I Thought Publishing a Book Would Change My Life
Then a famous poet gave me a warning I didn’t understand—until now
There’s a story I’ve told for years but have never written down.
It’s about the poet Patrick Lane. I’m not sure he would’ve appreciated this kind of hagiography. He wasn’t sentimental, and I’m not convinced he believed in legacy the way most writers do. The last time I saw him was at a poetry reading in 2008, where I stood in the back of a university bookstore, reading poems to five other poets, three empty rows of chairs, and one guy I’m pretty sure just came in to use the bathroom.
Patrick was one of the poets there, though he was part of the audience. He seemed surprised to see me and told me he thought I would be working as an actor in Los Angeles by now. I bought a copy of his memoir from the bookstore and asked him to sign it after the reading. He stared at me for a long beat before writing an inscription. He closed the book and passed it back to me. I didn’t read it right away, in front of him. He was pulled into another conversation before I could say goodbye.
I walked home that night in a fog of self-doubt, the kind I’d been carrying for a year, ever since my book came out. The rain had stopped, but something stranger had taken its place. Not quite mist, not quite drizzle. More like the cloud ceiling had quietly collapsed onto the streets of the West End. The air was thick with moisture, the edges of the streetlamps ringed with soft halos. A foghorn groaned from somewhere in English Bay, mournful and low, as if the city itself were exhaling.
I’d be on stage at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in two weeks to promote my book. It was the biggest break of my writing career, what I had been working towards since I was a teenager. And the hit to my ego, reading poems to an almost-empty room yet again that night, landed harder than I expected. What if Patrick was right? What if I wasn’t meant to be a writer? What if I had been chasing the wrong dream all this time?
When I finally reached Davie Street, I wondered if my sister Lindsay would still be up when I got home. She’d given up on her New York dreams that fall, had spent two years at NYU, then a year teaching at the Harvey Milk High School for queer kids in Lower Manhattan only to return home broke and burnt out.
The timing had worked out. Sort of. After selling everything I owned and a failed attempt to move to Bangkok to teach English with my now ex-boyfriend, I was back in Vancouver. I’d spent the past month sleeping on my best friend’s couch. I needed a roommate, and my sister needed a new start.
So we moved into a two-bedroom rental in The Columbia, a brown-brick tower above a grocery store in the heart of the Davie Village. We’d only lived there a few weeks before discovering our roommates: silverfish, and the occasional cockroach—a rarity in Vancouver, but somehow not in our suite.
Lindsay couldn’t find full-time teaching work. An old roommate pulled strings and got her a temporary placement, but the school was in Vancouver’s farthest suburbs. Two hours each way from downtown. I barely saw her during the week because when she wasn’t working, she was either commuting or sleeping.
I was in my mid-twenties then, freelancing as a writing consultant, mostly doing real estate copy, during the worst of the 2008 recession. I’d lost all but one client and was barely scraping together enough to cover rent and groceries. I had my author copies of my book from the publisher, but hadn’t sold a single book at the bookstore reading that night. And even though I knew readings weren’t about sales, I needed money. Any money.
Back at the condo, I found Lindsay in the kitchen—sweatpants, oversized sweatshirt, her blonde hair pushed back in a headband. She stood over the stove, cooking a single chicken breast in a scratched non-stick pan, assembling a spinach salad from a bag of tired-looking greens. She had just turned twenty-five, and I kept wondering how much leaving New York had upended the life she’d always imagined for herself.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Oh, you know,” I shrugged. She had enough to worry about without adding my bullshit to her pile.
I sat in the living room, on the second-hand leather couch we'd found on Craigslist, and pulled Patrick’s memoir from my bag. I opened the cover and read the inscription:
Names are forgotten in order that a man prosper in perfect anonymity.
With great affection,
Patrick
I stared at the page for a long time, reading it again and again. It felt like a riddle, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell me. So I stood up and walked into the kitchen.
“Patrick Lane was at the reading tonight,” I explained, passing her the open book. “I asked him to sign this.”
