Betty Jane Hegerat

I have the  pleasure for the next four months of being a mentor in the Writers Guild of Alberta inaugural mentorship program.  I met this morning with Ali, the talented  writer with whom I have the privilege of working and we talked a bit about non-fiction, about the challenges of writing about real life. For me, fiction is always the way out; turn the story inside out, sideways, upside down, embellish, and change the details until the only recognizable truth is the quiet beating of the heart of the story.  A few times, though, I have ventured into life writing, and one of those pieces of creative non-fiction was published in Room Magazine 33.1 in 2008.  I’ve been thinking for some time that I wanted to post a story here just for reading, and  this one is on my mind today because it’s the example I always pull out when I talk about the challenges of writing about personal issues.  With thanks to my daughter for the grace with which she blessed this story before I sent it out in the world, here’s:

Dressed for the Occasion

When my daughter calls, I’m dressing to go out for dinner, looking for some way to perk up a plain black skirt and sweater. I find myself holding my mother-in-law’s pearls. Not because of an affinity for the necklace, but because she’s ailing, and has been on my mind.

Shortly after Robert and I were married, I asked his mother what she would like me to call her, and without hesitation she answered “Mom”. She would not like, she said, for me to address her as Helen even though that sort of informality seemed common these days. I stuck to “you”, or a clearing of the throat, an “ahem” when I wanted her attention and she wasn’t looking my way. “Mom” belonged to my mother.

When we had children, I could speak through them.  Ask Grandma if she’d like tea, I would say, but never addressed her as “Grandma” myself. Now, with phone in hand, I tell Elisabeth, I am standing here looking at your Grandma’s pearls, wondering who on earth will ever wear them.  Maybe they should have gone to St. Vincent de Paul with the clothes.

Are they real pearls? she asks. I squint at the necklace. Does it matter? The knick-knackery we salvaged from my mother-in-law’s life was chosen out of sentiment rather than material value. She was a woman who lived through years of hard-scrabble, no extravagance or luxury. A woman who could part with nothing, and whose hoarding we met full on when it was time to close down her house and help her move to a nursing home. By then, she was so far-gone in her dementia that my husband, his youngest brother and I made the decisions about her belongings. She shouted at us to throw it all away, because that was what we wanted, wasn’t it?  To be rid of her?

We filled dozens of green bags with clothing none of us had ever seen her wear, and dumped dusty jars of home-canned peaches and grey pickled beans that had been on the basement shelf at least twenty years beyond their best-before date. At the end of that exhausting weekend, I showed her the pearls in their Birks box and a plastic baggie full of rhinestone costume jewelry. I would hold this in safe-keeping for her grandchildren, I promised. She nodded as though she understood and was pleased, but we knew she was likely to phone a week later and tell us that someone had crept into her room and stolen her jewels.

Elisabeth has called to talk about the wedding. She and her partner – I’ve settled on “partners” as the descriptor for these two young women even though I hate the business-like sound – are worried that Bill C-38, which became law eight months ago, might be short-lived. We have a new Conservative government rabidly opposed to civil marriage rights for same sex couples.

The partners have set a wedding date in August. They’ve been together for almost four years, three years since my daughter choked out the news that she was in love, and it was serious, and the object of her love was another woman.

Today, though, we’ve moved far beyond that tearful declaration and my own private weeping, my heart’s misalignment with my head, my embarrassment at discovering that all the intellectualizing in the world couldn’t change what I felt about having my child move out of the mainstream. I feared that the world would no longer treat her as gently as she deserved. Today we’re talking about wedding venues and menus:  a late afternoon affair with hors d’oeuvres and some bubbly wine? But what about their friends with huge appetities? Maybe better to have a full dinner reception: AAA Alberta beef, or cedar planked salmon?

I tell her any of those options sounds fine. I hold up the necklace, frown at my reflection in the mirror, think the pearls probably looked better on the oysters.

There is a bubble of laughter in my girl’s voice when she says they can have a slightly more extravagant wedding because their Alberta Prosperity cheques have arrived. She says there’s pleasing poetic justice to funding her gay wedding with bonuses from the glut of oil and gas money in the provincial coffers. Our premier, Ralph Klein, strenuously opposed gay marriage. I suggest a thank you note to Mr. Klein, telling him he’s buying AAA Alberta beef for the celebration.

I coil the necklace back into the blue box. I came of age in the sixties, and went from mini-skirts to granny dresses, neither of which begged for a string of pearls as the finishing touch.

How is Grandma? Elisabeth asks.

The same, I tell her, or maybe worse.

She says she’s been wondering if the next time she’s in Edmonton she should visit, tell Grandma about the wedding. Or will her dad do that? Or will I? Or will we let it be?

