"In Search of Solace" by Claudia Chowaniec
– I have made it to here.
I discovered many ways to escape the truth.
Claudia Chowaniec is the best-selling author of Memoir of Mourning. In 2021, Claudia received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write Moving Toward Joy: how to survive the death of the love of your life and learn to live again. Published in journals and online, she writes literary non-fiction and poetry; she is currently querying agents. Claudia lives in Ottawa, Canada. Her recent adventures include travelling to the interior of British Columbia to kayak and to photograph grizzlies on the Chilko River and becoming a first-time grandmother.
Author’s Talk
Claudia Chowaniec
As a child I loved writing little stories and poems for my grandmother, my Oma. When I was 11, I decided to become a teacher and pursued that dream, eventually earning a PhD in Literature. I started teaching at a university and quickly discovered I did not suit the constrictions of an academic environment. So, I left for the business world and eventually founded my own consulting company.
While I convinced myself that I was still following my writer’s dream as I wrote clear, coherent, and well researched reports for my clients, I knew it was not the truth.
When my mom died in 2009, I started to write about her life, her death, and my bereavement as a self-healing process. It brought me great comfort sharing my stories with others who were also confronting their grief and loss. I wrote Memoir of Mourning: journey through grief and loss to renewal. It became a best-seller in 2013 and was listed as #1 in the kindle e-bookstore in the Sociology of Death category and #2 under Death and Grief.
Finally, after all these years I am able to work on my creative writing again and build an artistic practice in the field of literary nonfiction and poetry. My poetry and short stories have been published and I write regularly for the Canadian Virtual Hospice online site.
I was awarded a Canada Council Writers grant in 2021. I am working on a new memoir, Holding Hands, that focuses on the death of my husband, my immense sorrow and loneliness after his passing, and my gradual recognition, now more than eight years later, that I am coming to a new, more hopeful place in my life. I describe how I am making progress on my journey to a deeper understanding of grief and loss, and how I am moving toward renewed joy.
My stories weave together three distinct strands: my personal narrative of the deep suffering I experience in the loss of my life partner and my difficult and sometimes futile attempts to face the radical changes in my life; poems intertwined with the prose to illuminate painful emotions and quiet reflections; and insights and quotes from authors and journalists in the field of medical research on dying, death, loss and bereavement.
My story in the Lost and Found collection is from this work in progress.