Lindsay read it silently, then looked at me and sighed. “What the fuck does that mean?” she asked.
And that was the thing: I didn’t know either.
The door banged open just before the hour. Wind swept in with the sessional instructor, carrying the smell of drought—dead grass, dry dirt, decomposing leaves. Linda Rogers floated through the room like she was being pulled by invisible threads: scarves and heavy necklaces, silver rings on every finger, the hem of her linen jacket catching on a desk as she passed.
The classroom for the introductory creative writing seminar taught by poet Linda Rogers had the strangest layout. The back half was raised two feet, like a kind of dias. I sat midway down the lower area, near a row of windows, trying to catch the light filtering through the trees outside. The branches from an oak scraped at the glass, casting shadows across the floor in slow, flickering patterns. You could hear gulls over the quad, and the low hum of traffic on Ring Road, which circled the campus at a ridiculously slow speed.
“I have a surprise for you,” Linda said, setting her oversized purse on the desk with a thunk. She tucked her hair behind her ears with the grace of someone used to being watched. “Be patient. He’s on his way.”
When Patrick Lane walked in a moment later, a ripple of recognition moved through the classroom. He looked like he’d just come from chopping wood: wool sweater, jeans stiff with wear, his hair a little wild. His eyes moved slowly across the room, assessing us without revealing anything. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even introduce himself.
“You’re all so young,” he said. “You should be out getting your hearts broken. Screwing up your lives. Doing something worth writing about.”
We laughed nervously. A few students shifted in their chairs.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
Linda crossed her arms, like she’d heard it before. Maybe she had. But I felt a flicker of anticipation—real, embarrassing excitement—low in my gut.
Patrick was the first living poet I’d ever met whose work I’d studied in high school. He was from a logging town in the interior of British Columbia. He’d spent years working in sawmills, housing construction, picking apples, driving trucks—anything that would allow him to keep going with his poetry. He had a vision for his future and didn’t let go of it. And as I watched him walk to the center of the classroom, something in me began to rearrange.
He read a few of his poems, including Mountain Oyster. Then he pulled a single folded sheet from his back pocket and smoothed it on the lectern. No binder. No handouts. Just a poem: “Stone” by Charles Simic.
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
When he finished, he looked up. “What’s the central metaphor here?” he asked. “And why does it work?”
Silence. Somewhere in the back, a radiator clanged.
I took notes as he walked us through it, line by line, explaining how poetry is really about imaginative leaps. How to fuse two unlike things into something unexpected. How to study something ordinary like a stone and see it in an entirely new way.
Then he gave us an assignment: “Write your own version of Stone. But make it yours.”
He folded the poem back into his pocket and tucked his book under his arm. For a moment, I thought he was going to leave the same way he arrived, in silence. But then he turned back with one final thought.
“If you really want to do this,” he said. “If you want a career as an artist, you’ll have to choose. You can have an interesting life or a comfortable life. But you can’t have both.”
I wrote this down verbatim and underlined it twice. I made my choice without hesitation. I was too young to know what I’d chosen then. But I do now.
We were trying to get the shot just as the SkyTrain descended from its elevated trackway to street level. I was leaning against a chain-link fence topped with loops of razor wire to keep people off the tracks. The light was almost gone, but this was the one the photographer wanted: the train racing overhead, the Georgia Viaduct blurring into dusk behind me, a pose that suggested defiance or mystery (we hadn’t decided yet).
Every time a new train approached, the photographer crouched low. I held still, waiting for that low whoosh of static and cool air as the train passed, then began making adjustments as soon as she yelled, “Now!”.
Hand to the fence. Look up into camera. Turn head. Look away. Repeat.
“Try something else,” she called. “No, make it cooler. Remember what I said in the email!”
Her email instructions had been straight to the point
> Practice more cool facial expressions whenever you have time.
> Facial/eye expressions are the key difference between a good
> model and a good-looking person. All right?
She went by Y.D., used an anonymized email address, and had the most polished portfolio I’d seen in the Craigslist trade-for-photo listings. Originally from China, she now lived in Vancouver with her husband and toddler. She didn’t speak much during the shoot, except to give quick, exacting feedback between shutter clicks.
“Keep your chin down,” she’d say. Or: “Look down and then look up. Yes. Like that.” Click. Click. “Okay, try something different.”
She was building her book, just like I was, and we were doing a trade. I couldn’t afford author photos. My publisher couldn’t either. She got portfolio material. I got a headshot.
The makeup artist, who also acted as the wardrobe stylist, stood just off-frame, holding a zip-up garment bag with my only suit in it and a duffel full of other “options.” She’d rimmed my eyes in black shadow, then smudged it with a stubby brush until it looked lived-in. Smoky. Edgy. I looked like a poet who might also front a sad-boy garage rock band.
“You look more like yourself when you smile,” Y.D. said, checking the screen. “But no, smiling is definitely not the right look.”
Not the right look. The photo shoot was beginning to mirror an underlying tension in my real life. I felt like two people: who I was and who I was trying to become. By day, I worked a 9-to-5 office job I hated. By night, I was finalizing the manuscript for my first book. It was the only thing that made me feel like my life had a purpose beyond the modular-carpet cubicle where I spent most of my waking hours.
My book Made Beautiful By Use came out in April 2007. We launched it in Victoria and Vancouver. In Victoria, friends and family showed up. In Vancouver, it was mostly other writers. There were a few reviews—in a local newspaper, a kind write-up in another magazine by a friend from university, a couple of niche literary blogs that disappeared within a year. Then there was the shirtless cover story in the local queer mag, written by poet Billeh Nickerson. “The New Face Of Gay Poetry” stared back at me from every newspaper box in the city for two weeks that summer.
It felt like the start of something.
And then—nothing. No festival invites. No cross-country book tour. No award nominations. Nothing.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know back then. I didn’t apply for grants or set up more readings myself. I didn’t submit new work to magazines to stay active. I didn’t reach out to any of the poets I admired or studied under. Too proud to ask for help. Too afraid of seeming pushy or needy or transactional.
I told myself I was giving it time, letting it circulate. But really, I was just afraid. So I waited. And when nothing happened, I disappeared.
I quit the office job, sold everything I owned, and moved to Thailand with the guy I was dating. I thought I’d teach English, find inspiration for a novel, reinvent myself. Instead, I failed—spectacularly. I came back broke, heartbroken, and seriously wondering if it was time to give up writing for good. Then my publisher called with a plot twist: I’d been invited to read at the Vancouver International Writers Festival.
When the next train passed overhead during the shoot, I adjusted my chin like Y.D. had coached me, hoping to radiate presence, gravity, a sense of arrival.
In the final photo, my eyes are rimmed in smoke, my mouth slightly open. I’m cross-legged on a concrete block in the middle of an empty skatepark, wearing the same suit I’d worn to my mother’s funeral years earlier. I looked like a poet and a twink had a custody battle, and nobody won.
I used that image for everything—bios, grant applications, festival submissions, a panel that eventually got cancelled. I must have stared at it a hundred times that year, trying to see what other people saw. Trying to see if I still looked like someone who was going to make it.
A pink Turkish carpet stretched across the stage, flanked by dahlias, ornamental grasses, and a single tree just beginning to turn yellow—like Martha Stewart’s basement guest room if she’d let her deadbeat gay nephew redecorate.
This was the setup for the Vancouver International Writers Festival’s big queer literature night—my first major festival appearance. The event was billed as “part poetry reading, part cabaret.” It wasn’t your typical literary affair. One lucky audience member was going home with a gift certificate for a free nipple piercing. My friend Rob Easton had been hired as one of the go-go dancers—scruffy, wearing a lemon-yellow American Apparel polo with matching briefs, tube socks yanked to mid-calf and topped by a single red and blue stripe. During breaks, he climbed onto a small raised platform in the crowd and pumped his hips while 200 literature lovers whooped and clapped along to the music between authors.
The host was Billeh Nickerson, a poet and friend with a stand-up comic’s timing and a rotating cast of facial hairstyles. That night, it was a vertical stripe down his chin—like an exclamation point. He was another mentor who’d opened a thousand doors for me, including this one. As a first-time author, I shouldn’t have been invited to read. But here I was, seated with my sister a few rows back, palms sweating through the pages I’d tucked inside my copy of Made Beautiful By Use.
There was no green room. No escape hatch. I was in the middle of the lineup—safe on paper, torture in real time. My thoughts spun: What if no one claps? What if I stutter? What if I freeze?
Then I heard my name. I climbed the stage.
I hadn’t learned the trick for stage fright yet—how, when your heart is in your throat, you find one person in the crowd and perform just for them. All I could hear was the pounding in my ears. The lights dipped low. I couldn’t make out a single face in the audience, not even my sister’s.
So I started with the more accessible poems from my book—ones with good “hmm” potential, the kind of sound you want to hear from a literary crowd. There were a few polite murmurs and mmm’s, but nothing that settled my nerves. I didn’t loosen up until Rob joined me on stage for some of the new poems I’d been workshopping—pieces from a manuscript I was tentatively calling Haute & Cool, a poetry collection loosely themed around fashion that I was co-authoring with David J. Brock. Rob stood centre, posing like a model while I read a poem about tube socks. He mugged for the crowd and posed theatrically. It landed. People laughed.
I finished with a poem about scarves, featuring Colonel Mustard trying to kill Miss Scarlet from Clue, and managed to get at least a third of the room chuckling. Then it was over. The lights went up. I stepped down and returned to my seat.
After the last reader, lines began to form at the back of the venue around the book signing tables of the more established writers. I pushed through the crowd, apologizing as I went, clutching my folder and pretending I wasn’t searching for eye contact. When I found my table, I saw my twenty author copies stacked neatly beside a pen and a branded Writers Fest tote with a thank-you card and a much-needed bottle of water.
I sat. I smiled. I waited.
A woman with silver hair pulled into a long ponytail gave me a once-over, then inspected my book without touching it. She pressed her lips together into a tight line and moved on to the next table.
My sister came by to say I did great and that she had to leave early because of her commute in the morning. Rob hugged me and promised to meet me for a drink at a hotel bar nearby. But nobody bought a book.
Was it my delivery? My poems? Was it because I’d read new work instead of leaning harder into the book? Or was this just what it meant to be a poet: to be watched, applauded, and forgotten, all in the span of fifteen minutes?
All my fears about poetry—its solitude, its small audience, its inability to pay my rent—crystallized in that moment. How could I call myself an author if no one wanted to read or buy my writing?
As the chairs scraped and the lights came up, I reached for the tote bag the festival had given me, opened the wide canvas mouth, and quietly slid all twenty copies of my book inside.
It’s strange, the things we carry. Patrick Lane’s memoir has made it through three apartments, two relationships, and one major career change into film and television. I sell or give away books every time I move, but There Is A Season always made it into the next box—usually near the top.
I didn’t read the inscription again until after Patrick had died, when the writerly ambition that had once lit me up like a flare had dulled into something quieter. Not gone, just different. Less cerebral. Less performative. Less concerned with who was watching.
The line was still there, written in his confident, looping handwriting:
Names are forgotten in order that a man prosper in perfect anonymity.
With great affection,
Patrick.
I think I finally understand what he was trying to tell me.
He was talking about letting go. Letting go of what you think your life is supposed to look like. Of needing your name in print, your face on a poster, your books stacked on a festival table. Letting go of the ego that says this poem must be heard instead of this poem must be written.
He was telling me that the real work—the lasting work—happens when no one is watching. That the clearest voice you’ll ever write in is the one not trying to prove anything to anyone.
Maybe that’s why he just handed me the book that night with the cover closed. Why he didn’t explain. Why he didn’t need to. He’d already told me everything he needed to say.
And from the vaults, an interview with Patrick Lane that includes typewriters and smoking and a dozen other writerly flexes by one of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated poets:
Tears down to my chin
I needed to hear a lot of what was written here. I feel like you just saved me from myself.