I answer without hesitation.  Her grandmother would forget the conversation within an hour, and if she did remember it would confuse and upset her. There is nothing to be gained, no coherent blessing to be given.

Our daughter was the first grandchild.  Profoundly premature, she weighed just under 1200 grams, and I know that in her grandmother’s eyes she has always been a miracle.  But my mother-in-law’s actions and opinions are based on what the rest of the world would “think,” with no dispensations for favourite children.

Six weeks later, my mother-in-law slips away in her sleep.

I expected to feel relief at her passing. Creeping infirmity had drained the joy from her life long ago.  For five years, she was dependent on the care of strangers, and in the absence of a daughter, dependent on me to shop for clothing and personal items.  I assumed the role of stand-in daughter grudgingly, bound more by duty than affection.  I am stunned by the sadness I feel at her dying.

I was not on my Irish Catholic mother-in-law’s wish list. If her eldest son was not going to fulfill her dream and become a priest, then her number two longing was that he would marry a good Catholic girl. I never told her that my mother was as aghast at my marrying a Catholic, and that the priest who took our vows wryly told my husband that he was doing so only because I seemed to be a far better Lutheran than Robert was a Catholic, so perhaps there would be hope for him in this union. We moved to Calgary, in retrospect probably one of the best decisions we made in our marriage. My mother-in-law did not visit often, but each time her anxiety, fussing and oddly off-track conversation wore me down within hours. If I left the kitchen in the midst of preparing dinner I would come back to find that she had scurried to the sink and was frantically peeling potatoes. Because she noticed, she’d say, that I hadn’t done them and like all the Irish, her sons loved their potatoes with every meal. With spaghetti carbonara and Caesar salad?

By the time we had children, I thought she might take comfort in knowing that I was a good homemaker and mother. She was glad, she once told me, that I was not the sort of woman who left her children home alone and went out to the beer parlour. Well no, I wanted to reply, and I did not grind glass into her son’s meals, or hers which might be tempting, nor had I held up a convenience store recently. But there were other things I did do that might be noted.  She told me as well, that she was glad that none of her sons had taken up with a girl of another colour. That would have been much too hard for the children. It was a waste of breath to tell her that it was never the children who made such things difficult.

My children were far more patient and cheerful than I. They never saw their grandmother as anyone but the frail, nervous woman who loved them fiercely.  When she asked them to get on their knees and pray with her, they would glibly tell her, Maybe later, Grandma. I’m going to watch Inspector Gadget now. I kept my ear tuned to her conversations with them, because if I could not change her religious, racial and ethnic prejudices, I could at least do damage control when she spilled them over my children.

We never left our children alone with my mother-in-law. I, because I was only half-joking when I said I was sure she would call a cab and rush them to the nearest Catholic church for baptizing, and Robert because he remembered a mother who had nothing but a stout stick for dealing with her anger when the dithering patience failed. He had found the grace to acknowledge that like so many other parents who fall short of the ideal, she did the best she could with what she had. We hope, he and I, that our children will be able to say the same of us.

Funeral arrangements for someone whose life has been guided by the rules of church and society as she understood them are relatively easy. At the mortuary, the cemetery, and finally the church, we let “what she would have wanted” be our guide. As the only non-Catholic in the meeting with the priest, I try to keep my mouth shut. What do I know about the ritual of the Catholic funeral Mass?

The funeral will be at the church my brother-in-law and his family attend. The priest has never met the woman he will be burying. He refers to her as “Helen”. I have, I offer cautiously, written a few things about “Helen” if it would help him to know her better. Or perhaps someone in the family could read it? He answers quite sternly that there is no place in the Catholic funeral Mass for eulogies. When the question of music comes up, and I can’t help remembering the songs my mother-in-law sang while she peeled the wretched potatoes, he shakes his head again. No matter how much Helen loved Don Messer’s Jubilee and Marg and Charlie’s rendering of ”Abide With Me” it is a Protestant hymn, and it will not do for her funeral. It strikes me, as the plans are made, that it’s as difficult to die a traditional Catholic as it is to live as one.

At the beginning of the Mass, before the casket is brought to the front of the church, someone will drape it with a pure white cloth. I volunteer my daughter, holding my breath in case the priest asks, Is she Catholic?  No, I will tell him. But in our family album there is a snapshot of a little girl, barely a year old, in a flower-sprigged dress. Alone in the photo, she is taking a wobbly first step, but the hand she is clutching belongs to the grandma just outside the frame.

On the drive from Calgary to Edmonton, we shared our relief at being done with the nursing home smells of adult diapers, steamed food, the choking overlay of cleaners used to mask the stink. One more visit required this evening, one last clean-up.

Unlike the emptying of the house five years ago, this job is easy. But wrenchingly sad.  On the end of the bed, there is a faded afghan. One of dozens knit by my husband’s grandmother. The afghan, a few photos, and my mother-in-law’s rosary go into a small suitcase. Clothing goes to the Catholic charity, St. Vincent de Paul.  The only garment I set aside is a silky, long-sleeved dress the colour of raspberry ice cream that she saved for special occasions. A closed casket, we told the funeral director, but still, she would have wanted to look her best.

The handful of fabric I’m holding feels as cold and lonely as this room with the stripped bed, barren bulletin board, and mound of green garbage bags at the door.  My mother-in-law was always huddled into herself for warmth. Even in mid-summer, she kept the windows shut tight, the rest of us rolling our eyes, fanning ourselves with magazines. At our house, she begged an extra sweater, a pair of warm socks as soon as she arrived. The thought of her thin body in nothing but this icy breath of a dress is too much.

I grab Robert’s arm.  What time is it?

Nine-thirty.

We need to go shopping.

For what?

I dance the dress in front of him. A warm sweater, I say.  With only a breath of a pause, he nods, grabs the little suitcase, and we race to the car.

We reach Wal-Mart fifteen minutes before closing time, dress in hand.  Pick our way through racks of sweaters, me muttering: too flimsy, too slithery, too tacky, too pink. I sound like Dr. Seuss. Robert takes my arm finally. This isn’t working. He glances at his watch. What about the afghan?

I let go of the sleeve of a hot pink cardigan. Imagine a satin-lined casket, a silk dress.  A shabby blanket?  No. She’d be mortified at what the people at the funeral home would think.

And what about undergarments, stockings? How could I have imagined her laid to rest in nothing but a dress? I wish we had asked the undertaker what clothes they need, but surely that choice should be ours. Hers. I scoop up a slip, cotton, slightly more substantial than the dress, panty hose, cotton briefs. There were none of these in the dresser drawers at the nursing home. Nothing in her wardrobe but pyjamas, boxes of Depends, and the fleece pants and sweatshirts I bought at Cotton Ginny as endlessly as the harsh laundering at the facility wore them down.

A cheery voice announces that the store is closing.

Robert points across the aisle at another rack of sweaters. He takes the dress from me, strides away, randomly pulls out a hanger. Does this match?

Perfectly. A shade darker than the dress, a delicate lacy pattern and soft as a kitten. I hold the sweater to my cheek, and then to his. She’d love it.

In the car, I put my head back and close my eyes. Now I can envision Helen in her gleaming mahogany casket. Mom, Grandma, Sister, Aunty, Sister-in-law. She was none of those to me, and yet we were intimately connected for thirty-five years. Therein lies the seed of my grief, and therein this small gift of grace. In strict adherence to “what she would have wanted,” we have dressed her up. In exchange, I will tell Elisabeth that Grandma is wearing the dress she would have chosen to wear to the wedding. For the wedding, she would have worn the pearls.

My friend and colleague, Lee Kvern has a new story at http://foundpress.com/ and because I am a fan of both Lee’s fiction and this innovative story site, I urge you to go there.  Buy the story.  Buy all the stories.  They’re brilliant and entirely affordable in this format.  But first I want you to meet my talented friend.

Lee and I belong to a writing group that meets ad hoc whenever any one of the six of us decides we need a kick to get a new story finished.  No matter at what stage Lee’s story offering to the group, I am utterly charmed by the writing and have to work hard to bring my steely-eyed gaze to the work. Lee has a background in the visual arts and if I had to choose only two words to describe her writing I would say she is an artist and a stylist; her prose is spare and yet elegant.  Allowed one more word, I would say she is a magician; her narrative is quicksilver on the page. With each new Lee Kvern story that I have the pleasure and honour of reading, I shake my head and ask, “How does she do this?”  So I thought I would ask questions and try to tease out the secrets to her magic.

 BJH:  Lee, I know you are a graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, and I know that you’ve had a history of interesting occupations in support of your life as an artist and a writer.  Could you take us through some of the journey and how it’s shaped you as artist, both visual and literary?

LK:  At the age of three… no, I’m kidding. After Art College I moved to Vancouver where my husband, fellow artist/illustrator started a design company. Work was piecemeal, largely altruistic and speculative at best; the city was expensive. So after a time, my husband got a job at a car wash and turned to painting, I worked three nights a week at the casino as a pitboss and started silk-screening. I had this great studio space on Granville Island where I caught the day ferry across the clear green water and spent entire long luxurious (!) days silk screening dill pickles and cows and milk bottles. It was absolutely wonderful both in studio and space and time, something I wish I had now as I share my tiny writing/art studio with the faint smell of husky pee in the corner. That and the fractured time with kids and husband and work, none of which I would trade, all the while balancing toast making, laundry, part-time work, paying bills, the usual things people do.

When I look back on that now: such a short period of time in my life, such a long time ago, but it had an enormous impact on me in that it has lasted me a lifetime. It ruined me for anything less. I found I not only craved time and art and space but also recognized that I needed to do something creative in order to be remotely happy. Dang Art College, Vancouver, Granville Island, all of which have a permanent sweet stain on my heart.  

Then my father died. I moved to Vancouver Island in order to make sense of things. (I’m still waiting on that explanation, says Cage The Elephant and me). I started writing fiction. Reading fiction had always been integral to me both in Art College reading the philosophers, the Dostoevskys, the Hesses, Rands and Orwells, and in life, reading Hemingway, Munro, Laurence, Salinger. The first story I wrote was a semi-finalist in the CBC literary contest but even before that, just the physical/emotional act of writing itself, I knew I’d found my niche.

So how does art influence writing? I’m a visual thinker, so images sticks more strongly than any other sense in my mind. Usually for me, that’s where a story starts. I’ll see something at Tim Horton’s or Sobey’s or on the street and that image will stick with me. It always about people and their interactions with one another, or non-actions that catch me. I’m immensely interested in what makes us tick, how we think, why we do things. More so when we make mistakes, when we fall down, and in turn, how we might pick ourselves back up, and with luck, find redemption of some sort. Outside the initial visual, this is the impetus that gets the story rolling for me. I’m a rock lifter by nature. Not a great quality if you’re a homemaker (more to dust) but for a writer it serves a purpose. So that combined with the visual makes me the writer I happen to be. I like to describe scenes in a very A.D.D. way (only the facts, ma’am), in the hope that the reader can see what I see, in combination with the emotional/psychological depth of our Oh Humanity (I say this lovingly, myself inclusive) that I also hope comes through in the story. For me both are important. Yes, a movie/story has to look good, but it also has to move me.

BJH: Your website http://leekvern.com/  has both Writer and Artist pages. I know that recently you’ve been spending more time on finding and painting vintage furniture than on story.  Can you talk a bit about how you balance the visual art with writing?

 LK: After launching my second book in 2010, finishing my third and having my mother die in the same year, I needed a break, so went back to those things that I haven’t done since I lived in Vancouver some twenty-odd years ago. Think I’m still/always looking for that explanation. Can someone please explain it to me, anyone?? I’ve spent this last year painting images on vintage furniture in avoidance of novel writing and rock-lifting. I think my soul just needs a break, a place to come back to where I can mindlessly enjoy what is in front of me. And for that, I am grateful for Art College and green waters that still sparkle in my now older, wiser mind.

 That and the fact that I don’t care about painting, I have nothing invested in terms of hopes/career/ambition, which I’ve been guilty of having towards writing and publishing. Which, over this last year has left a vinegary taste in my mouth, but that is likely grief speaking, coupled with ridiculous expectation. I know at some point I will come back to writing, newly energized, ready to do the heavy lifting (rocks, always with the rocks) that I apparently can’t seem to avoid. I long to be the sort of writer who can write light, funny, Harlequin Romance-type books that actually sell, and make people laugh. If you think Happy Drugs might be the answer for all your problems, please consult with your doctor… yes.

 BJH:  I’ve known a number of writers whose talents and training take them into the visual arts as well.  Your artist’s eye and hand are so obviously a part of your writing. Can you describe how the writing and the painting work together, or any challenges involved in moving between them?

 LK: No challenges moving back and forth. In this past year and a half of supposed non-writing on my part, I’ve written close to two hundred blog pages (see: don’t care, doesn’t matter as in painting). The ha ha is on me in this case. What I’ve discovered (to my surprise and delight) is that if one thing becomes too important in my mind, then the shift onto the other is a great remedy. My most anxious times are when I’m pushing too hard on something, or conversely waiting for something to happen (waiting is death to any writer), both of which suck the joy life out of the very things I love. So, in that sense, writing and painting work well for me. Wished I’d discovered this sooner.

BJH: You have two books, both novels, and I know that you are looking for a publisher for a collection of short fiction. Tell us a bit about this collection and your passion for the short story and its place in Canadian literature.

LK: I do have a book looking for a publisher, a short story collection that spans twenty years of writing for me. Short story writing is what kick-started me into this whole silly writing game. I love the genre. I’m A.D.D. at best and this form works well for me. I read short fiction wherever I can, I serve on short story juries whenever I can, I promote the hell out of this poor-cousin (as Z.Gartner says) to the novel. The short story deserves a secure place in Canadian lit. It’s the starting point of almost every writer out there, so why then does there need to be a stopping point? I’ve been told by numerous publishers, that if you don’t have a Giller, a G.G. nom under your belt, or bare minimum, the New Yorker hasn’t noticed you yet, then sorry, we can’t take your collection. And to that I say, market it, the same way you market and sell any other book. Make it an attractive genre that promises a whole slough of writers that you might never get to read otherwise, and man/woman, you don’t know what you’re missing! You really don’t. I could talk about what Alice Munro taught me via her short fiction in my early days, how Margaret Laurence impacted my world view of things, how Salinger’s short stories caused me to pause and ponder and re-think something, the list of short story writers that have impacted my life outside of my writing is endless. Think we need to push it whenever/wherever we can.

BJH: And after all this seriousness, what’s so much fun about all this that none of can cease in spite of the frustrations we share and whine about regularly?

LK: For me: Granville Island. Space and time, balance and perspective, waiting on that explanation. For the record, we whine because it’s hard, dang hard but I suspect when it comes down to the endgame, its worth is measured in the body/soul weight of every writer out there. I wish obscene obesity for all of us. Eat, feast, write… : )

BJH: Thanks, Lee.  Such a treat to talk to you at any time, and a real pleasure to be able to host a blog visit!

Have I mentioned that Lee’s last book, The Matter of Sylvie, was shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction in the Alberta Book Awards in 2010?  Check out that book, and her previous work and all the other bits and pieces of Lee at http://leekvern.com/.

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Sharon Butala after brazenly contacting her to ask if she would write a back cover blurb for my upcoming book, The Boy. Sharon graciously agreed, and when we met and talked about writing, she told me that her sister and I shared the experience of social work and in particular of child protection work. I was intrigued to hear that Deanna, too, had a book of short stories published in 2008, and as with me her experience spilled into her writing. In fact, her book explored the world of the front-line child protection worker. I sent Deanna an email and suggested an exchange of books. A week later, No Easy Answers was in my mailbox. Frances Itani’s words of praise are on the book cover:

Lueder’s writing shines with quiet compassion, even while evoking grim reality. Always direct, never sentimental, these stories give an insider’s view of the costs and rewards of working with bleak but never entirely hopeless lives—especially the lives of children who find themselves on the fringes of society.

I have found it difficult in my own writing to release myself from the years of working in child welfare programs. Not nearly so many years as Deanna Lueder’s long career in this heartbreaking profession, but long enough that I read No Easy Answers with my heart responding every time Lexie, the social worker in Deanna’s work of fiction was assigned a new case.

I dedicated my first novel Running Toward Home, to children in care and the foster parents and social workers who keep them safe. “Lexie” is exactly the social worker I had in mind. I believe that all of the helping professions are fraught with the difficulty that no matter which way a tough decision is made, there is human fall-out. I can’t do better than Deanna Lueder’s words in explaining why this is an important book. From the Afterword to No Easy Answers:

 “I’ve gradually come to believe that the basic characteristics of a competent social worker are formed in childhood: respect, empathy, compassion, and intuition (the famous “flinch factor”). … I hope that the writing will give credence to a much-maligned profession and reveal to the reader that it is indeed a worthwhile one, not to be dismissed as mere “do-gooding” or as a job of unrelieved doom and gloom. Social work is a profession that is perfect for the curious learner, the optimist, the communicator, and the lover of life.”

This is an important book, and I am grateful to Deanna Lueder for having written it.
No Easy Answers by Deanna Lueder ISBN 978-0-88961-465-9 Women’s Press, an Imprint of Canadian Scholars’ Press, Toronto

My good friend, Judy, and her daughter, Lindsay are setting off on an adventure that has me smiling with delight. A few weeks ago, Judy told me that after Lindsay finished reading The Boy she felt she had missed out on a huge chunk of Alberta landscape because the Calgary to Edmonton journey which the family had made regularly for years to visit Grandma, had never veered off the main highway.  She wanted, she said, to take a road trip and follow Betty Jane’s path through all the towns mentioned in the book:  Lacombe, Ponoka, New Sarepta, Camrose, Stettler, Hanna and the surrounding countryside. This, Judy decided, would be a very fine mother/daughter outing, so the two of them are setting out next weekend.

Judy called today to ask for suggestions of places to stop.  I told her I would thumb through the book and send her some ideas. My first thought was that these two are going to enjoy the journey far more than I did in my years of shotgun trips to interview or search through archives.   What better time of year than golden autumn to wander the Alberta countryside.  Find the best coffee shop in town, take a walk down Main Street and then do a leisurely meander down residential streets. I’d start the trip in Lacombe, which is one of the prettiest of Alberta towns with its tree-lined streets and “Edwardian” business section. Somewhere in my notebook, I know that I scribbled “come back and see this town another time” after my interview with Doreen Scott. I’ll be counting on Judy and Lindsay to have scouted some things for me to see when do go back to Lacombe.

