Breaking out of my cocoon & following my book's lead

Part 3 of the story behind my book's metamorphosis

As a quick recap of my last two posts, my book has undergone a complete metamorphosis over the last ~year:

1. Egg: RIP 🪦 book about fun that was totally boring [Japan / Sept + Oct 2023]

2. Caterpillar: RIP 🪦 choose your own adventure book [Thailand / Nov + Dec 2023]

3. Pupa: emergence of a memoir about pollinators [Vietnam / Jan, Feb, Mar 2024]

4. Butterfly: well, let’s just say this post is about trying to break out of my cocoon..

🦋 Stage 4: Butterfly [Ongoing…] 🦋

“Integrity is the essence of everything successful.” - Buckminster Fuller

My interpretation of this Fuller quote is that a caterpillar will only become a butterfly (or moth! but there are no moth emojis 😔) if it is absolutely true to itself. If it spins itself a cocoon, and hopes to emerge as a bat, well, it will feel like a failure won’t it?

I think the same is true of this book. It will be exactly as successful as I allow it be. In other words, I’m listening to it, not trying to bend it to my will. It’s almost as if my book is a living, breathing creature telling me which stories and studies belong in it, and which ones—however entertaining or interesting they may be—don’t.

It’s for this reason that I have continued to find feedback from friends and my editor so valuable. They are helping me hone in on the integrity of the book. I am especially grateful for 🐞Dany🐞 who read my whole ~fourth draft, and for my editor 🐝Geoff🐝 who has probably read three whole drafts at this point🙏.

As my friends have helped me see where the book wants to take me, and when (for example, by pointing out that the book essentially became a love letter to my communist father, while I was writing from a communist country…), I have often wondered what “success” would even look like.

If you know anything about the publishing industry, you’ll know that the most likely outcome is that it earns me precisely $0 for my year of effort (and if I factor in how much I’ve spent for the privilege of writing….it’s depressing). So I defined my own measure of success: I just wanted it to reach the person who needed to hear what I had to say.

I didn’t know who that was, but I imagined this person may be feeling something like a moth: misunderstood, undervalued, overlooked, and emoji-less. It did not occur to me that my dad was this person until I learned that he had been given days left to live. Suddenly I could see that he was the only reader who mattered.

I needed him to read the book, ”before it was too late,”—remember that foreboding line from an earlier draft?—and now he unfortunately didn’t even have enough energy to read anything.

I’ll eventually write more about what happened next, once I have enough space to process it, and all the parallels it had with the end of my mom’s life when I didn’t get to tell her how I really felt. But in short, I was worried I wouldn’t make it home in time to read the most important parts to him myself, so I asked my brother to read him the last three chapters.

Here’s an excerpt that he heard:

Kurt Vonnegut, who was born in Indiana, once said “what people like about me is Indiana.” 

When I first heard that, I believed that what people liked about me was Winnipeg. All the paradoxes that, when combined, have earned the city the right to call itself the Heart of the Continent. The world’s worst winters, followed by epic floods, followed by insect outbreaks worthy of a horror movie. We have the honour of being called the mosquito capital of the world after all. Of course I left. But if you grew up with those wide-open prairie skies, and that Winnie the Pooh hospitality, you’d understand why I keep going back. Who could bear to leave their heart behind? 

Now, I believe that if indeed people like anything about me, it is my dad. Harold Dyck is the exact opposite of a dick. He is the epitome of Friendly Manitoba. The heart of the continent.

I know enough to admit that I don’t know how to reverse climate change or end income inequality. But I know how to care, and I have my dad to thank for that.

Now you’ll have to read the whole book to benefit from all the Winnipeg references, Dyck jokes, and to understand how hard it was for me to come to this conclusion, but you should know that my dad has worked tirelessly, without pay, for the last ~25 years to advocate for people living in poverty. You can learn a little more about his work in this teaser for the doc I started to make about him (and one day, when finances are more in my favour, intend to finish editing.)

He was the last line of defense for Manitobans who had fallen through every other social safety net, as he had. And yet he has received virtually no recognition for his sacrifices. Before he died from a disease that feels all the more tragic for its direct correlation with his socioeconomic status, I wanted more than anything for him to know that he mattered. Gratefully, he got the message.

Now my goal is for others to see that too. No matter which way you look at it, my dad and the people he helped, are the least appreciated beings in our society. Just like moths, mosquitos, ants, and other pollinators. It’s uncomfortable to think about them. We may not say it aloud, but our actions show that we’d rather they change, or simply cease to exist.

I hope that the pollinators in my book (both human and “more-than-human”) may serve to remind us of all the meaningful work that is invisible, uncompensated, and often really misunderstood. The world is simply too interconnected to go on pretending as if any being is more important than another.

Ok, that’s enough sounding like my communist dad for today. (Also, I should note that he is still alive! Though his prognosis remains grim 😔.)

I’ll leave you with one more quote from my favourite:

“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.” - Buckminster Fuller

Fuller wrote that 55 years ago. Talk about trying to send a message before it was too late. Anyway, I really, really do believe that paying pollinators the respect they deserve will have a butterfly effect that saves us! So stay tuned for more rants 😉

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me, it’s been a weird one!