Breaking Silence, and Breaking Free of Abuse

[Editor’s note: This story contains depictions of family violence and abuse involving children.]

Soft as Bones: A Memoir
Chyana Marie Sage
House of Anansi Press (2025)

Some stories take time to write. Others take healing, growth and family. This was the case for Chyana Marie Sage, a Cree, Métis and Salish writer and educator from Edmonton who published a standout essay about her family in the New Quarterly, a Canadian literary magazine, in fall 2021. Courageous and true, her essay “Soar” offered an unusually layered, searing portrait of an Indigenous family moving through intergenerational trauma. It won first place in the New Quarterly’s 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and the Silver prize for personal journalism in the 2022 National Magazine Awards.

Sage wrote the essay for a creative writing class at the University of Alberta, just before the COVID-19 pandemic started. The isolation served as a creative time to complete the essay. The year after she completed her undergraduate degree in English and creative writing at the University of Alberta, she enrolled at Columbia University. She was the first Indigenous student to graduate from Columbia’s creative non-fiction master of fine arts program in 2023. Over the last four years she continued to develop the work into a full memoir called Soft as Bones, which House of Anansi Press published late last month.

The book opens in Sage’s childhood in early 2000s amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta). The opening sections offer glimpses of how a young child can see (and, notably, not see) horrific events. The story continues as Sage’s eyes gradually open with age.

“I grew up in a time when there was such a culture of silence,” she tells me. In her book, she writes, “Sometimes the greatest power lies in the things that remain unsaid.”

In Soft as Bones, Sage breaks a powerful silence. The book explores her father’s abuse — and how she learns to free herself.

‘It’s time to tell the truth’

From a young age, writing was always a companion to Sage. Her early love of poetry offered an outlet to process what was happening at home. Her father was a gang-affiliated drug dealer whose abuse included grooming and molesting her older sister, a step-daughter raised as his own. Poetry helped Sage process these events and understand the intergenerational trauma of the Sixties Scoop and the residential school system.

Sage continues to write poetry and has published two of three books in a poetry trilogy called The Love Letters. They examine toxic relationships and nurture the steps taken towards self-love, respect and healthy relations.

She briefly set poetry aside for fiction while pursuing her undergraduate degree. “I was essentially writing these horror fictionalized accounts of the truth, what actually happened in my life at the hands of my father,” she notes. But there came a time when, and she describes it, “I’m no longer hiding behind fiction or I’m no longer hiding behind the poetics of it all, and I was like, ‘It’s time to tell the truth.’”

Truth has a strong pull when a “childhood is shaped around lies, and keeping things hidden, keeping things behind closed doors,” Sage says. Another reason she resisted the idea of fictionalizing events was to ensure readers “couldn’t assume or project or read that you are somehow sensationalizing trauma.”

“I know that what my family went through is one of the most traumatic things that you can imagine. And I didn’t want to sensationalize it. I didn’t want to present it as fiction. It is 100-per-cent real-life horror.”

In Soft as Bones, she writes:

I believed every word he told me
Children are not born doubting their parents
We learn every truth of this world through them.

Articulating the unspeakable

Sage’s writing is prose, stories and poetry, intermingled. In Soft as Bones, this includes unsent letters to her father and stanza formatting where certain lines of poetry are distinct from prose paragraphs.

Poetry steps in to help Sage communicate scenes where some things are still too unsettling for words. “There’s the one poem that I include when it’s a memory I saw of my father and my sister and I talk about a spiral staircase,” she pauses. “Pink sheets.”

Sage explains her intent is to give enough imagery to convey the truth of her father’s abuse without traumatizing her readers.

“I use poetry as a way of cradling the reader,” she says. “But also probably cradling myself a little bit in those moments too.”

SPIRALLED STAIRCASE

Small body
A glimpse into a bedroom

Pink precious bedsheets
Lacking innocence
Poignant sins

A large hand
Shutting the door
Only a glimpse

Of her pink stained eyes
While I spiralled
With the staircase

Laying out one’s truths in a memoir is a personally significant process for an author, but Soft as Bones involves a whole family’s truths — collective and individual.

For Sage, the writing started with conversations with her mom. “I just kind of began by starting to tell some of my mom’s story and talking a little bit about her history and upbringing,” she says.

The process of writing her memoir stood in opposition to how Sage was taught to write about family in university creative writing courses. “Keep in mind, it was a very white institution that I was in,” she says of her time studying creative writing at Columbia. “There’s this kind of Western idea where when writing about family, they always tell you to not consult with them, don’t let them read anything, just write what you want to write and don’t show them until it’s over.”

But “that never sat right with me,” she notes. “And that’s not what I did.”

Sage’s family members were supportive of her book from the beginning, she says. “I had their blessing to write it, and I had their openness as well.”

In the end, there was nothing that they wanted redacted or removed, and Sage attributes that to trying her best to capture the full truth. “The hard, the difficult, the dark and also the good, the beautiful, the love.”

One of the challenges was separating the threads of where Sage’s story merged with others, and she took care to write from her own perspective to preserve and honour the ownership of stories. “I definitely protected a lot of their stories that were theirs to tell,” Sage notes. She says she “instead focused on telling as much of it as I possibly could, of us, together.”

Writing as healing

Throughout the process of writing Soft as Bones, Sage carved out new ways for her family to speak about the things that had hurt them.

That healing and connection that arose from her interviews with family members for the book “has been the most liberating, cathartic and beautiful experience,” she says.

There is a spiritual element to her purpose in this memoir. “I feel divinely guided by Creator to do this work and to put my story out there — and our story,” she says.

In conversation, she often refers to it as “our” story — “‘our’ being [mine] and the families, but ‘our’ also being us Indigenous people across Turtle Island, capturing a little bit of the mosaic that captures our histories and our histories of colonial harm, how that still impacts us today.”

Sage sees writing as a form of activism. “I’m very focused on change — how do I stop those cycles of harm from being passed down in my lineage, and how do I strengthen the cycles and the generations and the inheritance of healing and culture?”

In her writing and elsewhere, Sage continues to work through these questions. She has worked with young people for Connected North, an educational initiative engaging with remote Indigenous communities, she has taught creative writing at Columbia and she is now in the process of moving back to Canada after a time in New York City.

It's been a fast-moving few years. Sage has also written a short film, a TV pilot and is at work on a novel. She offers the following words of wisdom to other writers who might be early on their path: “Give yourself grace and give yourself space.”

Words to live by. And words she lives by too.