From Lacombe, I’d suggest a back road to Ponoka – ask someone in that very good coffee shop that I’m sure is right there on Main Street in Lacombe to point out the route.  The old Ponoka Mental Hospital from which Robert Cook escaped, is now The Centennial Centre for Mental Health and Brain Injury.  The original hospital has been empty since 2002 and is designated a heritage building.
Ponoka Mental Hospital
Look at the windows, ponder which one was the escape route.

From Ponoka, go east to Hwy 21 and then north to New Sarepta, noting along the way the town of Bashaw, which is where Robert Cook was taken into custody after his escape.

I haven’t been back to New Sarepta in many years, but the last time we passed through, the coffee shop that seemed a cavernous place when I was a little girl was a small liquor store.  I’d suggest asking someone who looks like they would be of an age to remember if they know which building was the New Sarepta Coffee Shop owned by Morris and Martha Harke back in the 1950s.  It was between Hettman’s General Store and Diewert’s blacksmith shop.  The post office was across the street, Myrtle Lehmann the town postmistress.

Then back south on  Hwy 21 to the junction with Hwy 13 and east to Camrose.  I will give Judy directions to the house on 56^th St. where I sat on the back step and tried to make sense of a brother killing his family.  Camrose is a lovely city with a man-made lake in its centre and the Augustana University Campus, formerly Camrose Lutheran College.  On the trips I’ve made back to Camrose to read when my previous books came out, I’ve stayed at a  B&B near the college and I’ll probably suggest that to Judy as a possible place for the night.

The Stettler Museum is only open “by appointment” after Labour Day, but I’d phone just in case there’s a special event or simply a later season because of the fine weather.  Stettler Museum

Archived material about the Cook case is in the old courthouse.  There is an apartment building on the original site of the Cook family residence.  I was disinclined during my research to visit that spot, and probably wouldn’t suggest it to anyone else either. Just a wander around the town is a good way to get a sense of this community.  There’s a fine bakery café on the main street,  a great place to stop for lunch.

Driving south to Hanna, the landscape changes from aspen woodland to grassland.  This a smaller town still, and my own tour of it was short but I suspect there will interesting places that Judy will find to tell me about. The cemetery is just north of town on Pioneer Trail.  A sad place to end a road trip, but it is a peaceful place and I rather hope that Judy and Lindsay are treated to the scrutiny of a herd of Aberdeen Angus just as I was on my quest to find the Cook family.

I am looking forward to hearing about the trip, to seeing the pictures, and to taking a similar weekend trip myself some day. Thank you, Lindsay, for this great idea!

A writing colleague, Dale Kwong, put a book of essays in my hands just a few days ago.  Somebody’s Child, published by Touchwood Editions, is hot off the press and includes Dale’s essay which I had the pleasure of reading when I was the Writer in Residence at Memorial Park Library two years ago.  It includes essays by some other writers whose work I know as well. Normally I take my time reading a book of essays, slotting them into times when I don’t want to bury myself in long pieces of fiction.  But this is a book I’ve been awaiting for reasons other than celebrating the publication of my writing friends.

I began a career in social work when I graduated from the University of Alberta with a B.A, major in Sociology, minor in English in 1969.  In those years, there were few social work programs in Canada, and qualifications for work with social service departments varied from a degree of almost any stripe, to related life experience. I started out in the Lethbridge regional office of the Department of Public Welfare, soon to be renamed the Department of Social Development, and later in my career, the Department of Social Services and Community Health.  Inexperienced, twenty-one years old, I was given a diversified caseload that included all the financial assistance programs, as well as the full spectrum of child welfare.  I had a rural area that extended from Taber to Grassy Lake, and under child welfare authority I apprehended children in cases of neglect, supervised foster homes, did “surrender” counselling and court documents with unmarried mothers who were relinquishing their children for adoption, and completed adoption home assessments, placement visits and final court work for adopting families.  These were the times of secrecy and sealed documents.  Adoption was no longer an informal shuffling of children from one family member to another, or shifting within communities to those who were willing to take in orphans and if all else failed to orphanages where children awaited being “chosen.”  Government agencies were mandated to protect children.  The mandate was long overdue.  The wisdom behind the secrecy was that it would protect adopting parents from interference from “natural” parents, and it would protect children from the stigma of adoption.  No one but the members of the adoption triangle ever need know that the child was not “born to” the adopting parents.  Even Registration of Live Birth was altered to state that it was so. In my early adoption work, I was troubled by the assurances I was authorized to give all concerned that their secret would be safeguarded forever. I had a sense that life had no forevers, and each time I helped a sobbing young woman sign away her rights to a child —often without ever holding or looking into that baby’s eyes, because that was the advice of the time, that it would easier that way—and each time I urged her to put this loss behind her and get on with a new life, my words rang so false in my own ears that I’m surprised at how few lashed back in anger. I went back to university after three years of work, earned an MSW and then worked again for Social Services, as a casework supervisor.  I left the government agency when our first child was born, but the births of all three of my children put that early adoption work into a sharp new perspective and I wondered over the years about the young women I’d met, about the babies I’d seen placed in foster care or adoptive homes.  When I returned to social work some years later, it was to a private adoption agency and to a new wisdom. Adoption through private agencies was open, and mothers (now called birthmothers) didn’t relinquish or surrender; they chose a family, met with prospective parents, made arrangements about future contact in the child’s life. Many of the families applying to adopt were frightened of open adoption, many of the families of the young women who were choosing adoption for their child also questioned this new philosophy. For me, it made such perfect sense that I grieved for the long ago “birthmothers”, adopting families and adoptees in whose lives I’d had such a brief but significant role.  When the Alberta government took the huge step of facilitating adoption reunion if both birthparent and adoptee were consenting, the agency I worked for was licensed to facilitate search and reunion and I became their agent in that work. With identifying information in hand, I tracked adoptees for searching birthparents, or birthparents for searching adoptees.  The stories that unfolded were validation that the decades of well-meaning secrecy were a mistake. That work was the probably the most heart-wrenching and gratifying of my social work experience.

