Literary Road Warrior

The long & winding road of this writer's life, not to be confused with the Alaska Highway

On my very first author tour in 1990, I stopped my little Dodge Neon rental car on the summit of a rise in the northern Rockies between Chetwynd and Tumbler Ridge. The occasion was the Morningside interview wherein Peter Gzowski respectfully attempted to pry information from a reticent Alice Munro. The radio reception crackled and I strained to hear their conversation over the static.

I felt joyously connected, there on the side of that highway, on my own author tour, listening to two Canadian icons. In fact, only weeks earlier, I'd taken it upon myself (I did not have an agent or a publicist or a tour organizer, just a very good, very overworked small publishing house from Winlaw, British Columbia) to call Mr. Gzowksi's CBC studio in Toronto. I did what I’d done for other authors when I worked as a publicist in the 1980’s, I let them know I, too, had written a book of short stories, Disturbing the Peace, and was about to embark on a National Book Week Festival tour. I'd been connected to the Morningside producer who listened to my enthusiastic plans for a polite amount of time before gently informing me that he could not fit me in to the program and that he had to get back to his research for an upcoming interview with Alice Munro.

“Oh, goodness, don’t let me keep you. I quite understand,” I believe I said, or words to that effect, ridiculously pleased that I was, possibly reluctantly and certainly very politely, being requested to make way for the Absolute Queen of Short Stories.

The phrase, 'green as grass' comes quickly to mind as does ‘clueless rural git’ but back then I was under the distinctly inaccurate impression that every Canadian writer would eventually be interviewed by Peter Gzowski and that I'd better make sure he knew I had a book. Well, as I was to be reminded several years later, I was no Pierre Berton but even I knew then, as surely as I know now, I was no Alice Munro either.

Caroline Woodward & Sadie Browne-Dog circa 1985 Photo by Frank Brooke

Decades have whizzed by since that first wonderful road trip where I gave eight readings in libraries made of logs or cinder blocks and in swooping contemporary libraries, filled with light and birdsong (from the Tumbler Ridge Library aviary) and lovely, smiling librarians who presented me with bouquets of flowers and community cookbooks. I turned down a full-time job teaching English to go on that first road trip as a new author. I’ve looked back at that economic decision, and hung my head and cried more than a few times.

My timing was off. Update: it still is. The literary pendulum swings relentlessly. I was either behind the curve or possibly ahead or utterly off on another trajectory entirely. Nothing I was working on seemed to interest anyone else much and I was run ragged trying to keep up with my many activities, with brief respites of house-sitting away from home, trying to find the inner tranquility and brash confidence to write. My wonderful former publishing house was sold, alas, alas. It eventually merged into a larger publishing house which apparently did not publish the kind of work I wrote. My award nominations for both books and even their surprisingly strong sales didn’t seem to matter. It is a sad story but not an uncommon one. The 90’s were a brutal time for publishing and bookselling in Canada and many books became orphaned amidst the carnage. The bankruptcy of a major distributor for small and medium-sized publishers, the arrival of big box stores in the major cities, the 65 cent Canadian dollar to the US greenback, the collapse of the Japanese yen, all sorts of things were impacting the national publishing ecosystem.

My heart and soul, my creative ego- call it what you will- was bruised and banged-up and so I put my energy into more gratifying pursuits, singing in a community choir, producing theatre, hosting literary readings, assisting at all levels of cultural do-gooding on local, regional, provincial and federal boards and juries and foundations. I was a good 4-Her, donating my head and my heart and my hands to community service and I certainly did not spend much time beating my own tin drum, or my tin cup either. I fervently and secretly wished someone would beat some sort of tin instrument for me, mind you, but I lived far outside the glitterati and the salons of the big cities.

My almost-might-have-been-brilliant career foundered on the dreaded shoals of non-confidence, from within and without. I cannot tell you how many times my manuscripts have apparently gone missing in large Ontario publishing houses. I am the freaking Queen of the Lost Manuscripts. This is not a business for the faint of heart or thin of hide and by then, I possessed both. What, I ask, would Pierre Berton do?

