Nancy Huggett thought she’d lost the chance to become a writer after her daughter, who has Down syndrome, suffered a devastating stroke.
But the 66-year-old Ottawa poet has now become the oldest recipient of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award, an annual honour aiming to encourage new writing in short stories, creative nonfiction, journalism and poetry.
“There’s so many of us who are just emerging as we’re older, especially if you’re a caregiver or if your life has been consumed in different ways,” Huggett said. “Sometimes life affords the opportunity to emerge in a new way as an artist.”
A jury of Canadian writers chose Huggett’s work among a total 560 entries, nearly double the number of submissions from the previous year.
Huggett’s winning poetry collection, Revelation, delved into her experience as a full-time caregiver for her daughter.
In 2015, at age 26, Jessie Huggett suffered a stroke that affected the frontal lobe of her brain, resulting in her needing significantly more attention.
“That’s when the intense caregiving started,” Huggett recently told CBC Ottawa’s All In A Day. “[Jessie] lost all language, all movement.”
Life after a devastating stroke
Jessie had always been fully included in society despite having an intellectual disability, Huggett said.
As a founding member of Propeller Dance — an Ottawa company providing dance programming to people of mixed abilities — Jessie helped shape an inclusive environment for dancers.
But the stroke’s impact on Jessie’s frontal lobes led to ongoing challenges with executive functioning and impulse control, Huggett said.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented another set of hurdles, with the virus posing a significant risk to Jessie’s health, forcing the family into strict isolation and disrupting the routines and support systems they had carefully built.
“It’s like rebuilding again,” Huggett said. “And it’s not that easy to do. Resources are not quite out there.”
Finding her voice
Huggett found an unexpected outlet in poetry, rising at 5 a.m. to write for two hours every morning.
She also took an online writing class.
“I could commit to online because if something happened [with Jessie], I just have to open the door and I’m there,” she told All In A Day
Initially Huggett didn’t want to tackle personal themes. “And then some of it slipped in.”
Encouragement from fellow writers and the therapeutic nature of the process led her to continue exploring her personal experiences as a caregiver.
“I’m hoping when somebody reads [my poems] they will feel seen and discover something about themselves or in their life,” she said.