The stories in Somebody’s Child touch my heart more profoundly than I could have imagined.  These are the voices of people who have lived the adoption experience.  Each time I finished an essay and put down this compact volume—crayon drawing on the cover of a child walking away, each hand held by an unseen adult—it was with the sense of awe at the tears, the anger, the joy contained within. I am deeply grateful to the contributors of this anthology and to the editors and publishers for the courage and honesty, the guts it took to bring these personal stories to the world. Some of them are told with a quiet eloquence, simply the facts, others (Dale’s among them) are stunningly beautiful literary work.  All of them reinforce what the back of the book tells us: “identity is universal to the human experience.”   Like the pieces of the puzzle in the lives of adoptees seeking their identity, these essays fit together to form as complete an understanding as is ever possible.  The ragged edges should teach us what we need to know.

Somebody’s Child, edited by Lynne van Luven and Bruce Gillespie, Touchwood Editions 2011

Keeping the Book Alive

No, I’m not going to lament the death of the hard copy book as we know and love it, or talk about ebooks and piracy and loss of income to authors, or predict that under-appreciated writers will put down their pens and Canadian literary culture will shrivel to a few bestsellers a year.  I’m about to begin another round of readings and presentations to promote not just my latest book, The Boy, but my three previous books as well and also a young adult anthology, Dark Times, published by Ann Walsh which includes one of my stories and which I think is a fine collection that deserves every breath of new life I can give it.  I was warned when my first book, Running Toward Home, was published that books have a short season and after an initial blaze of interest they rapidly disappear from the shelves.  I knew that reviews and award nominations and invitations to festivals were the key to a book’s success, but I’m enough of a pragmatist to know that there’s only room for a small percentage of the books published each year to be given those honours.  True to prediction, my first two books came and went with little fanfare, but I wasn’t deeply disappointed or ready to throw down my pen because I’m as tenacious as I am stoic and I held onto the hope that each new book would stand on the shoulders of the one before it, that there was an audience building. Besides,  I had never set out with fame and fortune as my goal.  The hard truth was that publishers have little in the budget for promotion and even though I was published by two fine presses whose efforts to produce a book of which I could be proud met all my expectations, if my books were going to stay afloat, maybe even catch a bit of wind in their sails, it was up to me.  But how, and where to go?   Shortly before Delivery was published, I did a reading at Pages on Kensington with a poet friend from Regina who was launching her first book.  A woman came up to me after the reading and introduced herself as my sales rep.  I’m Susan Toy, she said, and I’ll be selling this book for you.  Now, I knew someone was out there selling my books, but to have someone actually come to my reading, and then call me the next day and invite me to coffee to plan ways to promote the book was astonishing. Susan has had a long career as a bookseller, both in bookstores and as a sales rep, and is passionate about selling Alberta authors.  Not just new books by Alberta authors, but previous books as well, and in fact is a whirlwind of ideas on how to get authors to their readers.  A few months after we met, Susan left her job as a sales rep to establish her own business, Alberta Books Canada, a promotional service for authors. With Susan’s help I’ve done dozens of readings and presentations to libraries and librarians and in venues I would never have found on my own.  She’s done a fine job of promoting my work, and also a fine job of cataloguing all the places The Boy has been since May when the book came out.  Check her post:

http://islandeditions.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/alberta-authors-betty-jane-hegerat/

Meanwhile, my purpose in writing this post is to reinforce the notion that while the agonies and pleasures of writing a book truly are the critical part, when it comes to building audience, the writer’s job has only just begun when the box of books arrives.  Like it or not, our shy and introverted selves are required to sell the book, and arriving at some level of comfort with readings and presentations is the first step.

