Percy Cameron doesn’t give you a tidy recovery story.
He’s been sober for over twenty years. He’s a certified addictions counsellor, a poet, a musician, a chainsaw artist. He’s survived three heart attacks and a quadruple bypass. He works with First Nations communities on the frontlines of grief and addiction. By any measure, the man has earned the right to package his story into something clean and inspirational.
He won’t do it.
I sat down with Percy to talk about his book, Flying Over Life’s Challenges, a collection of poetry. Percy talked the way people talk when they’ve stopped caring how they sound. Honest in a way that’s almost uncomfortable.
“My whole life I grew up saying no when I really meant yes, and yes when I really meant no,” he told me. “Because I grew up hating myself, I became a martyr. I would sabotage me, sacrifice me and my feelings just so you’d like me.”
He grew up in the shadow of the residential school system and a home shaped by violence. His poem The Things Some Kids Go Through doesn’t flinch from any of it. Children watching their parents on the floor. Screams through thin walls. Morning smoke from the stove burning their eyes.
You don’t read it so much as absorb it.
Twenty years of sobriety hasn’t erased any of that. Percy is upfront about still carrying shame, still working through the weight of intergenerational trauma. He’s been with his partner for 17 years and they aren’t married. Not because of a lack of love, but because truly trusting another person is a wound he expects to carry to his grave. He says it without self-pity. Just as fact.
What’s changed is what he does with his hands. He used to fight. Now he carves walking sticks, canes, tables, and more. He played guitar at MarBella Coffeehouse, the only brown man in the room, shaking with nerves, and the crowd pulled in close and told him they didn’t see colour. He laughed telling me that story. The laugh of a man who’s earned the punchline.
Percy’s poetry isn’t built to sit on a shelf. The book started as exactly that — a collection — but some of those poems now live a second life inside a workbook he uses in his counselling practice, paired with questions designed to make people look at what they’d rather not.
Percy told me that if it makes you cry, that’s the point.
“If that book affects you that deeply, there’s some woundedness within you that you need to look at. Otherwise, why would it bother you?”
Hard to argue with that.
Flying Over Life’s Challenges has sold hundreds of copies across Winnipeg and Toronto. If Percy’s story resonates, reach out to him directly on Facebook through his page Percy’s Chainsaw Creations or his personal profile.
