I’ve Never Been to Vancouver, but I Know the Pull of the North

A lyrical meditation on gravity, quiet, and the steady truths we carry beneath height.

In The Cities I Carry, the author turns toward Vancouver — not as a destination, but as an imagined landscape shaped by presence. A city held beneath mountains, softened by mist, and defined by the gentle weight that steadies rather than binds.

Though she has never walked its rain‑lined seawall or stood beneath its dusk‑blue peaks, Vancouver lives in her like a slow exhale. Its heights become a metaphor for the truths that rise gradually, the stillness we learn to trust, and the quiet recognitions that shape us from within.

Through eight intimate, atmospheric essays, she explores:

the city that breathes beneath its mountains
the gravity that steadies rather than pulls
the weight that holds without binding
the water that remembers its depth
the forest that speaks in stillness
the mist that teaches us to stay
the blue that rises from stone
the part of us the mountains carry

With prose as gentle as coastal mist and as steady as rising stone, Vancouver, and the Weight of the Mountains invites readers to consider the transformations that happen quietly — the ones shaped not by urgency, but by presence.

For readers of reflective, poetic nonfiction, this book is a companion for anyone who has ever longed for a place that steadies them softly, a place that understands without asking, a place that rises in rhythm with their own.

Vancouver may be imagined, but the recognition is real.
And sometimes the quietest weight is the one that changes us most.