Cenk Enes Ozer's Blog
September 28, 2025
From Sawdust to Stardust: How I Answered Silence in a New Language
When I arrived in Canada in 2016, I had to choose between bread or books.
I picked bread.
Back in Turkey, I had been a writer. Nine novels on the shelves. Readers who followed my every story. And then, overnight, silence. My publisher was shut down after the coup attempt, and every title I had written was pulled from stores. My name disappeared from the book world as if it had never existed.
When I landed in North America, no one cared who I had been. All that mattered was rent, groceries, and how fast I could learn the words “safety boots.” I took whatever work I could: tile helper, factory cleaner, the man sweeping sawdust at the end of the shift. I traded my pen for a hammer, my desk for scaffolding. I was learning English in the evenings, but my days belonged to construction sites.
Carpentry slowly became my survival. I measured, cut, and installed until the calluses on my hands grew thicker than the notebooks I used to fill with stories. In a strange way, wood has its own language: joints that fit perfectly, doors that close with a soft click. It was honest work. It kept my family safe. But the silence inside me never left.
Years passed. Then one night, after everyone was asleep, I sat at my desk. A blank page stared back. Not Turkish this time—I had been silenced in that tongue. Instead, I began in English, the language I had once struggled to order coffee in. Every sentence felt like cutting wood against the grain, but I kept going. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, the sawdust on my hands turned back into stardust.
That book became When the Devil Loves, my first English novel. It’s a mythic fantasy about exile, love, and rebellion—but really, it is my own story disguised in another’s skin. They silenced me in Turkish. I answered in English.
Sometimes I laugh at the absurdity of it all. I used to sign thousands of books in my twenties; in my forties, I’m signing off carpentry invoices. I still run a small finish carpentry business in Ontario. I still wear steel-toed boots. But now, when I come home, I also sit down to write. The choice is no longer bread or books. It’s bread and books.
The first time I held my English novel in print, I thought about that younger version of me, the one who left home with a single suitcase and a thousand unsaid words. He couldn’t have imagined this—surviving through carpentry, raising a family in Canada, and then publishing again in a new language.
Silence tried to bury me. But stories, like weeds, find cracks in the concrete. They push through. They survive. And if you give them enough time, they bloom again—sometimes in another language altogether.
I picked bread.
Back in Turkey, I had been a writer. Nine novels on the shelves. Readers who followed my every story. And then, overnight, silence. My publisher was shut down after the coup attempt, and every title I had written was pulled from stores. My name disappeared from the book world as if it had never existed.
When I landed in North America, no one cared who I had been. All that mattered was rent, groceries, and how fast I could learn the words “safety boots.” I took whatever work I could: tile helper, factory cleaner, the man sweeping sawdust at the end of the shift. I traded my pen for a hammer, my desk for scaffolding. I was learning English in the evenings, but my days belonged to construction sites.
Carpentry slowly became my survival. I measured, cut, and installed until the calluses on my hands grew thicker than the notebooks I used to fill with stories. In a strange way, wood has its own language: joints that fit perfectly, doors that close with a soft click. It was honest work. It kept my family safe. But the silence inside me never left.
Years passed. Then one night, after everyone was asleep, I sat at my desk. A blank page stared back. Not Turkish this time—I had been silenced in that tongue. Instead, I began in English, the language I had once struggled to order coffee in. Every sentence felt like cutting wood against the grain, but I kept going. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, the sawdust on my hands turned back into stardust.
That book became When the Devil Loves, my first English novel. It’s a mythic fantasy about exile, love, and rebellion—but really, it is my own story disguised in another’s skin. They silenced me in Turkish. I answered in English.
Sometimes I laugh at the absurdity of it all. I used to sign thousands of books in my twenties; in my forties, I’m signing off carpentry invoices. I still run a small finish carpentry business in Ontario. I still wear steel-toed boots. But now, when I come home, I also sit down to write. The choice is no longer bread or books. It’s bread and books.
The first time I held my English novel in print, I thought about that younger version of me, the one who left home with a single suitcase and a thousand unsaid words. He couldn’t have imagined this—surviving through carpentry, raising a family in Canada, and then publishing again in a new language.
Silence tried to bury me. But stories, like weeds, find cracks in the concrete. They push through. They survive. And if you give them enough time, they bloom again—sometimes in another language altogether.
