This Is It

Winnipeg, Manitoba

March 25, 2024

Dear friends,

Where can I possibly begin? I never imagined I’d be here, but that’s always been part of the magic of Coco & Vera – the baby blog that I launched on a Friday evening in 2010, three months ahead of our wedding. We’d owned our apartment on McGill Street in Vancouver for less than a year at that point. I dressed up and sat, of all places, on our kitchen island, insistent that Ian take my picture. From an idea, and those photos, Coco & Vera, which I expected to be little more than a passing fancy, was born.

That passing fancy turned into the wildest and most improbable ride of my life so far. When I reflect on the evening when it all started, and where it went from there – the Fashion Week invitations, the photoshoots and all the nights I spent sipping champagne like that was a perfectly normal activity for a women in her mid-twenties – I struggle to comprehend the chain of events. I started writing about fashion on Google’s free web-hosting platform, Blogger, and somehow I became an in-demand fashion connoisseur, not to mention a professional fashion writer, almost overnight. CHANEL sent me mail. Once, I interviewed Elizabeth Hurley at The Bay, of all places – I took Topher along as my photographer and he was so nervous in front of the stunning superstar, who towered over me, that my DSLR nearly slipped out of his hands.

This all happened to me. A regular girl from Winnipeg. It’s been almost fourteen years and it still doesn’t feel real, even though I have the magazine cutouts and designer invitations to prove it. I lived these stories, and they’re fun to retell, but what’s most important is the people in them. The simple fact is, I started Coco & Vera on the cusp of true adulthood, a time when I had only the vaguest vision of the life I wanted and the people I wanted in it. And it took me places I would never have dared hope I might someday go, where I made the most kind and interesting and fabulous people anyone could ask to encounter. So many became dear friends. That’s the part that really matters, especially now.

Why now? Because this is it. After almost fourteen full years, the blog I started on a whim will finally shut down. It’s the end of an era that I’ve been exceptionally fortunate to live, but what I want, and where I’m going looks very different now. I was an insurance assistant in 2010 – these days, my title is Director of Operations, which sounds almost as nebulous as insurance assistant but comes with infinitely longer hours and the kind of executive stress that Hyacinth Bucket envisioned for her long-suffering husband, Richard. (Long-time readers will know that I couldn’t close this out without a last reference to Keeping Up Appearances.) I’m much more conscious of how I spend my free time because I have so much less of it. And I want to spend my free hours writing – but not about fashion. Not anymore.

Once, not long ago, I described time as non-linear – we live in a continuum, and always loop back to what we’re supposed to connect with in the end. I was telling a story, which I’d made up, but I put this part in because it’s a concept that intrigues me. So often, we come around in circles through our lives rather than moving in a straight line. It happens to me regularly. And it’s where I find myself again now, closing a full circle. Shortly before I launched Coco & Vera, I’d been rejected from a Masters program in Creative Writing. My dreams of life as a writer died on impact. I could have reapplied, of course – I could have done all kinds of things. But instead of trying again, I changed my strategy in a way that changed my life. It also digressed my writing career significantly. While I published my books along the way, they were a side project, not my focus. I did all kinds of other written work that allowed me to hone my skills – and now, I’m finally in a place where I’m truly ready to start again. I’m six chapters into a new novel, and simultaneously contemplating the idea of finally publishing a book of poetry.

It sounds as improbable as the rest of this story, but it seems to me that I became a fashion writer for a while so that I could become the literary writer I really wanted to be. This is the end of that journey and, while older, I find myself back where I started; with dreams of filling paper pages and seeing them in print.

I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for all of you. There is value in writing for oneself, but ultimately, without an audience, writing doesn’t go very far. So thank you all for all the time you’ve taken over the years to come along with me on this journey. We’ve talked about everything. I’m so grateful you’ve been willing to be part of the discussion. Thank you for your support, your kindness and your generosity. I cannot convey in conventional adjectives the sheet magnitude of how meaningful it’s been for me.

What this means for the future of C&V still isn’t exactly clear to me. The blog will remain online for the next few months, at least, but I don’t have any plans to continue writing – whether or not I take it down entirely still needs to be decided. If I do maintain it, updates will be sporadic at best, and more likely very rare. In essence, it will not be what it was, and that’s the point. This is me moving on.

But before I do that, I want to celebrate… so please join me LIVE on Instagram (where you’ll be able to find me pretty much exclusively moving forward) on Saturday, March 30, 2024 at 11 am CST to reminisce about all the fun we’ve had over the years.