For the first time in a long while, the future feels brighter. Scratch that. The present feels brighter and the year ahead feels lighter.

Big news: Two of my graphic novel projects have received Canada Council grants for Artistic Creation. The funding will support research and development for both books. The deeper work on those projects will begin once I wrap my current collaborative work: the graphic novel Full Bleed. (Conundrum Press, 2027)

The two grants include artist subsistence (and travel research next year), which means I’ll be able to cover my basic living costs over this year. I have made a decision that feels both practical and symbolic. I have said no to all comic arts festivals and conferences this year (outside of BC) so I can settle in and focus on finishing Full Bleed, and then move directly into research and development for the next books. It feels a little like reclaiming creative autonomy, protecting the quiet space where the work actually happens. And focus on health (which I will get to below).

Both new projects are long-range works.

The first grant supports Potato Nose: 1977, my autobiographical graphic novel project exploring shame, illness, adolescence, and identity. The funding allows me to focus first on completing a self-published prologue comic that I am completing early summer. (HUGE thank you to my Kickstarter supporters for literally kickstarting the shape of the project). From there, I’ll move into the full graphic novel, with a hopeful completion around 2028.

The second grant Occupation: The Long Shadow explores my grandfather’s experience as a Norwegian prisoner of war during the Second World War. As with Salt Green Death, “the ghosts are happy again.” The research delicious. Part of the exploration will include how his timeline intersects with my father-in-law’s wartime life in Canada and the UK. Both men served in the Air Force.  Although both men have passed, the sense that their stories want to be told grows stronger every day. This project will include a profound collaboration with my niece, Emma Varley, my father-in-law’s granddaughter. Together we are deeply interested not only in the historical timelines but also haunting in archives and how family stories continue speaking across (and impacting) generations. Research will involve listening closely to archives, locations, and landscapes in Norway, the UK, and Canada. Work on Occupation will stretch into 2029-30.

It’s been really helpful exploring how all my graphic novel projects feed each other.

Alongside all of this, I have been collaborating with Simon Fraser University researchers and with my brother, Fred. It has been deeply meaningful. The research project, Re-Storying Community, explores how arts-based practices can build connection and resilience. In Mission, I worked with an arts-based school, facilitating conversations between parents and teachers. In Maple Ridge, we held several sessions with community members aged 18 to 85 in a cozy second-hand bookstore café, sharing film, art, and storytelling practices. Those gatherings produced beautiful conversations and unexpected connections and discoveries. At the end of April I’ll be doing arts-based response and co-facilitating at a conference with the Provincial Health Services Authority in Victoria: Shared Care: Collaborative Palliative Care, MAiD, BC Cancer.

After a very hard and strange 2025, it finally feels like things are beginning to move forward again.

I also want to share a small health update, because it connects closely to Potato Nose.

Last week I received the results from a fine needle biopsy of one of several new tumours near my left parotid gland. The pathology indicates it is most likely a pleomorphic adenoma, a benign, slow-growing salivary gland tumour (one of many). A very slow-growing cancer cannot be completely ruled out, but overall the findings are reassuring. Because of surgeries and radiation treatments I underwent as a teenager for the same issue, the tissue in that area is complicated and scarred, so my doctors are proceeding carefully.

The plan is straightforward:

• An MRI will determine the size and number of tumours;
• After that we’ll decide whether to monitor the situation or consider surgery;
• Because the tumour sits close to the facial nerve, they want to proceed cautiously.

So the next step is the MRI… TOMORROW [March 17]! I will need a calming pill to face my extreme claustrophobia.

Moments like this have a strange way of reminding me how much of life involves negotiating control over our own bodies and stories. Receiving the grants is extraordinary and deeply validating. At the same time, the body doesn’t always respond to good news with pure celebration! There is relief, but also exhaustion, grief, and the resurfacing of old feelings, especially as Potato Nose asks me to revisit my teenage years, when illness and identity became so messily tangled together.

Sometimes the body simply reacts to release. After long stretches of pressure, uncertainty, and loss (including the death of my children’s dad last year) my nervous system doesn’t immediately know how to settle. So this past week has felt both hopeful and a little undone.

And maybe that’s okay.

As I’ve been thinking more about Potato Nose: 1977, one theme keeps rising to the surface: autonomy. Especially body autonomy. As I anticipate the MRI, I notice something surprising: I am actually less afraid of illness (and my aging body) than I am of the feeling of handing my body over to the medical system. My body reacts with panic and anticipatory claustrophobia as memories from earlier procedures surface almost immediately.

It brings me back to being a teenager in 1977, when every cell in my body feels exposed and judged, walking down a school hallway, aware of how my body is being seen. (Nobody but the bullies really gave a shit though). Dance held that same contradiction. It gave me moments of profound autonomy: strength, expression, the body moving freely through space, control. Yet it also carried pressure to be thin, excellent, obedient under the gaze of teachers and audiences (and my fellow dancers).

Some of the strongest experiences of autonomy in my life have been drawing, improvisational dance in the 1980s, and especially giving birth, when my body and my self felt completely aligned! But there have also been times when the only control available was submission… where intimacy sometimes blurred into the feeling that my body was no longer entirely my own. Another place where autonomy always lived is in my journals. My 1977 diary was truly the start and forms the foundation of Potato Nose: 1977 graphic novel. In the graphic novel, I want to keep the words authentic to that original voice, while using drawing to reveal what I couldn’t say then.

Looking back now, as I approach sixty-four, observing with curiosity the changes from aging, I can see how these contradictions shaped me. And perhaps that is what Potato Nose: 1977 is really about. Not just adolescence, or shame, or illness. But the long, complicated process of learning that this body is ultimately my own. I will be in the machine for an hour tomorrow. So instead of succumbing to claustrophobia, I will take the pill and maybe I will dare to close my eyes. I will choregraph in my mind. A rebirth! Let go of control and allow my body some autonomy to just… be!