper. Along with Wayson’s paperweight are two Zuni fetishes, a pair of pin feathers, and a quartz crystal.

We’re heading into the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse. A year of yang energy and, according to Vogue anyway, “one to be in motion rather than stand still.” A year of “bold, rapid change, dynamism… a stronger drive to achieve.” For me personally, it’s also a book launch year. My publication date is September 1st. However, taking a breath, I remind myself daily that working in the arts—telling stories, creating things such as articles, poems, events, and books—the old cliché about valuing the journey over the destination is paramount. So much of our process is informed by relationships. My books aren’t just about my characters; they’re shaped by my responses to the human beings and other beings who teach and move me. Earlier this month, when I was having a last read of the manuscript, the toughest part was signing off on the acknowledgements section. What shows up on those two pages represents a fraction of all the stories and connections behind a full-length work of fiction.

Thirteen years after our night at Allen’s, my memory of sitting with Wayson and the good friend who’d introduced us, a reader who’d helped so much with my first “final” version of The Shining Fragments, keeps going through my mind. All the things I didn’t see that lay ahead. Rejections. Rewrites. Releasing a hundred pages. Leaving full-time institutional teaching a decade early to recommit to my soul’s path in the arts, where I’d begun. Wanting something I could still have and experience, along with some things I couldn’t.

At the table, Wayson ate steak and told stories that were sharp and funny. He swore. He laughed. Afterwards, in his small white hatchback, we sped through the snowy streets, the soundtrack to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert booming: “I Will Survive.”

I wouldn’t see him for another five years, when the book finally launched with the Canadian publisher that had stood by me after the others turned it down. After I’d reinvented my life and written another book in the between-time, and started working as a mentor to other creative souls—the teacher part of me intact, as much a part of me as the writer. We are multifaceted beings.

By the fall of 2018, Wayson’s health was in decline. So much so, that when I sent him my Toronto book launch invitation, I didn’t imagine he’d actually come. Then, just as the evening was drawing to a close, with my short talk and all the hugs, handshakes, book signings, and chats mostly done, outside on Bay Street a vehicle stopped. I heard a car door’s metal thunk. Through the entranceway of Ben McNally’s came Wayson. Without pausing, he walked right up to me. I can’t remember if he took a copy of my book or not. He must have. What remains indelible, however, is how he put his arm around me and whispered a message in my ear. The kind of message a writer likes to hear about the future. The kind we remember when not everything goes as we hoped or planned. The kind that keeps a sparkly paperweight in place on the latest copy of a work in progress because—fire horse or none—in the arts, one must be bold and in motion. Even when that motion is moving a pen across paper. Especially then. “A horse year is not about running the fastest but running the longest.” Being in motion is about showing up. It’s about commitment.

With Wayson Choy at the Toronto launch of The Shining Fragments, October 2018, in Ben McNally Books

I never saw Wayson again. Before he died the following spring, I imagine the desire for a next book was still alive in him. But there’s a difference between incomplete work and incomplete fulfillment.

Whatever our walk of life, embodying who we are, and all that we are, as fully as we can—that’s fulfillment. For artists, what we create—books, poems, paintings, photographs, dances, essays, songs, concerts, films, albums, theatre, all of those things and more—those are gifts. If we are true artists, then our gifts are works for the greater whole. But they are also simply evidence that we were here and playing our part. Nothing lasts forever.

What is a true artist? Attempting to answer that question is a very old exercise. And of course, the answers vary. I believe good stories and other works of art are guideposts for connecting with our own soul. I believe a sense of connectedness with soul is vital to healing ourselves and our mainstream culture that has lost its way. I believe that when a culture loses its way, there’s still hope for healing and evolution. The artist’s role is to point to those possibilities. To reawaken a sense of wonder.

In the end, it was the mentor in Wayson who walked through the bookstore’s front doors and up to me, who embraced me and whispered—writer to writer, teacher to writer, teacher to teacher—a message I needed to hear. He had such strength in that frail body. He knew who he was. He wanted me to know who I was, too.

Here are the three other books by Wayson Choy. I recommend each one.

Over the next while, I’ll begin sharing more with you about my new novel, River of Dreams. Not in every letter of course. But in some. It’s a story that’s been coming for a long time. Far longer than the actual writing period.

If you are an annual paid subscriber, please look for an email from me soon regarding upcoming writing workshop offerings. I’ll share more about that in a letter to all subscribers once the details are in place.

Finally, when I realized that I’d be writing about Wayson this week, I looked around for video clips from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. There are a few good ones I know he’d like. But for me, this week, here’s the one that feels right.

Happy Year of the Fire Horse.

Happy Valentine’s Day, too.

With love,

Robin