Works in Progress

<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

</aside>

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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.

💻 2024 update: I have been awarded a long-form mentorship from Diaspora Dialogues, where I will work with author Ayelet Tsabari over six months to refine my memoir manuscript.

**🟧** Sharing weekly updates on my memoir-in-progress at a journey of visions and revisions — by vishmili. (Like, comment and subscribe and join my Substack community!)

📩 Working on submissions for contests and publications. Also: workshopping in community, reality checking, persevering, refining my practice, submitting again. Lather, rinse, repeat, as they say.

🥉 “The Final Sting” was shortlisted for *The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season Awards* in the creative nonfiction category.

🥉 "Dressing Up" was shortlisted for The Humber Literary Review/CNFC 2021 creative nonfiction contest.

💪🏼 31 rejection letters and counting. (Ok, I stopped counting.)

2023 update: Shared a not-so-rough draft with my first beta readers 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: The Writer's Studio, Diaspora Dialogues, Canada Council for the Arts, CNFC Society, Federation of BC Writers, BC Public Service, XOXO Festival.