I decided to write about a kidnapping — I suspect I’d been reading Nancy Drew books, although I’ve no memory of doing so — and I chose to take my imaginary family, one much like my own, on a driving trip. Only a day or so into the holiday, one of the children, a girl my own age, is kidnapped, but why or by whom is never explained. I don’t recall even thinking about that part. The family decides they might as well keep on with their holiday, and when they arrive at the next town, they receive a note from the kidnappers. How I wish I could remember that note. In any case, within the ten pages that made up the entire novel, the child is returned to her family, no harm has been done, and that is the end of that story.
Most of us remember such childhood exploits with a certain amount of sentimental self-love and some tenderness, me included. Chiefly, I remember my tremendous excitement, how hard my heart beat in my chest and how fiercely I concentrated on gripping that pencil, how miraculous my wonderful new endeavour felt. My greatest regret is that, although my mother was equally excited by my initiative and found some red cardboard to make a cover and tied it together with blue wool from her knitting basket, neither of us had any idea what the next step should be. She told me to show it to my teacher, who showed next to no interest, didn’t even want to look at it as I held it out to her — it was 1949 in Melfort, Saskatchewan; we had three grades in the room; my teacher was very young, with only a high school education and some bare-bones teacher training. I could only conclude that whatever I had felt, I had been wrong about its significance. After the novel, when I was between ten and twelve, I spent a lot of time walking around with a cheap ruled notebook and a pencil, writing mostly plays, or attempts at plays, as the only ones I’d ever seen were our school Christmas pageants. From then on, aside from my efforts at playwriting that didn’t last long, I wrote only what I was asked in school to write. Instead, I turned my efforts to drawing and to visual art. I did not think of being a writer again until I married Peter and went to the ranch to live.
I discovered early on that after having not painted for so many years, a dozen at least, I no longer could. It was not only that I had lost so much craft, but more that I no longer had the desire, that I had lost the ability to give myself completely over to whatever I was working on: a drawing, a painting. Part of my life seemed to have died. I mourned for a while, but then I began to think about writing down all that I was seeing in this fascinating new universe I had moved to. First, I thought about the possibility of writing magazine articles about ranch life and rural culture, not in order to be a journalist — I never thought that far ahead — but because the creative part of my being had been awakened by ranch and country life and being in nature again. I didn’t dare think that I might be a writer, someone who wrote novels, and I certainly never thought of writing non-fiction books, because they had never interested me much, and at that period in my life, when so much change was going on, they especially didn’t interest me.
By this time it was 1978 and I had long since come to the end of that first year of being constantly with Peter, learning every second of every day. I was now spending many hours by myself. When I discovered there wouldn’t be enough housework to keep me busy more than an hour or two every morning, I began to go outside. At the hay farm, I wanted to know what was at the top of the hills to the north and south of us, and what swam in the river, and what a certain bird was that I saw every day, and why the rocks scattered down the hillsides were of so many different kinds. The distances at the ranch were much longer, and sometimes the cattle kept me from certain fields, but I was as curious there as I was in the valley at the hay farm. The atmosphere was different at the ranch, though, no less surprising and pleasurable, but somehow more spacious. I began to walk the fields, and to think as I walked.
It was only when I began to not-think as I walked, that I began to discover a new dimension in nature, a dimension that, for lack of a better name, I call visionary; I began to feel the presence of spirit all around me. In my first year of this new life, my great dreaming had begun. The vast presence and mystery of nature, that endless, star-pricked sky, the great fields of grass melding into the far horizon, the dreams that took me into another space, the small, educative visions, plus Peter’s teachings about the land, the plants and animals, the way of life, most of this extended by my own extensive reading and my pondering on this, together made me into a writer. I wanted to understand this new world, to find a place for it in my understanding of human life, and writing about it was the best way. Understanding it, of course, involved understanding myself.
Strangely, I never thought to try to draw a line between my notion to write a novel at age nine and the excitement that idea engendered in me, and this extraordinary, trans-worldly experience that was filling me, at the age of thirty-eight, with the desire to be a writer. I wouldn’t have seen them as connected. It is only now, nearly forty years after my second attempt at writing, that I see the connection. Perhaps, as a mystic would say, there is no line, there is only a state, and surely that state is, at least in part, one of wonderment at the world, and the place of humans in it.
Article-writing paled very quickly. I wrote in longhand, until one day Peter in his riding boots clomped into the front room of the old frame house at the ranch, shoving open the permanently stuck door, and said to me, “Here.” I was sitting on the sofa absorbed in a book and only then noticed he had come in. I looked up: He had brought me a typewriter. Although understanding perfectly well that a pioneer society such as the one I was born into can’t do much better in the way of educating its children, I constantly decry the lack of love in that education, and the attitude that either a child could do the work or couldn’t. But this was one time my education, which bored me to death a lot of the time (though for two of my four high school years I had a wonderful English teacher, Mr. Harms, and in my fourth year the very fine Mr. Smythe), did me one favour. I had been forced, for reasons I still don’t know, as I was in the so-called “academic” stream, to take a course called “business practice” and also typing. Hence, when Peter handed over that typewriter, I could already type like a wiz. This ability that I had heretofore loathed put me miles ahead of many of my fellow novice writers.
I had a world to write about, I was constantly reading the best literature I could find so that I had models and a goal, I knew how to type, I had loads of time as long as Sean was in school and no pressure other than the pressure I put on myself, but that pressure was — well, it’s hard to say how immense it was. I was thirty-eight and thirty-nine and forty; I had no time to lose and so very much to learn. Trying to think how one began a career as a writer, I supposed that a novel was the place to start. I started writing one, long since destroyed, and finished it and knew it was terrible. (My subject was the self-destructiveness of some of the young people of the town near where I lived: drug taking, alcoholism in the very young, sexual profligacy — or so I was told. What a bad idea that was for a novel. In the end, my heroine rides her horse off out of the town heading to Palermo, which she thinks is in South America.)
I recall, after that, trying to think what I should write about next and toying with the idea of writing a novel about university life with a single-mom-academic protagonist, completing about fifty pages before I realized that I couldn’t solve the big problem: How could a novelist manage to give the reader the impression that she knew all about the life of the protagonist, when only small selected sections of it were actually written down? How did a writer manage a sense of continuity? Clearly, I thought, I needed some instruction. And equally clear to me was the fact that starting out with a novel was asking far too much of myself. I needed to be writing short stories — not that I had the faintest idea how to do that, either.
So I read the new writers everybody was raving about then: Atwood, Munro. I studied their stories so hard that I could predict where either writer would go next at a certain juncture in their story, and how very different they were. I read dozens of other short-story c
ollections written by the “greats,” and I began to get a feel for how a short story worked. Our doctor’s wife at that time was an Oxford graduate in literature and she gave a one-night-a-week class for a few weeks to a few of us would-be writers, and I began to get the idea that maybe — just maybe — I could write. Then the community college (a process then, not a building or an institution of the sort we have today) agreed to bring a creative writing teacher down to us. Through the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild (which, I hasten to point out, was the first writers’ guild in Canada), Caroline Heath, an incisive, super-smart, highly esteemed critic and editor, arrived to teach a full-day workshop on short-story writing. That was the beginning of our relationship that lasted until her too-early death at only forty-eight. She was my first mentor, teacher, guide, and eventually, when she began her own publishing house called Fifth House, my first publisher. Early in those days, maybe around 1979, when I would have been thirty-nine, her interest in my work (and that of a few other writers she had identified as particularly talented) and her intense support and guidance were a lifeline. Sometimes I felt like a drowning creature that she hauled out of the sea with her own efforts and brought back to life with her nurturing.
Over the next couple of years, I wrote something like two dozen short stories; I laboured over them, and rewrote, sometimes as many as thirty-five times, until they felt right. I doubt I was doing much to improve the story in question after maybe the tenth rewrite, but I was learning every minute how to write. Then one morning as I sat at my (now electric) typewriter to begin a new short story, a voice said to me, “This is a novel,” and even though I told the voice that it was crazy, that I was not ready yet to write a novel, it simply insisted, and would not shut up until I acquiesced. That is how my first novel, Country of the Heart, came about. By this time, Caroline Heath had started her publishing company, although she wasn’t ready to publish this novel until 1984. In 1985 my short stories were published as Queen of the Headaches by Coteau Books, and, astonishingly, were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. I say “astonishingly,” because they were the first stories I had written and I couldn’t convince myself they were worthy of such an honour.
How very driven I was to write, and this did not improve until Peter’s death in 2007, when I was sixty-six, although after the first few years I had at least the grace to question my priorities. When in the mid-nineties I was shortlisted for something like three major prizes and won none of them (I did win other, less significant prizes), I could only think that I must have offended the gods with my overweening ambition. But my losses, chastening as they were, only spurred me to try harder, part of me arguing that I should try to live by what I knew to be true, which was that prizes didn’t matter. In rare moments I felt the truth of this.
The stages of my education as a writer are very clear to me, although the order in which they came is not. More likely they were all growing at once. I even realized that I needed a subject that I could know intimately. With some reluctance, having imagined a more glamorous universe open to me, I realized that my subject had to be the rural agricultural world of the Great Plains of Canada, and in particular, the women of that world. When I think about this hard-won choice now, I see it as not a choice at all, but as inevitable. It is this subject matter that people think of when they think of my work — this and nature. Probably such choices for writers are always inevitable, whether they think so or not.