He, like me, started writing as a teenager, and being paid for it. He came from a literary family, especially his mother, where the work of journalism and literary writing was understood, recognized, valued and encouraged. Whereas I wrote School Daze, the weekly high school column and occasional ‘youth’ specials for the Alaska Highway News for two years. I was paid by the line inch, meaning I earned more then than I’d be paid by literary magazines decades later and today, for that matter. From Grade 11 onward, I bought all my own clothing and toiletries thanks to writing.

I was the first person in my first generation Canadian family to pay my own way through university and to earn a degree and then a teaching certificate. When I expressed an interest to my parents in attending a creative writing program some years later, I was told 'that nobody wants to read your crap'. Pierre would never have heard words like that neither would there have been an attempt to pull him out of school in Grade 10 to be sent to clean other people’s houses for a living either.

Bless my dear Dad for slipping me five thousand bucks since “we haven’t spent a cent on you for weddings or plane fares, have we?” to attend David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, BC. Specifically, I was to take part in the renowned Creative Writing program taught by practicing, published writers like Fred Wah, John Newlove and Paulette Jiles, seasoned with guest appearances and residencies by writers from across the country like Michael Ondaatje, Clark Blaise and yes, Alice Munro.

I keep writing because I can’t imagine stopping. Because it’s my way of making sense of the past and the present and I’ve written since Grade Two. I’ve now been around long enough to have made my own informed observations about the swinging of the literary pendulum.

I gratefully accept invitations to give public readings even when confronted by a bookstore clerk who smirked and informed me that I didn't look anything like my photograph on the poster. Can I help it if the organizers scanned an eighteen year old photo of me from the back of my first book for their Festival promotion?

Furthermore, would a young female bookstore clerk tell a middle-aged male writer that he no longer resembles the most flattering professional portrait ever taken of him on his book jacket? Don’t think so.

A colleague of mine told me many years ago that I was too nice to be a writer. Well, in my heart of hearts, I know I’m not really that nice, when cornered. If I was truly nice and good, I’d be in Calcutta carrying the nearly-dead to shelter or at least I’d be doling out day-old bread at the nearest Canadian food bank, volunteering full-time, living on the leftovers, sleeping on a pile of coats in the corner. I would claim the vow of perpetual poverty on my income tax forms and I would be a saintly sister instead of a stubborn, possibly deluded writer for decades, only feeling whole and sane and alive with true purpose when I have spent hours tucked away all by myself, thinking uninterrupted thoughts and writing with purpose.

The best compliment anyone ever paid me about my writing was during that first road trip, when I went back to where I was born and raised and where I hadn’t lived for years. A United Church minister came up to me after my reading and said, with a kind wink, “I’m really glad you didn’t write about us in a way that was too nice, if you know what I mean.”

I assured her that I did and that I was glad she felt the same way I did about the writing. I think it means to find and tell the truth no matter what. To winkle it out and show all the permutations and the pain, to understand and empathize with all points of view, to grow as a human being and to share my ‘people’ and myself.

My stubborn refusal to believe the nay-sayers, to allow their bleak poisons into my heart and mind, means that my very first children's book and my first novel in seventeen years have both been recently published (circa 2010). They are doing very nicely on all fronts, thank you for asking. I’m back and I plan to keep at it. I will not stop writing until I lose my marbles or die, whichever comes first.

That is what Pierre Berton accomplished, writing, including his favourite book, The Secret World of Og, for children, to the very end of his long and prolific life. I wish I had met him, even once, in passing. He'd met Ma Murray and I had worked for her and son Dan, as the teen columnist for the Alaska Highway News. We would have had a laugh and a few good stories to swap, I'm sure. He wrote so many books, books that were loved and may last. I've only written a few and I want to write many more, to have a career again, to write full-time and not die too soon, filled with regrets for stories I didn't tell. UPDATE: 2025, ten so far, for adults, teens and children.

It is just taking me a lot longer to get there than it would to snarl, “Yeah, I know I’m not Pierre Berton but just who, exactly, are you?”