Over the next couple of days, I shall unpack the Canada Day quiz I posted on July 1. The quotes and authors are some of my favourites. I shouldn’t keep them to myself.
“Looking back on it now, I can see there were signs. In the week before it happened, there was a string of unusual events that I noticed but did not recognize. Seemingly trivial, apparently unconnected, they were not even events really, so much as odd occurrences, whimsical coincidences, amusing quirks of nature or fate.” Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found
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On an apparently typical Monday morning, a middle-aged writer goes into her living room to water the plants. A woman is standing there. She is the Virgin Mary. Invited to stay for lunch, Mary explains that after 2,000 years of petition, adoration and travelling, she is tired and needs some rest. She stays for a week.
In 2002, I completed my MA thesis. I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about a man I met who was a commando during the Second World War. Now, the university I attended did not have a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program like the one at UBC. This meant my work had to stand on its own as a creative piece, but I had to defend it academically. Double work. I was a bit of a savage.
The academic focus of my thesis was that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is an artificial one that the reader creates to make sense of the world. Note that I called my thesis “creative nonfiction,” it’s a label that immediately informs you about the type of writing, and suggests the extent of the nonfiction or factual events described in the book. I argued that as a reader we should consider what is being said, who is saying it, what authority the author has assigned that character, why we believe something to be “the truth” and something else to be a lie. We shouldn’t be misled by the label.
If I was a more accomplished writer, with a great concept, Our Lady of the Lost and Found is the book I would want to write. Instead, it is the book that I had the most pleasure reading in 2001.