As I mentioned earlier, the Nobelist J. M. Coetzee, in a letter to the American writer Paul Auster, noted this about his art:
One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labor away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.
David Atwell suggests that Coetzee’s “great question” “would be something like, What script has my history written for me, and how can I rewrite it?” My own “great question” had to be, What is a human life worth? And in particular, What is a woman’s life worth? My question referred especially to the lives of people in the rural, agricultural world that I was coming to know so well.
My ambition, my willingness to give over my entire life to learning to be a writer, and then a better writer, and a better one after that, was plaited into my life as a housewife, a ranch wife, Peter’s wife. I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went, and whenever Peter got out of the truck or the tractor or off the baler or the feed wagon, I whipped it out and started making note of how certain plants looked in winter and what animals had been around, judging by their scat and their prints in the snow or mud. I tried to look for similes to describe what a herd of Herefords looked like flowing over a broad hill, or antelope skimming the grass; I often carried a well-thumbed book on prairie plants so as to tell one from another and make note of how they changed with the seasons. I watched horses being broken in the corral — pre-horse-whisperer days — and wrote down what I saw; I studied the bulls, mesmerized by their lazy, heavy power, and I studied the men for their unassuming courage in situations that scared the heck out of me, and the women for their brand of courage to keep going day after day in a world that, aside from their children and housekeeping skills, was never built for them. I often thought that my heart would break for the women (who absolutely did not want my empathy, pity, or compassion). Once or twice I felt the same for the men, how they were bound to their lives on the land and with their animals, hard and unrelenting taskmasters as they were. They appeared to accept this preordained life. This world I lived in though seemed to me to be the true world, or the real world in microcosm, and I yearned to grasp it wholly, although, in all my thirty-three years there, I never felt that I did.
From the time I made the conscious decision to write about this world, I knew my real challenge would be to make the subject matter interesting to urban people, because that’s who the bulk of readers are. Sadly, most urban people have little interest in the lives of rural people. And I was no longer young, and in touch with whatever it was twenty- and thirty-year-olds cared about, and that worried me too. Still, classic novels about the lives of women — Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and Hardy’s Tess — lived on because the work was so true psychologically. I would have to learn to write that well if I wanted an audience.
I mourned my isolation from other writers and from the writing world. But in the end, I know it was my very isolation that made me into the writer I’ve become, because I wasn’t influenced by whatever other writers were talking to each other about, whatever the literary fashions were. I was forced to create my own path. I wasn’t distracted by readings or literary events unless I chose to take a few days to drive to the city for them. I was pretty much on my own — nobody dropping in for coffee or a glass of wine, or for a long, chatty walk. Nor did I have a clue what the current gossip was in the writing world, and so lost no time over even the greatest scandals, hearing about them only years later, if at all. I just wrote and read and thought and walked alone, and wrote some more. As a side effect of my isolation, I began to get a reputation as prolific. But the truth is that I wasn’t an especially fast writer or an unusually creative one. Despite ranch work and housework and some small work I did in the community, I was fortunate in being able to put in more hours each day, day after day, year after year, than almost any other writer I knew.
When I think back to those days in the late seventies and the eighties, even the nineties of the twentieth century, I wonder how else I might have lived my life. Could I have had a better life if I hadn’t been so driven to be a writer? But I know that the work was so tightly interwoven with my own drive to know who I was and who I might be, fed as it was by my encounters in nature, that there was no possible “other” life.
Thus, I read a stream of books, usually four and even (rarely) five at a time, putting one down when I was tiring and picking up anoth
er, putting that one down when Peter called me to come and help, either by driving a truck, or by riding with him to bring in a sick cow, or to sort out calves, or to check fences, or to open and close gates in the corral, or else to make coffee and a snack for the few men who were giving him a hand that day. At first I left my writing without looking back, believing that my duty to Peter should always come first, but later I might reply, “Just a minute!” and delay a few minutes. Eventually, I would reply that I’d come as soon as I finished whatever I was doing. Writing had taken over. Peter would often reply, “You keep on with what you’re doing. I’ll get so-and-so to help me,” but, although he never said a word of complaint, I am sure that eventually there was a level where he resented my preoccupation. I can hardly blame him.
For the most part, though, these strands of my life — the writing, the housekeeping, the ranch work — worked together rhythmically, each giving me a break from the other, and each feeding the other. Struggles in my writing life only brought me closer to my spiritual life, which was fed so profoundly by relentless sky, the nightly crowd of unknowable stars, constellations, and galaxies, and the smell of prairie on the ceaseless wind.
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Where I Live Now Page 11
