<aside> 📎 “It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it...but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love...” — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
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✍🏼 Working on my first book, an anti-war memoir about a woman who finds herself in an increasingly borderless world and her call to investigate the legacies and stories she carries so that she may better define not only who she is but who she wants to be.
**🗣️ 2025 update:** I completed a 6-month mentorship with award-winning memoirist and novelist Ayelet Tsabari to refine my most recent draft. I will be submitting my manuscript to two Diaspora Dialogues beta readers and working on a publishing plan.
💻 2024 update: I have been awarded a long-form mentorship from Diaspora Dialogues.
**🟧** Sharing updates on Substack at a journey of visions and revisions — by vishmili. (Like, comment and subscribe!)
📩 Working on submissions for contests and publications. Also: workshopping in community, reality checking, persevering, refining my practice, submitting again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
🥉 “The First Sting” (revised) - The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards, 2024 shortlist.
🥉 “The Final Sting” - The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards, 2023 shortlist.
🥉 "Dressing Up" - The Humber Literary Review/*CNFC contest,* 2021 shortlist.
💪🏼 31 rejection letters and counting. (Ok, I stopped counting.)
2023 update: Shared a not-so-rough draft with my writing group in March 2023.
2021-2022 update: I have received a grant (!) and so thus declare: I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
🏔 Promoting my chosen habitat—Super, Natural British Columbia™—to the world, by building new destination brands through the integration of marketing and destination development as Senior Program Advisor at Destination BC.
📚Part-time, I provide writing and editing services, and manuscript consultation.
🫴 I also volunteer for the nonprofit Mothership Stories Society, as well as the CNFC.
🎸2020 update: Coping with pandemic life by writing COVID covers and #instapoems.
🔎 Building the glossary of my life at idefiningi.wordpress.com.
🃏 Documenting my study and fascination with the tarot tradition on @theoriginaltarot (when I remember to post).
Affiliations: SFU’s The Writer's Studio, Diaspora Dialogues, Canada Council for the Arts, CNFC Society, Federation of BC Writers, BC Public Service, XOXO Festival.