EXCERPT: Growing My Way Home
February 25th, 2026
At fifteen, Jenn Ashton was a pregnant runaway who ate a lot of Kraft dinner and popcorn. At times homeless with her baby daughter, Ashton would live with several different men, one of whom was abusive enough to point a gun at her. Little by little, Ashton learns to care for herself and her daughter. She finds strength and identity from her Indigenous ancestors. Now Ashton has written a memoir, Growing My Way Home: Stories of resilience and care (Talon $21.95), exploring how she eventually developed the courage to become an award-winning Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh writer, artist and filmmaker. Below, we provide two excerpts.
“I learned early to walk along my road in a sort of state of gratitude. It provided the counterbalance to being told by my family that I was a “bad kid.” But I was unprepared and naive and saw so many things I should never have seen. At eight, walking home from school, I turned a corner and BLAM there was a deer hanging upside down in a neighbour’s carport. At ten BLAM I came upstairs from watching cartoons in the basement and there in the hall was my mother’s buck-naked boyfriend, who would later lift me off the floor in a chokehold for something I said without meaning it. At eleven BLAM I saw the neighbour’s dog get plowed into by a speeding semi. As a young teen reading Linda Lovelace (because I would devour any book) BLAM I was changed forever. And BLAM hits you again when you are out testing the little yellow boat you’ve spent the past month refibre-glassing, only to find it’s taking on water halfway across the wide dark lake, and you realize there is no life jacket on board for the baby. Then BLAM when your new husband duct tapes your hands behind your back, puts another piece across your mouth, and heads out to the liquor store, apologizing later that it was only a joke. And as a young adult BLAM the horrors of war are delivered to your eyes by way of a Croatian medical magazine. Then BLAM your husband flushes your wedding ring down the toilet during the first week of your married life. Then BLAM BLAM BLAM I see things I should never have seen, and things have been done to me that I don’t understand, and I am powerless, and inside I’m as seething angry and afraid as a wild dog caught in a trap. What was this world?”
“The one thing that came unexpectedly from the road I walked was an empathy that can only come when your burden is so heavy it weighs you flat to the ground, but while lying there you can see slivers of light coming from under doors. And maybe there you meet a warm dog’s nose and a smiling kid, or you might see some grass covered in sweet clover, or maybe you meet another person’s gaze who is in the very same place as you.
Once you have empathy growing inside you, you can pull it up to use more and more and can use it to colour all sorts of encounters and people. You can forgive anyone anything, because you understand where they’ve been. You can see outside of yourself, and self is no longer a necessary adornment moving forward. You reach a tipping point, where in all the hits and misses along the road, enough bits and pieces of experience have filled you up and been made into a you-shaped being. When that point comes, you are transformed and ready for the next part of the journey, feeling a bravery that only comes from insulating your damaged heart for many years. Where your raw woollen bandages have worn down to reveal a soft felt.
I’ve learned a secret from my Ancestors. After I spin my wool, I wet it and then slap it across the side of the outside wall of the house as hard as I can. BLAM, and BLAM again. I BLAM it until it is smaller, but softer and as strong as you would ever need it to be. Only then is it ready to be woven. It’s like needing to soak cedar bark before you use it. These days I am soaked supple and am the yellow cedar, the softest of all.”
9781772017038
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