The day after Christmas, I find myself in the woods behind my Calgary home, I’m only a few kilometres away from where Bow River bends like a question mark through Mohkínstsis territory. The chainsaw’s weight settles into my palms — familiar as the stack of rejection letters on my desk, as heavy as the student loan statements I can’t bring myself to open. Winter sun filters through bare branches, casting shadows like lines of text across snow.

In felling season, every cut must be precise. I learned this from woodworkers, watching the work of Manitoba timber when I was young, before scattering away like windblown seeds. Now, standing in Alberta winter, I think about precision in writing — how I’ve published eight books sitting unsold on Amazon’s digital shelves, how I’ve learned to navigate university assignments with careful efficiency, maintaining a 3.9 GPA while reading just enough to get by. The irony of being an English Honours student who has mastered the art of minimal reading doesn’t escape me.

The oldest trees in these woods hold centuries in their rings, each layer a testament to survival. I count my own rings differently: first in my family to finish high school, first to attend university, first to write books — even if they’re only chapbooks of poetry, bound in Public Domain art covers. My professors praise my writing, call it promising — but promise doesn’t pay rent. I’m about to graduate into uncertainty, my future as nebulous as morning mist between trees.

Above me, widow makers sway — treacherous hanging branches waiting to fall without warning. Last semester was like that. My Honours seminar presentation on digital literature felt like standing beneath a deadfall, arguing for the legitimacy of my peers’ writing while my own work gathered digital dust. I failed a class for the first time, the F marking my transcript as a scar in bark. The forest teaches us about crown shyness — how trees maintain careful distance even as their canopies reach toward each other. I’m learning this balance too, between independence and interconnection, between ambition and acceptance.

When a tree falls, its impact echoes. In my final semester, I dream of making that kind of mark — not in destruction but in creation. I want my words to matter beyond the algorithms of Amazon’s marketplace. I want to write by hand again, to feel graphite and ink catch on high-quality paper, to slow down and soak in language the way roots drink deep. My desk drawer holds crisp notebooks I’m almost afraid to mar with imperfect words, like pristine snowfall I hesitate to track across.

The heartwood of a tree — its core — remains hidden until the cut is made. I think about my own hidden core, the stories I haven’t dared to tell yet. The truth about being first-generation university student, about living on loans and hope, about publishing books that nobody reads. About being told I’m talented while feeling like an impostor in academia’s marble halls. About wanting to inspire others while barely keeping myself upright.

Spring poles are every logger’s nightmare — young trees bent under fallen giants, storing lethal tension. Release the pressure wrong and they’ll snap back with killing force. My body holds similar tension: the weight of expectations (my own, my family’s, my professors’), the pressure of being pathbreaker and role model, the constant calculation of when to hold firm, when to bend, when to let go. Sometimes I feel like a spring pole myself, bent beneath the weight of everything I’m trying to carry.

There’s a term in forestry — “deadfall” — for timber that falls naturally. But nothing about my path has been natural or predetermined. Every step has been conscious choice, every word written an act of will. Even my failures — the unsold books, the failed class, the unread pages — are chosen, are mine. In the woods, everything that falls feeds new growth. I have to believe the same is true of our mistakes, our false starts, our necessary failures.

At day’s end, I’m coated in sawdust and ink-stains, my hands humming with the ghost vibration of both chainsaw and pen. The sun sets behind the Rockies, painting the sky in colors no printer could capture. Tomorrow I’ll return to my final semester, to the work of writing and reading and becoming. The trees remind me growth isn’t always visible from the outside, that some seasons are for putting down roots rather than reaching skyward, that even the strongest trunks need mycelial networks of support.

Winter deepens around Calgary, but beneath the snow, spring is already stirring. Like the trees, I’m learning to trust in cycles of growth and rest, to believe that even when the work is invisible — especially then — something essential is taking shape at my core.