TINY DOABLE THINGS

N THE prologue to her novel (Viking, 2021), Ruth Ozeki writes, “A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake.” There is power in that first letter, that first word, but how do we summon the courage to call it into being? All writers have felt the crushing emptiness of the blank page, and like many, I felt that emptiness more strongly than ever in 2020 as the pandemic descended on North America. I had my first baby during the first week of lockdown. I was living in Canada with my husband while the rest of my family was in the United States. The border closed, isolating me from nearly everyone in the world I cared about. I had a three-week-old infant sleeping on a pillow at my feet when I tentatively The cursor blinked. The page remained blank.