If I said that someone I knew left her full-time job, sold the company she had nurtured since 1994, and planned to move to the other side of the world to follow her dream, how would you think she felt? My initial thought was nervous, and probably excited.

Laurie Brinklow is the person diving into this new adventure, and in speaking with her I realized that nerves do not appear to enter into the picture. It is now time for her to focus on her own work, thoughts, and ideas. Excitement, and even eagerness, was what I saw. “I will get paid to think, dream, and read,” Laurie enthused.

She was recently interviewed by Jim Day for the January 23, 2010, Guardian article “Island Ink”. Mr. Day wrote a wonderful article on Laurie’s publishing achievements and life in PEI. Discussion of his article with my co-workers led to the idea of interviewing her to focus on how one comes to the decision to pack up a life and start something new at 51, just as her children were becoming self-sufficient.

Laurie has always worked hard. She’s been a single mom who held down a job and started Acorn Press, a successful, Island-focused publishing company, in her spare time. Laurie says that her job at UPEI, where she writes, edits, and creates award-winning materials for the university, has been great. With Acorn, she loves working with authors to make books that they are really proud of. She modestly told me that growing self-esteem led to success which laid the foundation for more success.

With her days spent working on other people’s projects, her life has been full. But she still undertook and completed a Master of Arts in Island Studies, graduating in 2007. Writing her thesis, entitled The circumscribed geography of home: Islandness in the fiction of Wayne Johnston and Alistair MacLeod, planted the seed to do a PhD and fostered the belief that she could do it and love it. She found the academic dialogue of her MA to be invigorating and engaging. But the timing was not right, with children still at university—or so she thought until the day her youngest won a scholarship that would cover her to the end of her undergraduate degree.

Realizing that she could follow her dream now that her daughters were set, she dropped a line to Dr. Pete Hay from the University of Tasmania to see if he would be interested in supervising her. Dr. Hay had visited PEI several times over the years, teaching Island Studies courses and doing research on islands. He had retired from teaching, but was still very interested in Laurie’s idea to do a comparison of the cultures of Newfoundland and Tasmania. Both Newfoundland and Tasmania are ridiculed by their respective mainlands; yet, despite the ridicule, both have vibrant cultures. Laurie wants to know if there is something about islandness that creates the conditions for this to happen.

You can see her face light up as she talks about her proposed work. With eyes dancing, she explains how she applied for a scholarship to the University of Tasmania last September, but did not hear back for ages. The waiting allowed time for her to question whether this was the right move. She was pretty sure it was, and even contemplated whether she could afford to go study without the scholarship. Although she is a firm believer in fate (she ended up in PEI in 1983 by choosing to turn left instead of right on Ontario’s Highway 401), it really did not make sense at this point to go without the scholarship. However, on the morning of Christmas Eve she found out via email that she got the scholarship and could afford to go— a wonderful Christmas present. “After that, the logistics just fell into place,” she said as she outlined some of the details.

Of course, I could not go away without asking if she had any fears. She said, “No, I know I can do this,” and laughed: “We all have fears, but I feel really engaged in this. It feeds my soul.”

That is what stuck with me. We all need to find something that feeds the soul and allows the fear to melt into the background. I think this is where embracing change can come from.

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3. My Woes with Wilma