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About

Hello and welcome! Let’s start Wikipedia-style:

Alison Gresik (born September 24,1973) is a Canadian author and creativity coach. Her debut short story collection, Brick and Mortar, was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award in 2000. Her memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire, is forthcoming in 2015.

Raised in Kingston, Ontario, she is a graduate of Redeemer University College and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary. She has published stories in the journals Descant, Grain, and IMAGE and in the anthology The Company We Keep.

Gresik trained with Eric Maisel and the Creativity Coaching Association and started her coaching business in 2010.

And now that you’re oriented, we can get to the good stuff.

Underneath all of my official credentials, I am a wrestler of angels.

You may know the Old Testament story of Jacob, who grappled all night with an unknown adversary and would not give up, who was both wounded and blessed in the confrontation, whose name was changed at daybreak from Jacob to Israel.

Persistence that leads to transformation. That’s the defining dynamic of my life.

I have wrestled with words ever since I wrote my first poem as a teenager and realized that I wanted to be a writer, a wonderful and terrible calling.

I wrestled with depression for years before I was clinically diagnosed at age 29, and through the long healing process I came to see my existential struggle as an angel in disguise.

I wrestle with the exigencies of marriage to my high school sweetheart, who has seen me at my worst and who stayed with me in the crucible until we emerged wiser and stronger.

I wrestle daily with the role of mother to my two children, with knowing how to love them while holding onto myself.

I wrestle with entrepreneurship on many fronts ~ as a creativity coach, as a self-publisher, and in my copywriting business ~ holding on through risk and uncertainty and steep learning curves.

I think we’re all looking for stories to help us wrestle our own angels.

Stories of hope and perseverance and quiet rebellion. Stories that show us what our next move could be.

I think my stories speak most clearly to people who are like me: women, creatively driven, prone to depression, with emerging careers as writers and artists, with jobs, partners, children, and other commitments that fill their days.

But I also know that stories have a beautiful way of translating from the specific to the universal. So everyone who finds my stories interesting and useful is welcome.

If you want to hear more, I would love to send you the first two chapters of my memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire, which take you further into the life of an angel-wrestler.

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