WELCOME!
If you are here as a human being, you have a body. This is worth celebrating!
There has never been another you, and there will never be another person exactly like you, EVER!
When I was a young mom, Nik, a friend of my kids and a friend of mine, started calling me evybody. It was a fun play on my name. After I wrote ghosts don’t have bodies and started searching for a name for my website, I remembered my “nikname.” I realized that evybody suits my lifelong questions about belonging and acceptance.
No one is a nobody. Everybody belongs. Everybody deserves to be valued, celebrated, and loved. Everybody is creative.
Creations
Ghosts Don't Have Bodies started as a poem about me.
The people I shared it with liked it a lot, so when my friend Michele, always on the lookout for good children's literature, suggested I turn it into a book, I listened to her advice. Never did I imagine I would be the author of a book for kids, but I guess I am! Maybe one day I'll publish the original poem for others like me.
Here's what my publisher wrote about this children's story:
You and I are alive. We live inside our bodies and express ourselves through our bodies. Many of us can do fun things like eat jam and toast, hike up mountains, dance to our favourite music and see each other’s faces. Others of us are more limited in what we can do. But one thing all bodies have in common is that they allow us to experience the world, ourselves, and each other.
This sweet, inclusive book offers the perfect opportunity to open conversations about body acceptance. It has great potential to delight young readers and introduce some complex and important topics in a friendly, funny, and accessible way, encouraging readers to listen to their bodies and practice self-love. Every body is different, and all bodies are good. (And I would add mysterious, complex, and creative.)
This book is available for print on demand as well as e-book as of April 5 2023 on the FriesenPress website. Click here to order yours or contact me below for a signed copy which can be shipped to you. It is also available on Amazon and other online retailers.
Wake Up is a snapshot of over 150 years of Canadian history regarding the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.
I am a late learner of this history even though I was born in the mid-1960s and grew up while it was happening all around me. This is why I called it "Wake Up". It was time for me to wake up.
This 9-minute spoken-word poem about the mistreatment of Indigenous people in Canada and their incredible resilience, expresses my longing for us settlers to wake up to what has been happening. I wrote this poem after one year of intentional learning, four months before the discovery of the unmarked graves in Tk'emlúps (Kamloops, British Columbia).
One evening while visiting with friends, I shared my poem with them. They spontaneously recorded me reciting Wake Up while the neighbouring cows bellowed in the background. Eventually I may do a professional recording but for now, you can view it by clicking here.
ME Kingcott, the illustrator for Ghosts Don't Have Bodies, didn't realize she was artistic until she was in her 60s!
For about two years, as a daily discipline, Marilyn (ME Kingcott) would use a peanut butter lid to draw a circle on a piece of paper. Then she would randomly put some dots within the circle and start connecting the dots. After the dots were connected, she would turn the circle around until she saw something she could create. When she had about 400 of these creations, she put a small number of them for sale at my close friend's concert. That was where I met Marilyn and her whimsical creatures. And the rest, you could say, is history.
If you want to buy any of Marilyn's illustrations found in Ghosts Don't Have Bodies you can contact her team by clicking clicking here or on the rabbit.
About Me
The greatest gift of creativity I have is expressed through my relationships, through every interaction I have. (That’s a scary thought for a blunt person like me!) For most of my life, however, I didn’t realize that counted as creativity. So, I dismissed the idea that I was a creative person. (I’m not sure why I didn’t consider birthing six kids as a creative endeavour!)
When I was in kindergarten, my teacher wrote in my report card that I enjoy and understand stories and poems. Then, when I was 9, another teacher wrote that my creative writing was imaginative. She also wrote Evelyn “enjoys art classes and is quite creative though she herself thinks she is not.” I wish I believed and remembered those report cards back then because I grew up thinking I didn’t enjoy or understand poetry and that I was NOT creative or artistic. Thankfully my teachers believed otherwise, and my mom kept my report cards to prove it.
Sometimes just knowing that someone else believes in us, gives us the courage to take risks and try new things. When I was 55, I discovered that I love writing poetry. One day, inspired by Amanda Gorman’s recitation at President Biden’s inauguration, I sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote for three days straight. That’s when I wrote Wake Up. One year later, I wrote a short poem about having a body. Recently I took an art lesson from my illustrator, Marilyn. And guess what? My fourth-grade teachers were right. I am artistic and creative… as are YOU.
I am immensely grateful to live in Stó:lō Téméxw, on the banks of the mighty river first inhabited by the People of Matsqui.
