Twenty-seven years ago this month The MoonQuest hit me over the head and demanded I write it. I'd never written a novel before and doubted I could. Boy, was I wrong!

It took all the courage I could muster at age 20 to call Gay Montreal and stammer 'I-I think I'm gay' into the phone and then take the bus downtown and purposefully talk about it, face-to-face, with a gay man.

That was my first coming out; there would be four more: at 39 when I reluctantly dropped the 'gay' label, at 43 when I married a woman and came out as no-longer-gay to my gay friends, at 50 when I lost the 'married' label, and at 54 when I came out all over again as a gay man.

But the first 'coming out' is always the toughest.

In the Jewish tradition, the number 18 carries special spiritual significance. That's because its letters spell out chai (pronounced "khai"), the Hebrew word for "life." The Chinese also view 18 as propitious, associating it with prosperity and success. In numerology, 18 is equally positive; 1 represents new beginnings, 8 is also a number of success and 9 (1+8) is the number of completion. As well, eighteen is the age when we leave childhood behind and move into adulthood. Here’s why all this is relevan…

It doesn't matter whether you call yourself a writer. What matters is that you find an outlet to express what you're feeling in these unprecedented times are affecting you. What matters is that you open your heart to the inner wisdom that will help guide you through and past the fear, that will help you avoid the apocalyptic panic that is so prevalent right now.

When did the call first come? When did you know, as clearly as you know your face, that you had to write? When did you know that an imperative deeper than any you have known was crying out for you to express it in words? When did you know?

When a powerful intuitive impulse prompted me to cross into the US from my native Canada on July 9, 1997, I couldn't know that not only would I not be going back, but that 21 years later I would be on my way to becoming a US citizen; a dual Canadian/US citizen, to be precise. Today, on the 21st anniversary of my "accidental immigration," I recount how I got here all those years ago, in a story excerpted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir.

There’s a difference between “wanting to know,” which derives from a healthy spirit of inquiry, and “needing to know,” which too often generates more anxiety than it eases.