Coincidence and Meaning

     Recently I travelled to a conference in Lake Louise Alberta, one of my single favourite locations in the Rockies. Really in all of Canada. Yes, it's an overpriced tourist-haven, but looking past that you can see why. It's magnificent. I've always done good writing while I'm there, and this trip was as fruitful as the last. Cost aside, it may be my single favourite place to write and walk. I was extremely exited for it, barely sleeping the night before leaving like a kid waiting for Christmas.
     I stopped in Banff for something to eat and to do a little journalling at a lounge called the Maple Leaf. Get the juices flowing so when the conference ended I could dive right in to my work that evening. Well, at the Maple Leaf Lounge I pulled out Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones to read a little essay to inspire me. I'd forgotten that the bookmark I was using was from a now-defunct book store. In Banff. The selection Goldberg wrote featured a group of poems from writers with mental challenges and one of the poems was called "Maple Leaf."
     It could have been nothing. Or, I could have just stopped in Banff to read a book that just happened to have a Banff bookmark in it at a lounge that just happened to be called the Maple Leaf reading a poem that just happened to be called "Maple Leaf." It can all mean nothing or it can all mean something.
     My first novel is about coincidence, about how so many things can circle together impossibly to the point where we have to address it, we have to accept it. The faithful see the thumbprint of God, the superstitious see their ancestors or the universe or ghosts working for them, the creative see possibility.
     Yes, there may be no meaning at all to coincidence, but we as writers have two jobs: to expose meaning but also to impose it. This second may sound forceful and it may sound like just the thing that frustrates students of literature: that we can see things that aren't there or might not be there or might not be obvious and say it means something.
     But I attest that as artists, that's our job. It all means something. Our job is to sift through what those meanings can be and say and do, what truths we can dig up in them to say what needs to be said about what it is to be human.
     And then we must shout it from the mountain tops.