My thoughts on writing and research, practice and process, and the writing life.
March 6, 2025 –Once I Stop Crying: Meditations on Family, Aging and Writing.
I wrote this essay last year in answer to a call for submissions for the Prairie Fire anthology on female writers over 50. It was not chosen. I thought I would share it here.
Sharon Butala’s wonderful 2001 book, This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life, includes a piece entitled “Vanished without a Trace.” In it, Butala discusses her long literary career and her loss of confidence, as an aging writer, in the wake of a new publishing “world” and of a new world in general, neither of which she might not want, or care, to understand or navigate. And, disconcerting to myself, as an aging writer, she articulates her thoughts on not reaching what she had once considered her full potential or longed-for recognition.
Butala, now in her eighties, has written at least 21 fiction and non-fiction books, but I’m ashamed to say, as both a reader and a writer, that I was unaware of her until I purchased This Strange Visible Air — which goes a long way toward proving what she talks about. After reading the essay, I thought, what chance do I have, in the face of all her accomplishments, her talent and, yes, her near-misses during awards season, to succeed as a writer?
I was a late starter getting published, after almost half a century of dreaming of a literary career full of erudite thoughts and conversations, lauded books, work created in Italy and Scotland and, of course, money and fame. But none of that happened. My life took a different route and, at 67 years of age, I feel bad about it. I wanted to be “special,” and I’m sad, and sometimes angry, that I’m not. I know feeling that way is not logical, and is based on fantasy, not reality.
My reality is, I love writing. I love to research my subjects. I love every minute of the process, and I love talking about writing to my writer friends. How fortunate I am to have the opportunity and the skill to do the work I love, as well as the support of family, friends and a local publisher in my endeavours. Unlike my fantasies, any financial gain and/or recognition that comes from writing is a bonus. And I realize they actually come to few writers. I’m not immune, however, to pangs of jealousy when I read of the accomplishments of writer friends on Facebook or watch an awards show. I do marvel at what other writers are capable of, and sometimes I wish I had written such and such. The success of others should encourage me, show me what is possible. But encouragement is not the only feeling it engenders.
My mother died at the age of 81 when I was 55 years old. A month before, she and I were discussing her childhood, parents and ancestors, as well as my desire to write about their experiences, about how they lived their lives and about my struggle to write anything at all. I was then grappling with my first novel, which finally took 25 years to complete. Any conversation I had with Mum during her last days ended with my being barely able to speak, tears filling my eyes and a lump restricting my throat. One time, she told me, “Someday, once you stop crying, you’ll be able to write about us.”
“ONCE you stop crying.” “Once,” in this context, meaning “when,” “after” or “as soon as” — a word conveying possibilities. It looks to the future. It also looks back, as in “once upon a time.” It is, then, a word that tells what was, what happened and what is past, a word with which I could begin the stories of my mother’s family, my ancestors and the place where I was born and brought up. Begin, that is, “once” I stop crying.
While Mum, I believe, was referencing the pain I was experiencing due to her terminal illness and impending death, she could also have been referring to the crying spells to which I had long been prone due to depression, begun in childhood and not diagnosed until my late thirties, that brought on self-doubt and an eating disorder, both of which short-circuited my energy and my courage to write. Mum used to say to me, while I lay on my bed unleashing a torrent, “Stop crying or you’ll make yourself sick.”
Mum had dreams of writing as well. We both grew up in a small hamlet on the Cumberland Basin, in Nova Scotia. Except for working “away” for a time after high school, Mum lived there her whole life. I ventured off for university and for employment. It was reading that led us both to the desire to write. Mum came from a “reading family.” I still remember my grandfather, a Second World War navy vet, sitting on the living room sofa, glasses at the end of his nose, reading Horatio Hornblower and Will R. Bird novels and non-fiction war books with ships in full sail on their covers. Mum and I were both voracious readers. But while we knew what reading looked like, neither of us, descendants of coal miners, butchers and farmers, had a clue about what writing and a writing life looked like or how to go about having one. We had no examples to follow. The only writers we knew of lived far away and, many of them, long ago.
Mum often told me how she had always wanted to be a writer, using the past tense, even in her thirties and forties. She often took notes and wrote short items about people in the local area, one of which she “sent away” and was accepted for publication in the Atlantic Advocate. Soon after, unfortunately, she got a letter telling her the magazine was disbanding and her story would not be printed. I remember her disappointment. I asked her if she planned to submit it somewhere else, and she mentioned something vague about having sent away her only copy. Did she not know, in those pre-computer days, of carbon paper? Or had she just resigned herself to taking this “no,” albeit conditional, as a sign of complete failure. Mum suffered from depression, too, in the days long before it was fashionable and cathartic to admit to such a thing. She likely did not know what to do next in the face of rejection, and with four children to raise just decided it was “too hard” to try again. For whatever reason, she never spoke of writing herself any longer, but encouraged me to do so. After she died, an aunt told me that Mum had written a poem to me, her first child, soon after my birth.
During my teen years, I wrote using a pen and lined scribbler paper to produce terrible poetry and romantic westerns — mash-ups of Zane Grey novels and The High Chaparral TV series. I wrote setting up in bed, long into the night. The first bit of my writing ever published was a short response to the question, “What makes a good teacher good, and a bad teacher bad?” posed, I believe, by the Family Herald magazine. It was my first paid gig, and I received a five-dollar cheque.
In my early forties, after graduate school, I moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, to take a job. By then, I was getting worried, as time was marching on and the novel I thought would be my first book was getting little beyond the research stage. I joined a writer’s group for inspiration, and met a woman who wrote book reviews for a local paper. She advised me to “Get in touch with the editor and tell him you want to write a review.” It worked. I couldn’t believe it. The Saturday my first piece was to appear, I raced to my favourite breakfast spot because I wanted to see the restaurant patrons eating their bacon and eggs while reading a paper that included my byline. That review led to many others in various newspapers and magazines, and gave me the courage and finally a bit of “know-how” to approach people about getting published. I snail-mailed Mum every book review and article I ever wrote. I had two books published while she was alive.
For years, I had recorded local sayings and phrases I had heard growing up, most of which came down through my father’s Irish family. I had collected about one hundred pages’ worth when I decided to approach a publisher about writing a book “on” them. The publisher was not interested in the idea as I presented it, but asked me if I would be willing to write a book about Cumberland County in general. I said “yes,” of course. It seemed so easy, the book was written in no time and all of a sudden, I was a published author. I dedicated Cumberland County Facts and Folklore to my four grandparents, all of whom had been born and spent their lives there.
I enjoyed the experience of bringing out a book and signing copies — so much so that, months later, I approached the same publisher, who agreed to my proposal for a second book. This whole writing thing was turning out to be much easier than I thought it would be. When Haunted Girl: Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery was published, I was 55, and decided it was time to turn to the long-overdue novel. By the end of that year, however, Mum was failing. She died of congestive heart failure on December 31. It was not until seven years later that the novel, Found Drowned, was published. Writing doesn’t seem as easy a task anymore.
I’m currently working on two projects that I hope will be ready for publication within three years, or at least that I will have a publisher on board who is interested.
In 2016, I undertook a project that came to me unawares, but in which I immediately became interested: the discovery of about 3,500 letters in a local nineteenth-century home. It took me five years to complete the initial task of transcription. When I began writing what I call Paper Remains, I had in mind a scholarly book that required “tearing” the letters apart looking for themes from which to create chapters. After a year of “tearing” and writing barely half a chapter, I decided that I just could not face the months, maybe years, of reading and research that such a project would demand. I have now created an “easier” chronological format that I think will make the book more accessible to both the reader and myself. I also, following a suggestion from my husband, took a break from Paper Remains and started on another historical novel, which at this point remains untitled.
My problem now seems to be that I’m getting tired. Those five years of transcribing have taken the wind out of my sails, and all my ambitions with it. I am closer to 70 than to 60, and I am afraid that I won’t have enough time to write all the books I have in mind. Rev. Edward Casaubon, a pathetic and annoying character from George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, haunts me. He did not live long enough, frittering his time away on details — see transcribing, above — to finish his “great” literary work. And life, as always, goes on. I am now the primary caretaker for my elderly father.
