For Camosun 2026 Business Administration grad Danielle Mier, grief is not simply an ending. It is a season—one that can be cold, dark, and still, but one that eventually gives way to something new.
Mier’s first poetry collection, Disappear Into You, explores grief, love, familial bonds, and growth, with what she describes as a touch of magic. Self-published online, the collection (which can be found in paperback and digital versions on Amazon) invites readers to find their own meaning in its poems rather than offering a straightforward explanation of what each work is about.
“Instead of doing a classic excerpt, like this is about grief, this is about love, like this is about familial bonds and healing and growing and that sort of thing, I wanted people just to kind of take what they want from it,” says Mier, who also wrote for Nexus when she was at Camosun. “I did want people to take from that and also have that, people who are going through that time of grief, that maybe it can help them too.”
Winter is a recurring image throughout the collection, appearing in poems “Still Christmas,” “Yukon Winter,” and “Only Winter.” While winter is often associated with mourning or melancholy, Mier says she had not consciously considered the season as a metaphor before discussing it. Mier associates summer with life and activity, pointing to Victoria’s tourists, celebrations, and excitement. Winter, by contrast, connects with the collection’s themes of death and loss.
“I feel like because there are those themes there, winter really resonates with me in that sense,” she says. “It’s kind of like, you know, winter is a period of coldness and darkness that you have to go through before you get to spring and summer again.”
Mier says that season also inspires her creatively.
“As much as I love colour, you can see, you know, the cover of the book, the back of the book is like black and white,” she says. “I feel like that, for me as a writer, is a very inspiring time.”
For Mier, turning personal pain into poetry is not a process that follows a single formula. Poems can begin with an idea, a strong image, or an emotion. One of those feelings became the poem featured on the back of the collection, written after the death of Coconut, Mier’s cat of 19 years. The collection is also dedicated to Coconut, and Mier says the poem emerged just two days after she had to put her down.
“I was in my room, I was just crying a lot, and I was thinking about that feeling,” says Mier. “I was really crying and just, like, breathing in, breathing in, and I felt like I was underwater. Like, I felt like I was being suffocated. And so I thought, this kind of makes me think of being underwater, and then slowly coming up, and calming myself down, and rising to the surface again, and able to breathe properly again. So that was a really intense moment for me.”
The loss of Coconut is reflected in one of the collection’s broader themes: the depth of grief that can come from losing an animal companion. Mier says she feels that pet/human relationships are sometimes not valued as much as they should be, despite the profound bonds people can form with their animals.
Through poems about death and loss, Disappear Into You ultimately leaves room for healing. Its winter imagery captures the darkness and stillness of grief, while its themes of growth and renewal point toward what can come after. For readers experiencing their own periods of loss, Mier says that she hopes the collection offers something they can carry with them.
“While there are those themes of grieving, growing, life,” she says, “I did want people to take from that and also have that, people who are going through that time of grief, that maybe it can help them too.”