In Praise of Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir
Thoughtfully and patiently, Seeking Spirit by Linda Trinh offers a compelling examination of how the search for belonging can create a heightened awareness of and longing for a spiritual life. Through the story of her own family, Trinh traces the threads that bind her to her ancestors, showing us all how faith and peace don’t begin with answers, but with learning to live with the questions.
— Hollay Ghadery, award-winning author of Fuse
This rich spiritual memoir of inner seeking by Linda Trinh is an account well worth reading. In it, she reveals much, crafting in words, her experience of the ineffable journey the soul takes through her life. Her spiritual touchstones are multiple and reflect the worlds of her Vietnamese family and upbringing as well as the cultures of the books she read in her childhood and growing up in Winnipeg. I work to make the mundane spiritual, she says at one point, and this I believe is the task of all of us for living our lives with meaning, purpose and vitality.
— Sally Ito, author of Emperor’s Orphans
Seeking Spirit by Linda Trinh is a well-written, beautiful book. It portrays her experience in search of the divine feminine. Trinh’s spiritual journey commences as she realizes with all that she has, still something is missing. And so, begins a profound and intimate spiritual journey in search of the sacred. Incorporating hybridity of form, lyricism, and emotional honesty, I highly recommend this book. Seeking Spirit deeply resonated with me and is a book that I will come back to again and again.
— Rowan McCandless, author of Persephone’s Children; A Life in Fragments and Governor Generals nonfiction finalist
Linda Trinh’s memoir Seeking Spirit is an honest, vulnerable, and tenderly crafted account of how she navigates her spirituality against a backdrop of brutal losses, grief, and setbacks. She draws us close as she exposes the complexities of believing, displaying an acute desire to know what is not known. As a fellow Vietnamese-Canadian who grew up spiritually untethered, this book made me feel seen in ways I never knew I needed.
— Mai Nguyen, author of Sunshine Nails
Linda Trinh seeks an authentic connection to spirit, one that does not paper over her moments of confusion, sorrow, or alienation; one that comprehends her history as an immigrant and the child of immigrants, her upbringing on the Canadian prairie, her roles as daughter, sister, employee, wife, and mother. While myths, legends, and practices from around the globe offer wisdom and solace, this is not enough. She must fashion a mantra of her own and embrace yet another role—that of writer— in order to hear herself and be heard. “Truth leaks out. It bubbles up,” she writes. In this heartfelt collection of essays, truth also shines.
— Susan Olding, author of Big Reader
For anyone who has ever sought spiritual connection or cultural belonging, Linda Trinh’s narrative reads as both deeply personal and strikingly familiar. Seeking Spirit is more than just a memoir, however, it is an offering to the sacred deities of motherhood and the divine spirits of writing.
— Shanon Sinn, author of The Haunting of Vancouver Island
Writing memoir is a rigorous endeavour. Trinh wrestles with her familial and immigrant experience of being “Not enough of something. Again.” In her decades-long quest, we witness how her failures and loss become her most profound spiritual teachers.
— Betsy Warland, Bloodroot — Tracing the Untelling of Motherless
An intriguing and stunning tale of a Vietnamese Canadian woman who seeks more to her successful immigrant life as a wife and mother thriving in Winnipeg. Trinh asks substantive questions and offers rich and astonishing insights in her inventive memoir of spirituality and international travel. What does it mean to find oneself through the meticulous excavation of family, culture, and motherhood? What does it mean to feel alienated and unfulfilled and also survive deep personal loss? How does someone carry their ancestors with them from childhood? Trinh enlightens, provokes, and meditatively reflects.
— Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality