Trish Sissons’ Writing Space
When I first moved into this house and started using this room, wasps would drop out of a concealed hole somewhere in the ceiling, buzz around between my face and my computer for a bit, spot the window and try to make a getaway where they’d be met with a steady stream of Raid. There’d be tens of them each day, and I’d count their little corpses as I swept them off the ledge at the end of each day. After that first summer, though I never found the hole and ripping the siding off the house never revealed a nest, they didn’t come back.
I now write/paint/sew/work-from-home from this waspless room, surrounded by all my treasures: photos from home, my grandma’s cowboy boots, an owl taxidermied by my grandpa, my other grandma’s cremains captured in glass art by Jade Usackas, a Christiane Spangsberg print, the red and yellow cedar surfboard my dad made for me, a calendar for deadlines that I sometimes make, a full pot of tea, a little whisky for when the tea doesn’t quite cut it, relics from my family’s lives before Canada, a few books that make me want to be a better writer, a yoga mat in case my procrastination is so severe it leads me to fitness. If nothing else, my admittedly kooky collection provides a good deal of inspiration when the words aren’t flowing. It’s hard not to feel motivated when the owl is ever-watching, ever-judging.
I typically write with the window open and a record on repeat, but when it rains, I scurry outside to the covered front porch and write on the couch. I am overly nostalgic and often homesick, and the sound of rain is a salve. When it stops and the neighbours reemerge with their distractingly cute dogs and questions about the hay bales and zucchinis in my front garden, I retreat back into my little studio where the owl forgives my transgression and reminds me to get back to work.
Trish Sissons is a BC-born writer currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her stories have been finalists for the Fiddlehead’s Fiction Contest and the Penguin Random House Student Award for Fiction. Her work has also appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review. A graduate of the SFU School of Communication and an occasional student at the UofT School of Continuing Studies’ Creative Writing program, Trish has studied and worked in Vancouver, Guadalajara, Melbourne, and Toronto. She was born and raised in the Bella Coola Valley, in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest.
She has also been known to farm on occasion