Zero boundaries? Here’s help.

Safekeeping: A Writer’s Guided Journal for Launching a Book with Love
by Chelene Knight 

Toronto: House of Anansi, 2025
$34.99 / 9781487013073 

Reviewed by Carellin Brooks

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There’s a joke, attributed to Margaret Atwood, about the brain surgeon who confessed his plan to take up writing on retirement. “When I retire,” Atwood retorted, “I’m going to be a brain surgeon.”  

Atwood’s acerbity is understandable. Writers labour at this effortful craft for decades without renown, riches, or even much in the way of recognition. Onlookers, usually our long-suffering partners, families, and friends, might be forgiven for wondering why the heck we persist.  

The truth is that our motives are varied. Some of us think we’re just the next book away from that runaway worldwide bestseller and attendant royalties. (We love to read stories about other books that got repeatedly rejected, only to finally be published to universal acclaim.) Others don’t care so much about the prospect of fame: we simply have a story we feel we must tell, no matter what. Leaving a legacy, making a name for ourselves, perhaps consoling ourselves in the hope that, while we toil in obscurity now, we might be rediscovered decades or centuries down the road: our dreams are as glorious, and probably as fictional, as the worlds we create.  

Before setting fingers to the keyboard, it’s probably worth asking ourselves exactly what we hope to get out of publication, recognition, or even the riches we hope are down the road. Is there a social problem we burn to bring to light with our words? Do we want our descendants to know who we really are when we’re no longer around to tell them ourselves? Or are we trying to preserve what we have to offer to a wider world? 

Enter Chelene Knight’s Safekeeping, subtitled “A Writer’s Guided Journal for Launching a Book with Love.” Knight, the author of four previous books including the award-winning novel Junie, has a business, Breathing Space Creative, that helps writers and other artists balance their work with the rest of their lives. As such, she is uniquely placed to offer advice to writers in this interactive writing journal stuffed with prompts, questions, and interesting personal stories. 

Having once been a novice writer, Knight understands the mildly poisonous mix of inchoate longing, scrabbling fear of being ignored, and basic insecurity that drives us to say yes to every invitation and ask. Before she began to consider more carefully what she said yes to, and why, Knight herself did the same: 

I was a single parent, managing editor at a popular magazine, about to promote my second book, working a city job, commuting everywhere on unreliable transit, battling complex familial relationships, getting ready to build out a literary festival… and all with zero boundaries, no energy curation, no intentionality. Add on the factors of oppression of being a Black woman trying to thrive in a cis white male-dominated world, and I was hanging on by a thread.

Safekeeping is much more than a journal about our writerly longings. It’s an interrogation by someone who’s been there, and who wishes she had someone else to ask her these sorts of questions much earlier in her writing career. It doesn’t really matter what our motive for writing is: what matters is that we know, because, as Knight points out, we’ll otherwise be driven by others’ agendas.  

In the early aughts, writers were told we must have a website; today, we are told we must engage online. Knight never once resorts to such blanket imperatives. Her own decisions, like the bits of her writing process she does or doesn’t choose to share on social media and why, illustrate the kind of individual choices she advocates. 

Knight’s tone–half cheerleader, half taskmistress–lends itself well to the job of cajoling and pushing writers to examine, not only their own writing process, but their choices in their lives overall. We’ve all lamented not having any time. While Knight concurs that capitalism pushes us to constantly produce and constantly be available to any stray opportunity, she also reminds us that we have choices–like how many devices notify us we have a work email, for example, or when we’ll respond to a message on Instagram or X, a text, a phone call, an email, or a voicemail. In discussing and dismissing the “no time” complaint, the typically compassionate author allows herself a touch of acerbity: “Burnout is often deeply rooted in complex behaviours and systems of oppression, but in this journal, we are all about working on the things we have control over.”  

Instead of rules, readers can decide which activities they think are energy-sucking as opposed to energy-building. I’d guess that ruminating on online reviews of our work by random strangers (I recall a comment that even though my book was called One Hundred Days of Rain, the reviewer hadn’t actually thought I would describe… one hundred days of rain), pondering penny-sized royalty statements, or lurking on more successful writers’ social media to envy their every accolade might fall on the debit side. Not that I or any other writer would do that, of course. Well, maybe just a little.  

There is no downside for writers in reading (and working) this book, unless it’s your tolerance for current self-help terms like holding space, being curious, affirmations, intentionality, and keeping safe. While ubiquitous, such terms and the concepts they describe can in fact be helpful to writers who otherwise find the path to publication lonely and—can I be frank?—something of a slog.  

This journal is like having a companion on the trail: someone who points out the pitfalls, loans you a shoulder to lean on in the hard parts, and gently steers you away from the worst of the hazards along the way. It’s worth picking up a copy of Safekeeping to companion your next foray into the publishing wilderness. It sure beats retraining to be a brain surgeon. 

Carellin Brooks has written five books, including Learned (Book*hug, 2022). She lives in Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Learned was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. Brooks has reviewed Catherine Owen, Erin Steele, Jes Battis, Jen Currin, Daniel Zomparelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Mx. Sly, Debbie Bateman, Michael V. Smith, Buffy Cram, and Maryanna Gabriel for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster