Life of a Writer: #15. Exploring Sedona, Arizona

So, another adventure, another journey, this time to the beautiful city of Sedona in the red rock peaks of Arizona. I went with a friend, Sally, to a Road Scholar program in this location. We spent our nights in the same place and went for trips and/or lectures each day to learn about the geology of the area, the culture of the Hopi, and took also a spectacular ride on the Verde Canyon Railroad. The highlight was naturally enough a trip to the Grand Canyon. How exciting to see such spectacular scenery again so soon after my journey to Morocco.

Life of a Writer. #14. Writer as Reader (continued). Sweet Tooth.

The latest book I've read was Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth.  It seemed a peculiar title for an Ian McEwan book, but then the vast array of topics he has taken on is amazing. So why not something about my own struggle with a sweet tooth. Mine, of course, is mundane and refers only to the fact that if there is dessert or candy or something sweet around, I will eat it. The rationale is that if I get rid of it, no matter how much there is, it will be gone. Then it won't be able to tempt me. Yes, really! I used to think it wasn't such a bad thing, nothing like drug or alcohol addiction. Or smoking. But what a delusion, sugar being one of the main culprits in many diseases. So, I don't buy sweets and if I have them when I'm out, I am able to stick to one serving. 

You weren't interested in that diversion, I'm sure, so back to the book. It was the title that had me take a sidetrack. Maybe it will have that effect on you also.  Until you find yourself caught up in McEwan's literate prose and clever plotting, in the foibles of his characters. And the actual meaning of Sweet Tooth, a code name at M15 for an intelligence project given to the main character to carry out. The novel is told from her point of view, a young woman who seems to walk into situations rather than go looking for them. I was intrigued and kept reading, which you will also have to do to discover the intricate plotting and conclusion in another display of exquisite writing by McEwan. Yes, another good read. Another coup for McEwan who never ceases to amaze with his versatility.

Even so, I found the book just a bit too clever in a way that seems to create distance from the characters rather than a sense of compassion for them.  But that's me! Draw your own conclusions.

Another book to read. 'The City's Gates' by Peter Dube.

I recommend Peter Dube's  The City's Gates. Intriguing novel set in Montreal prior to a global conference. The story unfolds enigmatically as a researcher seeks to find out about the groups who might disrupt the conference. There is always an air of mystery that keeps the reader guessing, but this is no traditional mystery. Documents with names and/or dates blacked out. Why? The novel is based on a very deep political understanding. This author has a wonderful grasp also of language and how to use it and it is always a pleasure, with much discovery involved, to read his work.

I am also reading a more traditional mystery set in Venice by Donna Leon who has written over a dozen mysteries in the Guido Brunetti series. These are fast paced stories with an intriguing detective who holds the fabric together. One also learns about his family and various other characters, always with the Commissario's Point of View the predominant one. As I am attempting also to write a mystery, this is an interesting read from that perspective also. I am using more than one Point of View and trying to figure out how to do so without slowing down the pace of the story.

Maybe I ought to call this post 'The Mystery of Writing.'

Life of a Writer. #13. Writer as Reader.

So much to read out there, how to choose. Often a book just falls into my awareness, but also there are times when something a colleague has written rises to the top. At the moment, I have been doing less reading than usual. That has been true over the past year. There have been many distractions, such as downsizing and moving.

 But now I begin to have time again. So, I downloaded a couple of books to take to Morocco and have just finished one of them. Louise Erdrich's The Round House was a superb read. I had read a couple of her earlier books and went to hear her interviewed last fall at IFOA (International Festival of Authors) in Toronto (where I live) by Eleanor Wachtel. A terrific interview, which I listened to again when it was broadcast on the CBC. All of that made my reading experience of The Round House even richer, told movingly from the point of view of 13 year old Joe. As he witnesses the impact on his mother of a savage rape, cooperates with his father to find out who did it, only to find that the white perpetrator can't be prosecuted as the jurisdiction on reserve and other land limits the rights of the First Nations population, we follow Joe to conclusions and actions that will determine the rest of his life. And that leave me as the reader more aware of the tragedies of legal systems created by governments that need to be addressed for true justice to occur.

Life of a Writer. #12. Journey to Morocco.

“Welcome to Rabat. Welcome to Morocco. Welcome to Africa.” The words of our guide in Rabat. We had a guide for the full trip, Muktar, but usually had someone local in cities we visited. At least for some part of the visit. Sometimes for the souks. Or for a particular historical site, as with the Roman ruins of Volubilis. On the whole, Muktar officiated with splendid ease as he was well informed, articulate in English and had a lovely sense of humour.

It took a while to feel as if in Africa after landing at the airport in Casa Blanca and being whisked from there to our hotel in Rabat. North Africa, with its many similarities to southern Europe and the Middle East, reminded me of what I knew and might have seen of other places. But as we made our way south after Fes through the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara, the sense of being on another continent gradually coalesced.

There were sights and sounds and smells to satisfy the most demanding traveler. We went from a rainy day in Menkes to the Roman ruins at Volubilis with gradual sunshine emerging in Fes, then through the snow in the Atlas Mountains where there are ski resorts and chalets that look like Swiss or German ones. Beyond that, further south, the majestic Sahara.

My memorable moments include a streetcar ride in Rabat with my roomie, Zarina, out to the end of one line. We talked to students and learned about them and the university. Then returned on the same line to the stop nearest to our hotel. This was at the very beginning of a trip that took us over vast distances to explore the ancient history of this land as well as developments down to the present. There is, for instance, a monarchy which governs there. However, the king is very modern and has made many changes that have left people content with his rule. He is the first king to marry a commoner and she is the first wife of a king to expose her face in public. Apparently she has red hair and freckles.

I suspect my most memorable moment will remain a visit to the Berber family of one of our three personnel on the bus. Jamal, a young man of considerable good looks and quiet charm, was the assistant to the driver, Mohammed. Neither spoke English, but I managed to communicate with the two of them with my fractured French. Jamal kept track of the tour participants, counting and assisting us. He was often navigator for Mohammed, in and out of tight parking, for instance. The tour guide, Muktar, an educated, articulate man also had a charming sense of humour.

In any case, the visit to Jamal’s family home came after we left the Sahara. Jamal had left the tour for the day to share a religious feast with his family. The arrangement was for the bus to pick him up as we continued along our route the following day. As we approached his village, we were told arrangements had been made for our group to visit his home where we would also be served traditional Moroccan mint tea.

Four generations of the family were represented in a simple compound with the structures a mixture of clay/mud with various other materials such as something that looked like healthy bits of straw. Some of it was open to the sky. It was quite simple. In the large room at the front, which was covered, we were asked to sit around the room on benches. A table was spread with local delicacies such as dates and almonds and walnuts as well as tiny cakes/cookies. We watched while an uncle of Jamal’s went through the ceremony of making the tea, something not many people in Canada would have the patience for. We had been given six gifts by Muktar to present in what was presumably customary fashion. 

The tea was prepared with much ceremony and then passed around in small glasses either with sugar or not. By this time, I got up to go out into the courtyard as I had been sick the previous night and still felt vulnurable. Out there I found little children and a brother of Jamal as well as a place to lean and take photos. One of the little girls brought me a flower and was pleased when I learned her name. Then I tried to get the names of all the children and Jamal’s generation as well. They all beamed with pleasure.

Preparation of mint tea

Serving tea.

Morocco Images. January 2013

Memoir Prologue. January, 2013

This prologue keeps changing. This is the latest revision. At the moment, a colleague is reading it to critique it. Your comments are also welcome.
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Memoir: Restless

Prologue

This memoir started to emerge after I discovered Uncle Billy’s manuscript in Banff, Alberta in 1992. While I’d been told his story before, I remembered William McCardell only as our maternal grandmother’s Uncle Billy, one of three railroad workers who had discovered the hot springs at Banff.  I had been through the area once before with my then husband and two children and we had seen a wax effigy of William McCardell in a museum on the main street. I wanted to see this effigy again while at a writing studio at the Banff Centre of the Arts some years later, but I couldn’t find it. Each day I questioned the man in a local artifact shop in the centre of town and finally he suggested there could be more information in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Thus was I led to a huge typewritten manuscript that contained accounts of the adventures of this maternal ancestor. When I went back for dinner in the cafeteria at the Banff Centre that day, I was almost jubilant. It was something I wanted to tell everyone, even to shout it from a mountain top.

My residence at Banff that spring was a significant point on a long journey. I went there with a novel to work on which took almost twenty more years to write and publish. In 1992 it had already been emerging for almost that long already. I found useful critique and guidance, new colleagues and Uncle Billy’s manuscript while at the writing studio. There was magic in those six weeks in the mountains ­-- a solitary room for work, a cabin with a piano, long walks by the Bow River and ongoing conversations in the halls, in the cafeteria and over a pool table.

            “Do you think you’ll do anything with it?” was the most common question about my discovery. Since we were all writers, it was not surprising that these new colleagues thought I might write something.

            What? I had no idea.

As time went on, I felt compelled to jot down thoughts about this manuscript and the connections it had led me to ponder. Those early thoughts became the starting point for this memoir, something I wrote because it felt as if I had to. I did so knowing that if there were any value to it beyond my need to create some perspective on my own life, it would only be apparent much later. What unfolded is largely a reflection of another era, a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared. How did I become a feminist?  How did I become a published author? How did I, in other words, get from there to here? At each juncture there were likely pivotal events as important as the discovery at Banff. The beginnings in a northern mining camp where another language surrounded us. A particular family and its roots and history. Something as minute as arguments between siblings.

How I came to grow up in a northern mining community was a result of a job my father found. A mechanical engineer, he was hired by Sigma Mine to design the hoist and to oversee the technical aspects of its operation. He went to the golden valley because of gold, but I doubt he thought it would lead to his first million.  Or any million, for that matter.

My parents, Beryl Goettler and Geoff Cosser, were married in 1935 and their first home was one of the company houses mine management had just built in northwestern Quebec for their first employees. After I was born, my mother and father moved into a larger mine house where they lived until all their children had left home. Had my father not developed a near fatal condition that required an ambulance to transport him over 500 miles to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto in 1962, they probably would have been there much longer. 
           The impact of this mining town, and others like it across the north in those days, was to create a tribe of northerners, something that remains in one’s blood for a lifetime. There is always an instant rapport as well as some common understandings when one meets someone else from that northern landscape. Yet other factors and themes are the basis of whatever myths sustained our family. Myths that are likely at the very root of what created the life trajectories of each of the three Cosser children, my two younger siblings and me. Likely everyone constructs such myths, creating narratives to make sense of our lives. We may know ourselves better if we can remember where we’re from and how we became the people we are now. In my family, each of us might have answered differently the question of how and why we’ve followed particular paths, yet there would be some commonalities drawn from the themes of the isolation of a mining camp in those days — the sound of the whistle at the mine as well as the blasting underground, the French language surrounding us, the family silver, the focus on reading, the English dictionary, the fireplace. Or could it have been mainly the experience of our father going off to war in 1942, shortly after his third child was born, that formed us? Was it his focus on overseas as well as on ancestors and family trees? Perhaps it was his alcoholism that seemed to be a consequence of that time overseas. Offset somewhat by our mother’s joy in good company, good food and dancing.
          I knew early and only too well the impact of the alcoholism, the fear aroused when Dad’s footsteps were uneven as he staggered into the house, when his voice became loud and angry. But I was not aware of the importance of most of these other themes except as underlying refrains. And even underlying that was the gold. We knew so much more about it than we were even aware of knowing. For we children of the company houses all knew the price of it was $37 an ounce. We knew the miners went underground with their hard hats with lights on to find it, to that dark place where only men were allowed to go to hack and dig into the rock. Where they planted the dynamite that created the loud sounds we heard at intervals on surface. We knew that the rocks came up in the cage (elevator) in open rather small rail carts that ran on narrow tracks to the crusher. That the conveyor belt we could see from the highway that ran beside the fence around the mine took this crushed rock to the mill where it was put in large vats. The extract from the mill was then melted in a hot furnace, the liquid poured out in a yellow liquid stream into rectangular pans to create bars of solid gold. These were hidden away somewhere unbeknownst to us to conceal them from thieves. We knew these things, but we played our games blissfully unaware of the ongoing saga of gold and how it held all of us in its grip. We played, went to school and made friends who came and went when their fathers moved from one mine to another. We left it to the adults to concern themselves with the mine and the gold. Although my siblings and I knew that we weren’t allowed to use the only telephone, set down on a small table next to Dad’s easy chair, for more than a couple of minutes at a time because it was used to contact our father if an emergency occurred underground.  Or when the mine manager wanted to reach him.
          Some of the men did make their first million in the frontier era of the gold mines. Probably not by mining. More likely on the stock market or by prospecting, some by high-grading (stealing gold from underground). The high graders were men who brought bits of gold up at the end of a shift, hidden in their mouths, in their clothing, in their lunch buckets. It was called high grade because it was the most valuable. We heard whispers that there were ways of selling such loot through mob contacts in places as far away as Montreal, Buffalo and New York City. Like so many things children knew, this was something we overheard the adults talk about. We knew who was suspected of high-grading and who had put money into the stock of some penny mine that had gone into production and already created wealth for owners off in some city.
           I was aware as I grew older that my father invested in some of the larger gold producers, but in reality he left the finances to my mother. His job was to draft and design and to go underground to check on the equipment. He knew how everything worked - the mill, the hoist, the underground cage.  Oddly enough, this wealth of story surrounding our lives elicited only mild curiosity on my part at the time. Although as children we breathed in this atmosphere and were affected by it.

Dad’s stories about his family’s history with gold, his own father having traveled first to South Africa from England because of it, possibly permeated slightly deeper. As did his attempts to convey his fascination with genealogy. Even when we were quite young, he showed us family trees and how to read the hallmarks on silver. As I watched his fingers trace the squiggly lines connecting names I was apparently descended from , I was amazed at his interest in these large pieces of old yellowed and folded paper. Only long after he died, did I begin to understand why such interest in one’s ancestry might be of value to me.  I wished he was still around to hear about my discovery at Banff.
          As children, we were told about Uncle Billy’s discovery of the Banff Springs, something that seemed remote yet rather intriguing. Like gold, another mystery hidden away in the earth. And as I had sat reading from his manuscript, what had gradually struck me were the ways in which my family had a role in the creation of a country. From the discoveries of Uncle Billy in western Canada of the hot springs and, apparently, also of oil (along with someone called LaFayette)  to the grandfather who worked in gold mines in South Africa before emigrating to the gold mines of northern Ontario. And to my father from there to the ones in northern Quebec. From the ancestor, also on my mother’s side, whom I learned about only after her death, who had come from France to settle on the banks of the St. Lawrence, who was the first settler in Canada. And as well of her Irish forebears who tilled the soil around Stratford somewhat later.

It was at Banff I suddenly saw these individual stories within a wider context and wished I could have another session with my father. Never before had it occurred to me how the strands of my family history were connected to this larger narrative, something I didn’t recall that he’d tried to tell me. Nor had he understood my lack of interest might have evaporated had I had any idea of this broader picture.  Or maybe it wouldn’t have at that young age. How would I know? But I do know as I thumbed through Uncle Billy’s manuscript in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies that I was suddenly and unexpectedly reassured that my restlessness- the need to question, to explore and travel, to be somewhat of a maverick -  was not just personal, but a trait I shared with my ancestors.