Sarah MacDonald is a journalist and editor based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, VICE, Hazlitt, The Walrus, CBC Arts, Elle Canada, FASHION, SLAM Canada, and many more. Her journalism focuses on music, culture, tech, and general human interest. She is a former managing editor at Noisey Canada, the musical vertical of VICE. She has appeared as an arts commentator on CBC radio and video programs and independent podcasts. She’s working on her first book of essays.

Sarah was in my Grade 10 drama class at Kitchener’s Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute (CHCI) in 2004, and would have been in my IB English class had I not relocated to Hartford with hubby, and on my 2nd maternity leave. She was cast in my production of Antigone. Sarah said she “never ever, not for one second, forgot Hunnisett’s advice to stop being the motherly figure in her roles and, more broadly, in her life.” Ironic, coming from me! It’s my profound honour to host the writing of this beloved, beautiful, talented lady – someone whom I have admired and adored for decades!

I’m writing my first book and it’s a suffering enterprise. I am constantly sitting with the work (and myself) in a grueling, head-banging-against-my-desk kind of way. Running parallel to this, I am thinking of what’s next—the stuff that comes after the work like agents, selling or marketing it, and building a sturdier platform for my work. I try to guide myself back to the task at hand as much as I can: I’m just writing this book and rewriting it and editing it and feeling the waves of its greatness with the shallow reality of its stupidity. Normal stuff! One of my favourite nonfiction writers, Melissa Febos, has said in the past that these overwhelming, competing feelings of severity about your work mean you’re on the right track with it. 

Still, in the pain of such writing, there’s nothing else I would ever want to do—that I could do. That I could ever be, really. 

While I reshape sentences, massage the text for meaning or shorten it for emphasis, I understand this, too, is occurring inside of me. That the ideas I place on a page, hand edit when printed in front of me, or scrap altogether are happening in the cells of my body, remaking me. 

For me, writing is not about passion. It’s not even a career. It’s devotion. In my experience, passionate enterprises are fickle. Devoting myself to writing, to thinking about writing, to being in and with my writing and ideas, and that of others, has worked for me for a long time. At some point, writing became my career, thus connected to money. Devotion warped into an ordinary commitment; an obligation. I thought of writing as something I do; a verb, not a noun, not identity. 

Then I wrote this book. 

I’m part of a writing group with other authors, journalists, and emerging writers who attend accountability writing sessions. Before, we met on Zoom and spent two hours each morning, every day for years, writing. It’s how I got most of my book done. Now, as the offering and group have changed, we do it for a week at the start of each month. The host offers original writing prompts for us, and a recent prompt was what is your unpopular opinion about writing. Mine is that writing is who I am, not what I do. 

Let me go back to one kind of beginning: I wrote stories as a kid to fend off boredom. I grew up to love reading all sorts of books, but was so fond of Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My writing life would be shaped just as much by the other art in my life including theatre and music. I was a drama kid once who would have pursued acting further had I not been so mean to myself. All of this art made me feel into the work as a vocation, not a job.

I cut my teeth in the writing world as a culture journalist. Journalism was a palatable career for my single mother who didn’t go to university and had lived poorly most of her life while raising two kids. I began by writing at my university newspaper, then arts blogs followed, and I interned at a national newspaper in journalism school. I was a freelance writer for a while, performing in marketing day-jobs until I got hired at VICE. I went on to work at CBC and then freelanced for nearly every national outlet in Canada. I’ve written a cover story for a fashion magazine, interviewed celebrities, and more important to me, the musicians who shaped my tender young brain, as well as emerging artists, and even world champion NBA players. I had great editors shape me into the writer and journalist I am.

When I decided writing would be my life, I couldn’t imagine what that would actually entail, and how the thing I love is what I did so little of. No one ever tells you the realities, sacrifices, misconceptions, and general quirks of your career. No one could tell me the exhaustion of press reps, how transactional media can be, that becoming a brand was integral to being a long-lasting journalist-turned-public-figure-turned-brand, or that you might have strangers on the Internet tell you to die and really mean it because you don’t like a Taylor Swift record. I had to learn these on the job and it was painful, more painful than the act of writing whatever it was I thought about. I began to doubt myself, doubt my worth. It all took me far away from my goals and myself. I wondered what the point of it all was; living and existing under a capitalist system where ethics or curiosity or devotion are moot. Somewhere around the time money became an absolute goal for me is when writing became what I did, not who I am.

Careers are fluid but a vocation remains steady. It took me time to return to that; peeling back layers of hesitancy and whether or not I wanted to be in a world where anyone could have an opinion about my work and tell faceless strangers on the internet about it. If I could work at and for something that had no promise of money. Writing this book has made it possible for me to feel into that again.

I’ve looked at my life now, 15 years in journalism and adjacent editorial work, and have fixed a path forward to make this vocation central to all I do and who I am; creating passage back to arts journalism and then back to school for an MFA, if I can, to teach later on in my life; writing less for others and more for me, finding a day-job to support that as it’s infrastructure for the art, not the purpose, until the art can sustain me financially again. 

Maybe it’s dangerous to make the thing you do your identity. That’s seductive though, isn’t it? Yet, all sorts of questions arrive like what if I don’t succeed and it obliterates me? And then this: what if my definition of success is that I am doing what I love? Does that not fortify my sense of self against a crashing tide of doubt? I’m not driven by how many copies of whatever I write sells or how many clicks an article gets. I’ve done that and it has run me ragged. I want to be with my work another way. Maybe I’ll take care of it and myself much better. 

Writers have all sorts of opinions about writing. They actually love to tell them to people, whether or not the person on the other end wants to hear it. That writing is arduous, which I’ve already told you, or that writing is doing homework forever. Writing, like being a person, is a painful endeavour because you have to sit and think and be with yourself, your subject or material, and somehow create something cohesive, smart, or funny out of it. It takes time. Living and experiencing and evolving run that parallel path. I believe the reason why so many tech leaders try to sell back to us that writing is something a machine could do is because these people want to avoid the nuances and complexities of being a person at all. Your humanity is the point, and for me that shows up in writing, career or not. 

I don’t think I’m the greatest writer. What I submit in this vast world of colliding stories is one perspective. Whoever I think is a great writer is likely not the same for you and that’s the most beautiful, democratic part of art. That offering of difference has an incredible ability to widen the aperture of living. It’s that I am here at all, doing it, breathing and living and getting underneath it, that makes me feel good at what I do and who I am. That I’m trying. This is how I know I am trying. ◾