There is a particular kind of recognition that happens when you encounter a book that seems to have been written for you, even though the author has never heard your name.
Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (2008) arrived in my hands on Day Four of my thirty-day retreat in Loreto, Mexico, and I felt, for the first time since arriving, that I was not entirely alone in what I was attempting. Maitland came to silence in her late forties, after her marriage dissolved and her children grew into their own lives. I came to solitude at sixty, after decades of caregiving, teaching, committee work, and the relentless noise of being needed.
She walked into the moors of Scotland and the deserts of Sinai seeking something she could not name. I stepped onto a malecón in Baja California Sur, watching pelicans dive into water the colour of jade, trying to understand who I might become if I stopped performing the person everyone expected me to be. We are separated by continents, by decades, by the particular textures of our lives. And yet, reading her words, I felt the shock of kinship that comes when someone articulates what you have only half-known about yourself.
What draws me most powerfully to Maitland’s work is her insistence that chosen silence differs fundamentally from imposed silence (Maitland, 2008). This distinction sits at the heart of what I am calling alonetude, an intentional, contemplative orientation toward solitude characterized by volition, presence, meaning, and felt safety. Maitland (2008) argues that the quality of silence depends entirely on whether one has entered it freely or been forced into it against one’s will. Solitary confinement destroys the psyche; a hermitage can heal it. The difference is not in the absence of sound or company but in the presence of choice.
I think of my mother, now eighty, widowed and living alone in Lethbridge, her solitude not chosen but arrived at through loss. I think of the years I spent in relationships where I was technically accompanied but profoundly unseen. And I think of these thirty days in Loreto, where every morning I wake in a casita that holds only my breath, my books, my slowly settling self, and I know that I am here because I chose to be here. That choice, Maitland helps me understand, is everything. It transforms absence into presence, emptiness into fullness, aloneness into something that, with patience and courage, might become its own kind of home.
Maitland (2008) also names something I have struggled to articulate: the cultural suspicion that attaches to women who choose solitude. She observes that female aloneness has historically been constructed as dangerous, improper, or indicative of failure. A man alone on a mountain is a philosopher.
A woman alone in a cottage is a witch, a madwoman, or a woman whom no one wanted. When I told friends I was taking thirty days in Mexico by myself, I watched their faces cycle through concern, confusion, and something that looked uncomfortably like pity. “Won’t you be lonely?” they asked, as though loneliness were the inevitable destination of any woman who steps outside the orbit of others’ needs.
Maitland’s work gives me language to push back against this assumption. She demonstrates, through both scholarly analysis and lived experience, that a woman can choose solitude not because she has failed at connection but because she has succeeded at knowing herself well enough to understand what she requires. What I need, it turns out, is this: mornings on the malecón, the soft fascination of waves against stone, the slow unravelling of decades of noise, and the quiet company of a book written by a woman who walked this path before me and left breadcrumbs I am only now learning to follow.
The Book of Silence
Reference
Maitland, S. (2008). A book of silence. Granta.
Author: amytucker
Weytk.
I am Amy Tucker, an educator whose life has been shaped by questions of belonging, precarity, and the institutions that hold us or let us fall.
I was the first person in my family to attend university. By the time I was twenty-five, I was a single mother of three, working at a donut shop, taking courses part-time when I could afford them, learning what it means to calculate whether you can afford both groceries and textbooks. Those years taught me things about resilience and systemic exclusion that no textbook could convey. They also taught me that the academy is simultaneously a site of possibility and a space where people like me were never quite expected to arrive.
For twenty-five years, I have worked in education, including eighteen years at Thompson Rivers University on the unceded territory of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl'ecw. Seventeen of those years have been as a contract faculty member, teaching organisational behaviour, business ethics, strategic leadership, teamwork, creativity and innovation, and human resources. I also serve as Prior Learning Assessment Advisor, guiding learners to recognise and document the knowledge they carry from lived experience. My pedagogy draws from trauma-informed education, Indigenous methodologies, and humanities theory, approaching each subject as a human question shaped by power, meaning, and the knowledge systems we choose to honour.
I am currently completing my Doctor of Social Sciences at Royal Roads University, with defence expected in early Winter 2026. My dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, employs participatory visual methodology to document how international business students experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging. The research integrates sociology, leadership, communication, ethics, and higher education studies, grounded in what I call asymmetrical precarity: a recognition that precarities can rhyme without being identical, enabling solidarity without appropriation.
I serve as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, advocating for sessional and contract educators whose resilience too often subsidises institutional failures they never created. This work is inseparable from my scholarship: both are forms of witnessing, naming, and refusing to accept conditions that diminish human dignity.
My research interests include academic precarity, equity and inclusion in post-secondary institutions, labour in higher education, community-based and participatory methodologies, trauma-informed pedagogy, AI ethics, and leadership in crisis. I seek an interdisciplinary postdoctoral position, doctoral fellowship, or qualitative research project to continue this work.
Beyond academia, I am a monthly columnist for The Kamloops Chronicle and a regular book reviewer for The British Columbia Review. I represent Team Canada in age-group triathlon and am a long-distance open-water swimmer, finding in endurance sport the same lessons I find in scholarship: that meaningful work requires patience, that discomfort is often the pathway to transformation, and that we are capable of more than we imagine when we refuse to quit.
I carry within me threads of French ancestry reaching back to Acadian territory, a distant Mi'kmaq connection I hold with curiosity and respect rather than claim, and an Austrian grandfather who crossed an ocean knowing that belonging must be made rather than assumed. These inheritances shape how I understand identity, territory, and the ethics of conducting research and teaching on Indigenous lands.
I believe the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. I believe research should serve transformation. And I believe that belonging, when it comes, is made rather than given.
Kukwstsétsemc.
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