“I feel like, in a way, writing chose me,” Chyana Marie Sage explains. She is a registered member with Métis Nation of Alberta who grew up around Edmonton. She’s been living in New York City for the last four years, attending graduate school at Columbia University and she’s been working with Connected North for the past year. While she writes professionally, it’s also a hobby. She got her start writing songs, poetry and fiction as a child. She wrote a book that’s been released, too.

Professionally, she’s a journalist and creative writing teacher and also a model. Sage writes for Huffington Post, Toronto Star, Electric Lit, and Matriarch Movement. She teaches first year creative writing as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. To make ends meet as a writer, she’s also worked as a host at a membership club, at fast food restaurants, clothing stores and so many other roles given her self-described restless spirit.

When it comes to her writing motivation, Sage says, “Writing has always felt like this really safe space for me. It was a place where I could tell my secrets, it was a place I could really open up, because as a young girl, I had a lot of trauma in my childhood, and came from a pretty abusive home life. I was forced to carry all these secrets, and so writing was a place for me to unburden myself and to really work through some of those more complex emotions and experiences that I was dealing with,” she confides.

Writing was a therapeutic practice as well as a connective experience. “I love the ability to create worlds and to shape stories and to tell stories, and I think that stories have this beautiful ability to connect us all to one another, to bring us together,” Sage continues. “It's just this deeply personal relationship that I have with it that brings me joy. At the root of it, it brings me joy. We spend at least a third of our lives working. So for me, it's really important to do something that I love for my job,” she concludes.

As far as her schooling, Sage didn’t graduate from high school and worked at the liquor depot. She considered going for massage therapy but reconsidered due to the cost. She applied to the University of Alberta as a mature student and got her Bachelor of Arts, working as a research assistant for the University of Alberta Prison Project. Given her father’s history of incarceration, it was a project close to her heart.

University was a liberating experience where she could follow her passions and she excelled, where in high school she struggled with being told what to study. Sage intended to complete a post graduate degree in education but decided to pursue a Masters in Fine Arts. She got into four different programs but decided to attend Columbia University as the first Indigenous student to take the creative non fiction program and the first Indigenous graduate of that concentration.

Thinking of the obstacles she faced, Sage struggled against financial barriers because her family couldn’t support her going to school. On her own paying her own bills since she was 18, she worked thirty hours a week while studying full time. She recalls not knowing sometimes where her next meal would come from, going to the foodbank in high school, university and grad school. Despite her challenges, she’s thrived academically.

To keep her mental health in check, Sage writes and journals. She also does yoga and fitness, going for daily walks and taking energy from nature. She smudges and visualizes, leans on friends, and practices gratitude.

For inspiration, Sage looks to her mom who provided for her kids and worked hard despite many obstacles. She also looks to her great grandmother, a grassroots activist who started the Friendship Centre in Slave Lake, turned her home into a transition home for Indigenous women and advocated for Metis recognition in the constitution. She is also inspired by her aunt. “I was surrounded by these forces of women, really, my whole life and I think that really influenced my drive, my determination, my fighting spirit, my voice as activism and why I choose to write about the things I write about, both within my memoir as much as within my journalism,” she shares.

Reflecting on her goals, Sage wants to put out another book in the next five years, as she’s working on a novel called The Ghosts are Dancing. She wants to write a feature film and be in the screenwriting sector. She wants to keep working with youth. Sage recently launched her own nonprofit called Softest Bone Storytelling Foundation to birth an Indigenous Storytelling Festival, creative retreat and scholarship to study anywhere in the world.

Her advice for a writer just starting out is “carve a little bit of time out of your day, each day, for you and for that writing, even if it's just five minutes… If you want this, you can't give up, because there's going to be a lot of no's in this industry and that, and that's the reality of it." Sage suggests practicing positive affirmations like “I am a successful writer.” She also recommends pursuing education for writing and doing an MFA, following your intuition instead of what other people have to say. She says, "Creator gives us these specific gifts that we all have, and if we're lucky enough to know what it is and know what we love to do, pursue that with everything you have, and not let the world and the noise and the chaos of it get you down or keep you down."

In conclusion, Sage encourages Indigenous youth, offering, "anything is possible in this life… I think having something that you're working towards is paramount, and so pick that thing and pursue it and chase it… pick the thing, and go after it and be fearless and know that you can do it and that you can make your dreams come true. I'm a testament to that. I grew up as someone with a drug dealing father and extreme poverty, no financial support, nothing and I built this life for myself now through sheer determination and hard work and just having a dream and working towards it."

Writing chose Chyana Marie Sage and she chose it right back. A writer since childhood, she went on to become an adjunct professor at Columbia University, a journalist and published author. Raised by inspiring women, she became one herself.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.