The challenge
Robin had written privately for years but never took it seriously. In 2015, his mother died of cancer. He didn’t grieve in an obvious way — no crying in front of people — he mostly ended up comforting others, including his father.
What helped
Without really planning to, he sat down and wrote about the last ten days he spent with his mother before she died. He shared it with a few family friends. They cried. They told him he had captured her. That reaction made him realize the writing mattered — it wasn’t just something to keep to himself anymore.
In their words
Robin’s mother died of cancer in 2015. He didn’t process it the way he expected to — he didn’t break down crying. Instead, he found himself comforting the people around him, including his father. His mother had been a strong presence in his life, and he says some of that strength carried over into him during that time.
Not long after, he sat down and wrote about the last ten days he spent with her. It wasn’t planned. The writing came out long and unpolished — big, sprawling stanzas. He shared it with a few family friends, and they cried reading it. They told him he had captured her exactly. “Something told me to just write it out,” he says. “And then I knew — clearly, there’s something here.”
That piece stayed with him. Years later, after he’d entered the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing program and developed as a writer, he rewrote it — the same subject, the same ten days, but with more craft and control than the first version. He included the newer version in a small self-published chapbook, which he’s carried to independent bookstores to try to find readers for it.
It’s one of the pieces that pushed him to keep writing — and to eventually take his poetry seriously enough to pursue publishing.