All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.” 

Richard Rohr

As a shy, anxious child, I often placed my fears into the hands of God and on the page.

For me, writing has always been a form of prayer— an offering that is at once contemplative and a direct call to action. As a child and adolescent, I wrote poems and stories that I hid away from the rest of the world. After a ten-year battle with infertility that ended with the birth of my two children, I began writing earnestly, feeling a sense of urgency to share my words with those who needed them.

Today my writing focuses on faith, identity, and mental health. Central to the essay collection I’m building is how first-generation settler Canadians try to navigate spiritual obligations and traditions in the face of the mandate to build a new world that is sustainable, equitable, and just.

My personal essays have been published in The New Quarterly, The Hamilton Review of Books, and The Humber Literary Review, among others.

As a child of immigrants raised in a religious home, I’m proud to participate in a conversation from which women have long been excluded. In unapologetically claiming my own experience, I invite others to do the same.

 

—Lori

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