Pop 89: Apart together
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
A friend phoned last week to ask if I had any more copies of apart, the new pandemic anthology put out by the Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild and edited by Courtney-Bates Hardy and Dave Margoshes.
“I think I have a few; you want one?”
“Yeah,” she replied, “I just saw Caitlin McCallum-Arnal read bits of Leonard Goes to Florida online, and I want to find out how it ends.”
I say that she could also drive to Eastend on Thursday and hear Caitlin read in person, because a group of us rural outliers – Helen Moure from Rosetown, Peggy Worrell from Swift Current and myself from Val Marie - got a grant from SaskArts to travel and read our respective stories at the library.
(I want to pause here and marvel at Saskatchewan’s funding agencies for the arts. The only other place I’ve lived where writers like myself have been acknowledged with such generosity and cultural far-sightedness is Quebec, where cultural preservation is such an imperative; it’s written on their license plate! In times like these - where we feel stretched and threatened, the arts bring our lives into relief, give them shape, keep us honest. As Winston Churchill said to his minister of culture when the man suggested a cut in the arts was necessary to fund the war: “Then what are we fighting for?”)
To read the anthology apart is to travel the length of the country. Though most of the writing comes from Saskatchewan, guild members submitted from their desks as far away as Nova Scotia, Vancouver Island and the Okanagan, to name just a few.
My friend continued. “It’s amazing – an archive in the making, really. I mean, this thing ain’t over by a long-shot, but the anthology is preserving its effect on us as we speak.”
She’s right. The anthology (“panthology” as Peggy called it - a slip of the tongue that has stuck with the rest of us) is a hybrid collection of impressions of a plague sweeping a country, not unlike the Spanish flu, which took thirty-five Eastend residents in Stegner’s childhood days. And it is estimated that nearly half the Blackfoot people died during the smallpox epidemic of 1869-70, according to Captain William Butler in his report.
But while reports are important for the cultural record, stories are essential for survival. This we learn from indigenous culture – the need to tell the stories to each other, in person, in a warm room, over winter, when the outdoor world folds in on itself and sleeps through the cold and the dark. The importance of a personal connection to the elements of the story, even as the ending remains a mystery and the stuff of dreams, comes when we meet and read in person. We get through tough times by telling each other our worst fears and greatest joys, by not staying as sick as our hard-held secret despair. We are, after all, the story-telling animal.
It’s an odd feeling, reading from a book to a room full of people about a situation that calls for isolation. I thought of the risks banned, and exiled readers take every time they open their mouths. Exiled by a germ, we took precautions and forged ahead in the service of story. Six feet apart feels like herding us in, I once joked about my ranching community. But we humans are herd animals, and we need to be within a bellowing, if not whispering, distance.
Apart is full of poems, stories, essays and drama. Besides being a record, it’s a considered response, an emotional reaction, and everything in between. Apart is sixty-four writers who, I feel certain, would prefer to read to you in a warm room rather than through a screen, if they could. Four of us had that chance last Thursday.
We appointed Peggy as our MC. Her piece, On The Eve of Halloween, was inspired by the story of her grandfather’s death. Heinrich Weinmeister died on Oct 31, 1919 in Rhein SK, from the after-effects of the Spanish Flu. Peggy’s pacing is pitch-perfect; she draws us in slowly.
Helen’s story, One Afternoon in the Winter of Our Discontent, is about relationships. How a husband and wife discover new things about each other when forced to isolate together. Her language is clear and piercing, covering domestic terrain as deftly as Carol shields or Anne Tyler.
My own piece, Essential Work, muses on the effect of epidemics on the homeless, already besieged by the pandemics of unemployment, opioids and suspicion. When it comes to how media reports on the pandemic, I quote the author George Saunders remark that: “the Conservative Opinion King has more in common with the Liberal Opinion King”, than either has in common with “the conservative and liberal slaughterhouse workers in Wichita Kansas.” Or Brooks, for that matter.
I care how stories get disseminated. I’m disturbed by the cognitive disconnect that comes with posing as journalists who are meant to put the story first yet strive for personal visibility and celebrity status in a profession increasingly seduced by fame and fortune. A decade ago, I turned to the far less lucrative, yet immensely more freeing, life of a freelancer. I live in fear of having lost my sense of humour: a fate, these days, as mortifying as losing one’s sense of taste and smell.
But that’s where Leonard comes in. Caitlin read from Leonard Goes to Florida, but time permitting, decided not to read the piece in its entirety. So now, we all want to know: what happens to Leonard? Did his sister let him in? Did the border guard arrest him? Did he get to see his daughter? Leonard is alive for us as a character worthy of a whole novel. His fear is ours, a fear we may “shit our pants” before this whole thing is over. But he feels the fear and drives south anyway. His example convinces us four women, by the end of the night, to take our own stories on the road.
