Wild to Wise
An Indigenous Woman’s Guide to Wild Grace, Soft Strength & Your Sacred Self
Verse & Vision is V13 Press’s weekly literary newsletter, and after a longer absence than I ever intended, we’re finally back.
I’ve been waiting far too long to reveal what we’re returning with: Wild to Wise by Geraldine Carriere, the first memoir from V13 Press. I edited it. It arrives October 1, 2026.
For more than a year, Ger and I have been rewriting her debut book, Wild Woman. When she first published it in 2022, it established her as a multi-hyphenate talent working across entrepreneurship, coaching, music and writing. But when we began discussing a new edition, I read the book and asked her a simple question: what did she think of it?
She told me it wasn’t really the book she had wanted to write. There was much more she had wanted to explore, but at the time, it hadn’t fit her brand, the direction that she was going for as an entrepreneur.
We didn’t set out to fix that in a single conversation. Ger and I agreed to meet regularly and work through the book properly over time.
Each session followed the same basic process: we talked until we found the pieces that mattered, then she went away and wrote from them. Ger needed to work through the material aloud, in person, before she could put it on the page.
So that’s what we did, again and again.
The moment I knew it had become a different book came partway through Chapter 1. We were three sessions in when Ger began telling me about her childhood. Suddenly, I understood why so little of her past had appeared in the original book. There was so much trauma, grief and pain there, but she had kept herself hidden. Sharing it was difficult, and she didn’t want the book to become a “woe is me” account of everything she had endured.
I had to convince her that the story needed more of her.
It’s not as though there isn’t horror here. Ger writes about being taken from her family home and placed into foster care, which is precisely the passage I’ve picked to share below.
She describes being stripped and deloused in the white basement of a nondescript government building.
That is a type of horror in itself. It is the worst kind: the kind rooted in reality.
So were residential schools.
So was the centuries-long, sustained genocide of Indigenous people in this country.
Ger has heard it all and dealt with it all. She is still here.
“I am Indigenous. I declare it. Because at one point it was illegal to be Indigenous.”
What editing Ger taught me
I’m a white editor working on an Indigenous woman’s memoir. I felt the pressure of that every time I raised a developmental question or critique. I second- and triple-guessed myself constantly.
But the important thing was to raise those questions anyway. Ger is a no-nonsense, no-bullshit person. She did not need me to tiptoe around the work. She needed me to be honest about what I saw, while remembering that the life inside the book was hers.
Editing Ger for a year and a half taught me how much more personal memoir is to the teller than almost any other form of writing. You aren’t only moving sentences or reshaping a chapter. You are asking someone to revisit the events that made them, decide what they mean now and then offer those events to strangers.
Wild to Wise is about striving and progression, but not as an endless chase for more. It is about trying to better yourself so that you can benefit your community. That is precisely what Ger is doing here. There is value in being honest about what you have survived because someone else may finally feel seen in it. They may feel connected. They may realize they aren’t alone.
Ger speaks most directly to Indigenous women, but her teaching reached me too because it comes from what she has lived. I don’t adopt anyone’s ideas wholesale, and Ger would never ask me to. But so much of this book affected me directly.
I was and continue to be blown away by her resolve, her resilience and her drive.
From Chapter 1: “Pride”
In this passage, Ger describes the day she and her siblings were taken from their family home.
One day, a car parked outside our house and just sat there. All day. The other kids were running around outside being kids, in and out of the house. I was the teenager, watching from inside, sketched out by it. By nighttime, the woman in the car finally came to the door. Four of us kids in that house, two boys, two girls. I was about twelve. The others were between five and seven. Mom was out.
A white woman in a navy blue suit, short brown hair, grey pen, ugly shoes. Two cops flanking her, both men. Mousy, soft, radiating unearned privilege. Guns on their hips.
They asked where my mom was. I tried to cover. Told them she was on her way, that they could wait but couldn’t come in. Then they busted in.
I was scared, but not for myself. All I could think about was my mom coming home to an empty house, her kids all gone. That guilt ate me alive. I was on duty, and I knew I’d failed my family.
They escorted us downtown, then bused us to an old building that looked like every description I’ve since heard of residential school, though I didn’t even know what that was yet. They took us to the basement. Cold, white, bare walls.
We were split up and stripped naked, de-loused like animals. I remember standing in the shower, the water scalding, and a man’s hand appearing with a heap of white powder, his face hidden behind the steam. Put this in your hair. It wasn’t a question. It was a command, and you could hear it echo off the walls. The smell was pungent, chemical, like chlorine or cleaning solution.
I was being ripped apart. Made to feel small and powerless. I felt dirty, attacked, on display. Like a piece of meat. But more than anything, I was angry. Under my breath the whole time, seething at these people. That’s where the distrust started. Anyone in authority. Anyone with power over me.
They gave us clothes and directed all four of us to rooms filled with dozens of beds, already occupied. All Native kids. All our people. Pulled from their homes. Made to feel like cattle.
After everything that day: the fear, the shame, the rage. All you want is to disappear. You feel so insignificant, so mistreated. You want to hug your mom, but instead you’re climbing into a strange bed in a cold brick room surrounded by other lonely kids just like you. No warmth. No love. No nothing.
Exactly where they wanted me.
Why V13 Press is publishing it
This is the first V13 Press book that isn’t my own. Ger did not pay us to publish it. This is not pay-to-play; we are not a vanity press.
We chose the book, we are investing our work in it, and V13 succeeds only when the book succeeds. We’re publishing Wild to Wise because we believe in it and because we believe in Ger.
We don’t take everyone. We want the most dangerous, exciting, no-holds-barred and genuinely different work we can find. Wild to Wise belongs here.
This book is also my way of coming out the other side of a difficult period with something real to show for it. It lets me say, “Hey, we actually did something good with what we were handed here.”
I’m very fucking glad that’s true.
This is the first of at least three memoirs I’ve been working on with brilliant artists and authors. Reaching the point where we can finally release one is a relief I find hard to put into words. The weight isn’t gone yet, but for the first time, I can feel it beginning to lift.
Why Verse & Vision went quiet
It’s been fucking tough, man. I’ve been solo parenting while trying to become a better husband and father. For the first time in a very long time, I decided to take that work on wholesale.
It cost me momentum. The newsletters stopped. The podcast stopped. Client work moved more slowly. But Wild to Wise kept moving, and that is part of why I’m so proud to announce it now.
(One lesson I would give any editor or writer is simple: never promise work that hasn’t been done. Ever.)
This book has been written. It has been rebuilt. It is almost here.
The ask
Buy Wild to Wise on October 1. Before then, join Ger’s email list. It means everything to me.
∴ If this newsletter has done anything for you, it would mean everything to me to hear it. Hit reply and tell me what you think. One sentence is enough.
Regardless, thank you for reading. Thank you for reading in an age of increasing illiteracy, cultural stagnation and attention divestment. You are doing something revolutionary. ∴
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