My first book of poetry, The Fifth Season, has just been published by Caitlin Press. It’s a book I started almost a decade ago, the day I told my husband of 20 years that I was leaving. In my car, waiting to pick up my 11-year-old daughter from a soccer game, I had my “bathroom floor” moment. There was no privacy in our small house for the intense grief of that moment, with my ex and 14-year-old son present. My car was the place I could finally let it all out: the ugly tears, the heaving, sobbing, deep well of grief. My immediate instinct was to write poetry. Fumbling for some writing tools, I found an old leaky pen and some napkins, and that’s when I started. It was totally unexpected. I was a writer, but I hadn’t written a poem in 30 years.
In retrospect, that this is what I turned to in my deep sorrow—not to a phone call, a walk, or another person—says many things about who I am and about the healing power of writing as a way through difficult times. Little did I know the poem I wrote in the car that day was one of many to come. In fact, the poems did not stop coming, and writing them helped me better understand why my relationship failed, why I went on to date men who broke me, why my kids moving out left me bereft.
In one online poetry workshop, I presented a poem about my first post-divorce date. It was a painful experience to live through, let alone recall and recite publicly. I had been reckless and unhinged, in the way my 20-year-old self might have been. But in my mid-40s, it was just crazy. Let’s just say it did not receive the response I was looking for, but it did propel me into a million rewrites that ultimately resulted in the poem “Rewilding.” Here’s an excerpt:
he pulls me up
leads me to the edge of the park
pushes me up against a tree
hot breath on my neck
arms around me like darkness
arms around rough bark
I lean back
my head arcs
and I see stars
bright through branches
full and lush
leaves trembling
like me
jagged
with shards of
moonlight
Here’s the thing about poetry: it helped me distill my emotions into something manageable, something I could learn from, something in my crumbling, unravelling world I could control. It helped me turn pain into something beautiful, and it ultimately led me back to loving myself, a skill I had lost in a long, unhappy, unsatisfying marriage.
Over the next 10 years, I wrote into the white-hot heat of many significant thresholds: my kids moving away for university, my many dating disasters, menopause, midlife rediscovery—all the while leaning into the questions that were arising. Among them, in the words of poet Mary Oliver: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
The poetry didn’t answer, but it did lead me to a better understanding of myself. I took my time with it. I let it sit and simmer, like a good stew. I went back over many years to add context, revelation, perspective. The flavours deepened. I had never taken that much time in any other form of writing, and the reward was that, in the end, I created a book about the journey of a woman’s life—from lover to mother to … what do we call ourselves now?
Not yet crones, at this midlife stage, we are unlabelled and unnamed, reinventing ideas of womanhood, reweaving ourselves into a new version of becoming. That reinvention is what unfolds in this collection, a journey into this “fifth season,” a time when we experience an entirely new climate within ourselves, literally and metaphorically. A time of internal heat, desertification, a looming fog, a landscape of unfamiliar colours.
As I write in the final poem, “The Fifth Season”:
maiden, mother, X, crone
try to find me on a map
I am a country
of shadows and solitude
visible only to myself
I am my own weather
my own season
beyond spring and summer
beyond winter and fall
I am fire desert fog
an unfamiliar liquid longing
The poem that started in my car on that miserable day now bears little resemblance to the poem that evolved over many years and many rewrites. What it became is a distillation of a precarious moment, a time when everything changed. I was terrified then of so many things: losing time with my kids, losing money to my ex, losing my house, losing the life I had so carefully and thoughtfully built for us all.
It contains all the fear and hope I felt in that moment, and it’s something I could never write today. The white-hot emotional heat has long passed, but when I read it, I am transported back in time to the woman in the car who couldn’t see a way forward. And I am grateful to that heartbroken version of myself who took a pen and poured her heart out, word by ink-stained word.
Read more from our Spring 2026 issue.
