by Shaun Hunter
I don’t know how or when I first heard about Lisa Romeo, a New Jersey-based nonfiction writer, and an inventive, generous writing teacher and coach. But for the past few years, Lisa’s blog has been part of my morning warm-up. Her regular Friday Fridge Clean-Out is a weekly trove of writing treasures I try not to miss.
Today, I’m thrilled that one of my essays appears as a guest post on Lisa Romeo Writes.
Thanks for checking it out.
by Shaun Hunter
1. Where did the idea come from for your book?
One morning, when I was busy pushing my children through school and music lessons, I looked in the mirror and saw my maternal grandmother’s face staring back at me. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance: I was becoming as negative, rigid, and demanding as Berniece. A few years later, I was diagnosed with melanoma, a deadly but preventable skin cancer. The two experiences seemed connected. The resulting exploration became my book, Under the Skin.
2. What genre does your book fall under?
Literary non-fiction. Memoir, if you insist.
3. What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I’m a nonfiction writer, so I’d have the characters play themselves. If my book were fiction, I might choose old Bette Davis for my grandmother, and young Audrey Hepburn for me. My grandmother, if she were still alive, would have her own views.
4. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When you have your face pressed up against the glass of your mortality, as the poet Jason Shinder describes the cancer experience, you find out who you really are.
5. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I’m old-school: I’m going to do my best to get an agent or a literary press interested in the manuscript.
6. How long did it take you to write the first draft?
A dozen years ago, my grandmother popped up in a piece of freefall writing. Five years ago, in a Booming Ground course with Merilyn Simonds, I began to think my Berniece essays might be a book. It took me eight months to write a first draft. The current draft (I’ve stopped counting) bears very little resemblance to the first one.
7. What other books would you compare your book to within your genre?
A combination of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother, and Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase.
8. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
A difficult, complicated grandmother; a strong, energetic mother; and my two, now grown-up children, who deserve to understand what lies under the skin.
9. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
This is a book where layers get peeled back – on the past, on the self, on the body. There are a couple of scenes where I take my clothes off. (Sorry, kids.)
Thank you to Rea Tarvydas for these questions, and her invitation to respond.
by Shaun Hunter
The other night at a downtown pub, I found a seat near the front and waited for the show to begin. I thought I spotted the featured speaker at this Freedom to Read Week event: a slim, thirty-something woman with long hair, tall leather boots and an air of relaxed confidence. But Cory Mack was in her early 50s, short, glasses, a little lumpy. Just like me.
Mack’s material is personal. She tells stories about her kids, her husband, her parents. Her landscape is a prairie childhood, the Calgary suburbs. Not so different than what I write about. Her sketches were frank, racy, rude, but often the laughs petered out too quickly. Mack segued to her next bit like the seasoned professional she is; from my bar stool, I squirmed in the silences. Be careful, Cory, I said under my breath. Don’t make yourself so vulnerable. I smiled harder, wider, offering myself up as a safe, welcoming harbour in the front row.
On the way home, I thought about why Mack’s routine bothered me so much. It was a tough room. A table of university students my kids’ ages sat at the back hunched over their smart phones. A group of arts administrators hosting the event camped in one corner. The rest of us, mostly middle aged women – who knew what we were expecting.
A male comic, I thought, could get away with the coarse humour, the f-bombs, the jabs at domestic life. But something different happens when a woman – especially a middle-aged mom – peels back the layers of her private life and serves it up in public.
If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Mother’s milk. The caution we ingest from the time we’re babes-in-arms.
The television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote recently in The New Yorker that shows like the HBO hit “Girls” upset people “because they violate the dictate that women, both fictional and real, not make anyone uncomfortable.”
The other night, Cory Mack made me uncomfortable. She rarely looked my way: she didn’t need the shallow harbour of reassurance I was offering. She had her own deep reservoir of courage, and craft, to agitate the silence.
I’m glad I saw her in action. I have work to do.
by Shaun Hunter
I’d forgotten that P. K. Page, one of Canada’s finest poets, spent much of her youth in Calgary. In the Twenties, she and her family lived in what we now call the Beltline, and later in Elbow Park. She spent summers on a corner of the Tsuu T’ina reserve, then used by the Canadian Forces and called Sarcee Camp. A place not far from where I grew up in southwest Calgary.
Sandra Djwa’s new biography Journey With No Maps charts Page’s life as an artist. I read the Calgary chapter slowly, lingering in the landscape of Pat Page’s childhood. Not just the recognizable geography of streets and avenues, but the interior world of an imaginative child growing up in a town far away from the so-called centre of things.
I grew up in Calgary almost fifty years after P. K. Page, but aspects of her childhood feel deeply familiar. The hours she passed in the public library, discovering art and artists. The makeshift studio she and her girlfriend carved out in her friend’s basement, where they wrote, sketched and dreamed. The books her mother gave to her. The school magazine she edited and where her essays were published. The sandy banks of the Elbow River and the Rocky Mountain foothills where she summered. These places and experiences fed my imagination, too.
As a teenager, I was convinced literature was written in other places, not Calgary. No one ever told me about P. K. Page. Instead, I fixed my eyes on the horizon and planned my escape. Real writers lived anywhere but here.
Of course, I know better now.
At eighteen, P. K. Page moved away from Calgary and never returned here to live. I left after high school, too, but came back in my mid-twenties. These days, as I write at my desk not far from the old Sarcee Camp, I find myself thinking about P. K. Page, and this place that shaped her artistic sensibilities, and mine. Fertile ground, after all.