September 11^th, I’ll be at a book club, one of my favourite ways to talk about The Boy and about writing.  I’m always pleased to be invited to visit book discussion groups in the Calgary area, and sometimes invitations from outside my home region work in with readings I’m doing in other towns and cities.  If you belong to a book discussion group that would like to talk about The Boy or any of my other books, send me a note.  Even if I can’t join you in person, there are other ways I can participate and answer questions.

September 23^rd, I will be part of the FreeFall magazine launch of the fall issue.  I have a long-standing affection for FreeFall.  I have been a member of its founding organization, the Alexandra Writers Centre Society, since I first became serious about writing fiction, and have served on FreeFall’s editorial board.  One of my first story publications was in the fall 1996 issue.  This time I have two postcard stories in the magazine, a first for me as I’ve never had a postcard published. Other contributors in this issue include some of my Calgary friends and colleagues, Bob Stallworthy, Barb Howard and Rona Altrows.  Pages on Kensington at 7:00 PM on September 23.  It will be a fine evening.  Come out and enjoy.

September 25^th, I will be reading at Lethbridge’s first ever Word on the Street.  The Lethbridge Public Library, and in fact the whole community are hugely excited about this event and I’m honoured to be part of it.  A great line-up of authors and events: http://lethbridgeword.wordpress.com/

October 3^rd, I am the keynote speaker for a professional day for the Parkland Regional Libraries in Lacombe.

Walk Softly —There are Stories Beneath Your Feet

Betty Jane Hegerat will urge you to support your Alberta writers for all of the obvious reasons, and she may even encourage you to mine the richness of your lives and this landscape we share for your own stories.  This presentation will range from the general to the particular, to this author’s work and how she’s discovered that fiction is one way of dealing with the troubling questions life throws us.  She will talk about her most recent book, The Boy, and how obsession with one of the most haunting crimes in the history of central Alberta took her on a journey into the frontier that lies between fact and fiction.

October 4^th, I return to Stettler for the  One Book, One Stettler event at the Stettler Public Library. I am thrilled with this community’s support for The Boy: http://spl.prl.ab.ca/files/One%20Book%20One%20Stettler.pdf

 October 5^th, I read in one of my home towns, Camrose. My memories of hearing about the Cook murder case go back to Camrose in the summer of 1959.  I spent a significant part of my childhood and teenaged years in Camrose and it’s always a pleasure to return.

October 28^th, I will be reading at the Strathcona County Library in Sherwood Park, and look forward to meeting a new community of readers.

October 29^th, I return to the Tofield Public Library where I first met a warm audience of readers when I was travelling with my novel, Delivery, in 2009.  So pleased to be going back.

Then comes November, and I will putting The Boy to bed for a while, and heading to Banff for new writing.  This has shaped up to be a fine autumn.

One of the questions I’ve come to expect when I do readings or book club visits is: What are you working on now? What’s next? And because September is a breath away, and it’s time to get back to work, to readings and presentations around my latest book, The Boy, I’m anticipating that question. And for the first time in years, I have only a vague answer. In the past six years, I’ve completed four book length projects all of them now published, as well as an MFA in Creativing Writing. I am frankly tired of long projects so the answer to the “What next?” question is that I’m going to go back to my first love, short fiction. Of the thousands of pieces of fiction I must have read in my lifetime, the ones that have the strongest glue in my memory are short stories. Alice Munro, of course, and Carver is one of my favourites too, but lately I find myself going way back to the first short stories I read, probably in high school English classes. Impulsively (okay, I fell prey to the marketing of beautiful books), I bought the four volume set of Chekov’s collected stories a few months ago, because I’d been thinking about “The Lady With the Little Dog” and “A Boring Story” and pondering Chekhov’s gun.
I’m going to be busy through September and October with readings and some travel, but I know that I need a plan to get me back to writing very soon. In fact, while I’ve been on my knees in the dirt enjoying a full summer of gardening, there have stories bubbling up and I’ve gone so far as to come inside and jot down a note or two when they get in the way of deadheading the roses. I’m hoping for a retreat in November, somewhere in place and time to kickstart a winter of story writing. And whimsically, I’ve decided that I will be reading Chekhov, I will take him with me, and my goal will be to write like a Russian. When I told my friend, Barb Howard, about this plan, she said she thinks this will require a chilly room and a lot of sugar in my tea. I told her I think perhaps some rough vodka and a lover with bad teeth if I went for real authenticity. And those, she replied, would seem to necessarily go together. I think instead I’ll go for the creative comforts of the Banff Centre and some good wine. At the very least I hope there will be a gun in an opening scene.