All through this course you have read writers who write from exactly where they stand. Richard Wagamese, an Ojibwe writer from Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario, filled collections such as One Native Life (2008) and Embers (2016) with short pieces drawn from his own life, his relationships and the land around him. Poets you have studied set their grandmothers, their languages and their home places on the page. The lesson for your own writing is not to copy their subjects, but their method: begin with what is truly yours — your places, your people, your languages, your memories — and render it so precisely that a stranger can stand inside it. This topic walks you through finding that material, turning it into images and voice, choosing a form, and drawing a clear line around stories and voices that belong to other people.
Writing from your own place and relations
- A place you know with every sense. A kitchen, a bus route, a lake, a rink, a balcony. List what you see, hear, smell, touch and taste there.
- A person and what they taught you. Not their whole life story, but one lesson, often taught without words.
- An object with a history. Something handed down, broken, carried across an ocean, or made by someone you love.
- A word from your family's language or languages. A word that has no exact English equivalent, and the moment you first understood it.
- A moment of change. The first time you saw something differently, including something you learned in this course.
- The land under you. Whose territory or treaty area you live on, researched carefully, and what you now notice about the place because of it.
Imagery and voice
- My grandfather was a hard worker.
- I felt nervous on my first day.
- Our neighbourhood is very diverse.
- I love the lake in summer.
- My grandfather's thumbnail is split from forty years of bolts and engine blocks.
- I read the same locker number four times before my hand would open the lock.
- On our street, Sunday smells like jerk chicken, pierogi and my mother's dal, all at once.
- In July the lake holds the sunset so still you could step onto it.
Showing works because readers believe what they can picture. A specific image does the work of an abstract word and leaves the reader to feel it, which is more powerful than being told what to feel. Voice is what makes writing sound like a particular person: word choice (diction), sentence rhythm, what you notice and what you joke about. Your strongest voice usually sounds like you on a good day, not like an imitation of what you think 'literary' writing should sound like. Use the words your family actually uses, including words from languages other than English, without apologizing for them. Look for a turn: a moment near the end where the piece shifts, deepens or reveals what it was really about. Many of the strongest personal pieces start with a small concrete thing and turn toward something much larger.
Choosing a form
| Form | What it does well | Try it when… |
|---|---|---|
| Personal narrative | Tells a real experience as a story, with scene, dialogue and reflection | Your material has a clear moment of change |
| Free verse poem | Uses line breaks and white space to slow the reader and stress single words | Your material is an image or feeling more than a sequence of events |
| Prose poem | Poetic compression in a paragraph without line breaks | You want intensity but the material runs on like breath or memory |
| Letter poem | Addresses one person directly, present or absent | You have something to say to someone you cannot say it to |
| List poem | Builds meaning through a series of items, often with a surprising final item | You have many small details that together make a portrait |
| Found poem | Reframes language from a real document, such as a recipe, report card note or immigration form | Your family has documents whose words carry more than their purpose |
Ma's garden in Hamilton
She plants by the old calendar,
not the one on the fridge —
bitter melon, coriander,
chillies that make my cousins cry.
In October she bends over the last rows
and says the soil is the same everywhere,
then tells me, quietly,
it isn't.The boundary: your voice, not someone else's
Creative writing feels like a space where anything goes, but the protocols you studied earlier still apply. If you are not First Nations, Métis or Inuit, do not write in the first person as a member of a nation you do not belong to, do not retell traditional or sacred stories, and do not use ceremonies, sacred figures or Indigenous languages as decoration. Even with good intentions, that kind of writing takes a voice that is not yours and usually rebuilds the stereotypes this course has taken apart. What you can do is write honestly from your own position: what you learned, what changed in how you see the place you live, a real friendship, a moment of listening. If you are First Nations, Métis or Inuit, your own nation's stories and language may be part of your material, and you decide what to share. Family and community stories can carry their own protocols, so ask the people they belong to before publishing them.
- A poem about what you noticed after learning whose treaty land your school is on
- A narrative about a conversation with a friend from Curve Lake, written from your side, with their permission
- A piece about your own family's language and what it carries
- A first-person poem 'as an Ojibwe Elder' by a non-Indigenous writer
- A short story that adapts a nation's sacred figure
- A poem scattered with Cree words you looked up but do not speak