As a child, I longed to be a well-known writer. I still do. I wanted in on the big prizes. I still do. I don’t, however, see that happening now. I still have an overwhelming “need to write.” I feel “out of kilter” on those days when I’m not at my computer. I begrudge every minute and every day that I’m not writing. I wish I were more disciplined. I wish I had a better mind. Am I even a “good” writer, or at least a competent one? Haunted Girl was short-listed for a regional book prize and, for a few years, optioned for a movie, which never materialized. Found Drowned received numerous reviews, for the most part positive, but two commented upon its “leaden prose” and “stilted dialogue.” A writer never forgets feedback like that. I will say, however, that the Globe & Mail’s Margaret Cannon wrote that she hoped I would write another murder mystery, so that’s something.
I compare myself to other writers, and that’s right up there with Googling a health concern: disheartening and frightening. These “young things” who win the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize and so on leave me downhearted. I was never the writer they are when I was their age, and never will be the writer they are, period. But does it matter? There are many levels of talent and expertise when it comes to writing — from Shakespeare on down, according to Harold Bloom, the late controversial British critic. I do believe, however, that there is room for every writer who is serious about doing the work.
Perhaps I should have entitled this piece, “Once I stop whining.” Is that what Mum was also telling me? That I fretted too much, about too much? About boys, then men, about my weight, about my lack of employment, my lack of commitment to writing. The act of crying denotes fear, sadness and despair. It’s hard to write when fearful, sad or in despair — not impossible but hard. I often wondered how Virginia Woolf could accomplish all that she did when in the midst of deep depression. It turns out she didn’t. According to some biographers, she was incapable of writing during her depressive episodes, and was often bedridden, immobile.
Sharon Butala ends “Vanished without a Trace” with acceptance — of her aging, her career and her life. Her dreams were her dreams, mine were mine, and neither of us, nor, indeed, any of us, was born with the right or guarantee that dreams would come true. And many times, it’s likely better that they don’t. Butala wonders if, perhaps, when all is said and done, we are “only dreams of ourselves.” Mum, at her life’s end, left me with the message to keep writing. She didn’t tell me to expect money or fame, just to dig in, accept what was and keep writing. And I will, even through the tears.
Updates: I have recently, once more, changed my tactics on Paper Remains and have gone back to writing it thematically. In November, the Langley Fine Arts School, wrote a one-act play based on Found Drowned.
February 5, 2025 – Writers need each other
Yesterday afternoon, I Facebooked with a young author from elsewhere in Nova Scotia. She has published one book of historical fiction, and is now working on her second. She had gotten in touch with me to chat about writing: historical fiction, research, practice and process, among other things. It was our first conversation and it was great to meet and share thoughts with her. She is articulate, smart, ambitious and full energy and love for writing. Her subjects, so far, are Nova Scotia women in the early twentieth-century. Right up my alley.
It’s so important for writers to share thoughts and to meet with other writers. Most of writing is a solitary process; we huddle over our laptops, oblivious to the world around us. While I love the idea of it, I’m not capable, as are some writers, of taking up a table at a local cafe or coffee shop, and writing away the hours. I have used such a location, however, for inspiration and to listen in on conversations, as all good writers should. I need to be alone, at my desk, in my home office, music is ok, if it’s classic and instrumental. I work best in the morning, but don’t get up and at the computer as early as I should.
I got off the topic a little bit there. What I wanted to convey is that we writers need to talk with other writers, to share ideas and let each other know that we share the same feelings about our work: anxiety, commitment, pride and frustration, etc. In rural, northern Nova Scotia, where I work , there is little opportunity to meet with other writers on a regular basis, when it does happen at a workshop, reading or other occasion, I’m like a kid seeking a new best friend, wanting to know all about them, what they’ve written, what they’re working on now, etc. It’s the opportunity for sharing, that I so enjoy.
So I thank the young woman whom I chatted with yesterday. She helped me more than I did her. She inspired me to keep writing and helped me to remember, once again, why I do it in the first place.