No matter where Cherie Dimaline writes, she feels her grandma with her

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write. This edition features The Marrow Thieves author Cherie Dimaline.

When I started writing, I shared a room with my Mere — my maternal grandmother. She had her stack of Harlequin romance novels and a crucifix made out of wooden matchsticks on the wall and listened to fiddle music on a small radio alarm clock. I tried to be oh so sophisticated in my corner with magazines tear-outs on the wall and candles I wasn't allowed to light on my nightstand. I was 15 and she was 77. I craved privacy and hung bedsheets like curtains around my bed, like the bohemian beds in some of those same tear-outs. I read books that I didn't really enjoy but that I thought were necessary for any young writer — Bronte, Thoreau, Greene.

As I do now, I wrote then at night. And because I left my light on to do it, my grandmother would interrupt every hour or so at 2 and 3 and 4 o'clock to say, "Cherie Ann, turn off the light and go to sleep." "Just one more page, Mere," I would promise and keep writing.

And maybe those were the golden hours because when we went to bed was when I heard the best stories — stories about back home in the community, about my grandmother growing up, about traplines and rogarous and the ways to treat sickness with just pine and maybe some onion and brown sugar.

In my 20s and 30s, when I had my own home and my own room, I found corners to write — not physical corners, but spots in the day where two blocks folded into a small pocket of time. I wrote on receipts, in the white spaces of other books, on takeout menus and in a thousand cheap notebooks. I wrote pieces of stories on work computers in between spreadsheets and sections of dialogue in the margins of speaking notes during negotiations. I pieced together my first books from those fragments.

Recently, my eldest son moved to Newfoundland for work and there was a room left vacant in our Toronto rental. Could it be? Could I actually have a writing office?

• Where I Write
  Omar El Akkad often dreams of writing at a 'fine mahogany desk,' but he loves his space

We painted the walls grey and lined most of the space with bookshelves, which quickly filled and then doubled past capacity. I bought two pieces of art for that room: "The Scream" by Kent Monkman on a series of skateboard decks and a drawing of Johnny Cash from the museum in Nashville. There are other things in here that reflect back the whimsy and beauty of my life: a headdress from a Mardi Gras Indian, vintage tea cups from Texas and London, beadwork done by my daughter, statues of Jesus that remind me of the old ladies who went to shrine every Sunday back home — though mine are different (case in point: one of them wears a tiny sombrero picked up in Cancun just for this purpose).

As I do now, I wrote then at night. And because I left my light on to do it, my grandmother would interrupt every hour or so at 2 and 3 and 4 o'clock to say, 'Cherie Ann, turn off the light and go to sleep.' 'Just one more page, Mere,' I would promise and keep writing.- Cherie Dimaline, author

And as I sit here, surrounded by books that I read because I love them — Robinson, Maracle, Camus, Justice, Ward — I am reminded of the room I shared with my grandmother. I sneak in here at night, part of me still worried the light will wake someone, and look at my postcards from India, Yellowknife and Paris; enjoy the collage of spines of hundreds of books; and flip through the stack of half-read Sunday New York Times near my feet. Anything to try to get to that space where her voice still tells me stories. And this time I ask her to live in the words I type, ask her to be the spirit of the story:

"Just one more page, Mere."