As one professional chapter closes at the end of this month, it feels meaningful to see another one finding its place on a public shelf.
The first Wazo book has been accepted into the Ottawa Public Library system.
Libraries represent access, community, and longevity—values I care about deeply as a writer, and values I carried with me for 18 years as a federal public servant.
For nearly two decades, my work was about making things understandable. Taking policy, complexity, confusion—and translating it into something people could actually use. Sometimes that meant podcasting. Sometimes it meant writing in plain language. Sometimes it meant being the bridge between rural communities and national headquarters. (Occasionally it meant explaining the same thing six different ways until it finally clicked.)
Storytelling isn’t that different.
You take something complicated—a feeling, an idea, a question—and you make it navigable. You make it accessible. You make it something someone else can step into without needing a map.
A library shelf feels different than a sales page. It’s quieter. More patient. It doesn’t measure success in spikes. It measures it in presence.
There’s also something grounding about knowing a book will simply… be there. Waiting. Available to anyone who wanders in curious.
And someone did! It's already been checked out.
I don’t know what the next professional chapter looks like yet. Canada's Free Agents ends this month. Eighteen years of public service shifts into past tense. That’s a strange sentence to write.
But there is comfort in this: the work of making things clear, accessible, and human doesn’t disappear. It just changes form.
For now, one chapter is on a shelf.
And another is about to be written.
