Ivan Coyote - Care of: Letters, Connections, and Cures

Ive been a road dog all of my adult life. My very first vehicle was a camper van, and I still miss it. Even before I became a touring writer and storyteller, I was a professional suitcase packer, a world-class map reader, a finely-tuned leaving machine. I wear through the soles of new boots ten times faster than I do bedsheets. Travel has been the spine and skeleton of my career for coming up on thirty years now. The two things all of my bones know best is telling stories on a stage, and the feeling of wheels or wings and road rolling under me.

Everybody on this continent remembers the week it all stopped. That weird week in mid-March of 2020 where the news about the virus wasnt coming from somewhere far away anymore, suddenly it was coming from our own hospitals, our own mouths, we were all breathing on each other still, and we needed to stop.

I was on the road when it happened. I had just finished a tour of high schools and libraries on Vancouver Island in the waning days of February, back when we were watching the news in China and Europe with one eye and washing our hands more often, but pretty much doing all other business as grinding and crowded as usual. In early March I had skipped up to the Yukon for three days to film a documentary, and then flown to Ontario. I was at my partner Sarahs place in London, Ontario, for a quick two-day visit before heading to St. Catharines for a couple of gigs at Brock University.

I got a text at 9:45 p.m. on Thursday March 12th that both of my shows the next day had been cancelled. Luck and circumstance found me under Sarahs roof that night, not in a hotel room, and I am still grateful for that. By the following Monday most of the red dots on the next three months of my calendar had evaporated, along with all of my plans, and my main source of income. Sarah is a songwriter and touring musician, and we found ourselves sitting on the couch next to each other, answering emails and making a long grocery list with a lead-flavoured knot growing in both of our bellies.

Both of us had spent the better part of our best years practising the craft of, buying the gear for, and logging the hours in to becoming the very best live performers we could be, and overnight, all of our talents had been rendered irrelevant in this global pandemic landscape.

We did what everyone else we knew was doing. We bought a bag of rice, and canned beans, and counted how many rolls of toilet paper we had left. We watched the numbers tick upwards on the news, and we disinfected our groceries with our dwindling Lysol wipes. We told ourselves over and over how lucky we were to have a little money saved up, to have each other, to still be healthy. We will make the best of this time off of the road, we said. I can write some new songs, she said. I can work on my mystery novel, I said.

Except I couldnt. The story I was working on flips back and forth between 1986, where a small-town 19-year-old local boy goes missing from a bar one Friday night, and the present day, when his remains are finally discovered in the bush by a dog walker, just shy of 35 years after he disappeared.

I was in the groove for the 1986 parts, I was listening to Jump and Born in the U.S.A. and When Doves Cry on repeat for inspiration, and it was working, but my words froze in my head when I tried to write about this present day. I spent hours staring at the flashing cursor on my computer screen. I made chili. I skipped rope outside in the carport because the gyms were closed. I cleared out a corner of Sarahs second bedroom and bought a little desk so I had my own place to work. Still. Imagining a world in this unimaginable time and place was impossible. Who could write fiction at a time like this?

So, I started answering my mail. I get a lot of mail. Emails, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram messages. Handwritten letters passed to me at the book signing table at a festival, a rain-soaked and blurry blue-inked note scrawled on the back of a flyer and left under the windshield of my car after a gig two years ago. Since 2009 or so I have been keeping both an electronic and a hard copy file of special letters, ones I always meant to sit down and answer properly, if and when I had the time. If and when was now upon me, and so I did.

This book does not answer all of my mail, not even close. I still owe so many beautiful writers a response to their missives. What I did was follow my storytellers heart, and I chose the letter that most called out for an answer on the morning of each day I sat down to write.

Some of my replies stretched out into four or five pages. I answered each letter with a story that the original letter shook loose from my ribcage. Outside my office window the snow melted and the green fingers of the garden started to burst out of the dirt in the backyard. I had the time and the stillness to watch the ants crawl over the peony buds and learn the names of the birds arriving and departing the feeder we hung from the spruce tree. I had time to drink a second coffee in my bare feet. I had time to write letters.

By summer solstice all of those letters, and the stories and souls and substance they contained, were beginning to gather themselves into a much bigger conversation. Themes began to emerge. The longing of an older lesbian to be seen and remembered was answered and echoed by the call of a much younger queer writing to me in search of an elder. A letter from a lonely daughter found itself on my desk in the company of words from a proud and fearful father of a recently out trans son. Ex-evangelicals and the excommunicated were both communing in my email inbox, waiting for an answer. Some of the letters I wrote took me days to compose, and tinker with and tweak. I took deep breaths and long showers, and even longer walks. I wanted my replies to these letters to be perfect, especially the ones that I had been keeping safe for five or eight or even eleven years before crafting the kind of answers that they so deserved.