“This is how I make it work.”

My self-imposed writers retreat, core values and a life of margin.

It’s Friday night, and I’m writing from a cozy little restaurant just around the corner from our home—Wi-Fi and silence paid for with a glass of wine, a bowl of olives, and a warming hot chocolate that’ll carry me through the late hours. Upon our recent sea change, I find myself here most Friday nights, claiming this candlelit corner as my own for a night, letting myself slip into the words.

This isn’t just about “making time” but a way of life, a practical devotion to what pulls at me—a rhythm I’ve chosen, my vocation, art, my day job (turned night). Writing is more than a passion; it’s an artform that demands deliberate acts, pockets carved into the every day to let art breathe where it will. And art, after all, is in every fibre of this life, not tacked on or added like an extra coat of paint but interwoven into everything we touch, see, feel—

It is how we be here.

So, if you’ve read my latest piece, Part Three: In the Ripples of Beautiful Dialect, you’ll catch the wink when I felt cheeky enough to title this one—

“This is how I make it work.”

Just shy of four months ago, we returned to our place of shared history—the backdrop of our early love story.

In this new but familiar chapter by the sea, now with three daughters in tow—we made the decision to un-school our three daughters, a decision that has reshaped my role as a mother and full-time artist into what I now call “the school of life.”