My first book, The Chinese Mirror, was a fantasy novel for young adults – which took me for a while onto the fringes of the SF writing community. In July 1989, I took part in my first ‘con’.

This conference on speculative fiction has started. When I was asked to take part I said yes, of course, happy to – and then thought ‘Ohmigawd, I’ve hardly read any new science fiction or fantasy for years!”

I re-read old favourites and I love to find new authors that I enjoy. But it’s so hard to find the good stuff. Everything has the same lurid cover, not to mention the same blurb on the back … “Will [XYZ] be able to slay [ZYX] and prevent [YXZ] from destroying [O]?”

(It is slightly dispiriting to realize you could put the same blurb on the back of my book)

Anyway, I went to the library and hauled away a pile of books, and have been studying as if they were going to set me an exam. Discuss Sprague de Camp’s use of the hero myth and compare with early Rice Burroughs. Name the evil dictator in Brunner’s novel, “Squares of the City. How is he similar to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”?

What if I flunk?

This seems like a distinct possibility. After all, I was assured that this would be a ‘writer’s con’ – that it would be very different from the usual SF cons focused on fandom. It would be serious, not Star Trek.

I walked in the door of Lister Hall behind a young woman dressed in a vaguely medieval costume, who looked like a cross between Maid Marian and Queen Arwen Evenstar, and went up in the elevator with her and someone in a large furry suit. This is serious? 

There also seem to be a large number of young men who look as though they need more fresh air and exercise. Though they are certainly ‘serious’ about writing. I overheard one of them buttonholing William Gibson.

“Has it occurred to you that Neuromancer is the dark side of Sons and Lovers?” he asked intensely.

Gibson gave a snort and said, “Well, now it all falls into place.”

My co-panelists included Phyllis Gottlieb and Judith Merrill. Phyllis’s voice is a Bronx honk and Judith’s voice is a husky snarl. They are both women of strong views. I sat meekly between them during the panel discussion while they disagreed with each other, and I disagreed (silently but just as intensely) with both of them. No one seemed inclined to ask me about the hero myth in L. Sprague de Camp.

Judith in particular seems like a writer of another vintage. “Candas, you don’t seriously propose to discuss writing in a room with no coffee and no alcohol,” she roared during this afternoon’s for-writers-only session.

Writers I know today seem like watered-down versions of the old booze-and-body-abuse stereotypes. We’ve all become sober and interested in fitness, and half of us seem to be women waking up to their creative potential rather late in life. Hemmingway and Dylan Thomas seem like old-fashioned models for the writer’s life.

Every hero myth gets modulated through the years…

From journal entries, July 1989

Lots of us have taken part in that strange ritual, the corporate team-building night out. I’ve never been able to turn the following experience into a poem, but some day…

We start at Yuk-Yuk’s, West Edmonton Mall.

Caricatures of comedians, all American, painted on the wall. A young, good-looking, half-Arabic man from Vancouver as emcee. He asks how many in the crowd are having birthdays and makes life miserable for those who are mad enough to admit it. Could be brought up on charges of harassment and aggravated innuendo.

He brings on the warm-up act – a clean-cut man called Jack Smith (surely an alias). His shtick is sort of “Mormon-on-acid.’ Olive-green suit and shiny ochre tie, hair cut short but tinted an electric gold at the tips. More sexual innuendo, but he doesn’t say ‘fuck’ quite as often as the emcee.

Finally the main act – a black American comic who starred on a now forgotten sit-com. Shaved head. Pacing the stage like a tom-cat on speed. He doesn’t say ‘fuck’ at all, but has a lot of stories about male sexual insecurity. He’s genuinely funny, but the main impression of the whole thing is that male comedians worry a lot about sex. So do the rest of the population, I guess. But most of us could get through the day without worrying about it that much.

The show ends. We’re herded out down a cavernous service corridor with cinder-block walls and institutional fluourescent lighting high overhead. We straggle in a V behind our leader, not quite sure what we’re supposed to be bonding to.

Next stop is the Sherlock Holmes pub next door, where a sing-along is in progress. The musician leading it is a slight young man with a couple of guitars and a synthesizer. He has a perky, boyish smile and tilts his head ingratiatingly to mark the end of each verse. Someone in our group happens to know the bouncer at the door, who tells us that the performer is actually a mortician by day.

Instead of Irish folksongs or war-time ballads, the songs are a mix of country tunes and rock music. Belting out the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction as a pub song is truly bizarre, when you remember how outrageous and hard-edged it was back in 1965. Now it’s so much part of our shared experience that we can stand around high tables lined with beer glasses and shout, “I can’t get no…”

We’ll have arrangements for upright pianos next.

It keeps getting stranger. I start to notice a disproportionate number of short people in the crowd – one whole table near the loudspeakers. At first I thought they were all sitting down, now realize that they are all standing up. Several other tables also have shorter-than-average patrons.

“There must be some sort of conference for short people at the hotel,” I think, while the mortician directs us to number 14 on the song sheet and starts up Brown sugar on the synthesizer. Browanhn shugah, we honk, like a disaggregated line of geese.

Who organizes conventions for short people? I find myself looking at other bar patrons going by. “Are you one? Are you?” And realize how difficult the line is to draw. A trio of oriental kids has taken the other next table to us – they are normal Vietnamese height, but could dance with the people at the short table and look their partners in the eye. Shades of Owen Meanie.

But the people at the table nearest the speakers are definitely shorter-than-normal, shorter-than-they-should-be. One youngish man with a big rock-musician’s face and blonde, Rod-Stewart haircut looks as though his real height should be five-ten or so, but he’s a foot shorter than that.  Another man beside him, middle-aged with graying hair, is a little taller – maybe five feet one – but he still seems subtly disproportionate. One of the women has a slim, been-round-the-track kind of face, elaborately good posture and a country singer’s leonine shag. She’s the same height as the middle-aged man, but would seem quite an ordinary height if you passed her in the mall.

And nearby, there’s me, barely an inch taller.

I look from the group at the next table to our own (where Pat is calling out for “Number 32″ and six-foot-tall Chris knows all the words without looking at the song sheet) then over at the mortician.

Who on earth put this all together? What team am I playing on? And for god’s sake, what’s the game?

April 22, 1996

From my journal of 1990 …

Spring beat me back here from Calgary this afternoon. When I walked back to the house from the municipal airport, the wind was warm and turbulent and the bushes in the light-industrial subdivision north of 111th Avenue were surprised with themselves. It’s as though the season has been squirted out of can, like foam hair mousse.

Why do I write?

Why I write in general is one thing. Why I write at a particular moment is another.

The first is out of curious fever for permanence, a hope of existing beyond myself in space and time. It’s a little like sending snatches of Bach and Jerry Lee Lewis out into the universe – signals that may, by some wildly improbable coincidence, be intercepted and decoded. As long as these signals are out there, we still exist – even if we’ve blown up the home planet in the meantime.

Why I write now is the very opposite of permanence. It’s because the sun is going behind a cloud, because a tracasserie of sparrows flew round the corner of the house, because of the cat-tickles of thought and the pond-ripples of memory, the intersection of past and future, the moving target. There is a constant glory in this sense of consciousness bobbing like a cork on the waves. You want to put your hand out and capture it. You get out a pen…

May 2, 1990

In 1996, I joined the League of Canadian Poets, and went to the annual meeting for the first time.  How do you dress to meet a hundred poets? Expensively….

I’ve just put $400 (!) on my credit card, trying to spend my way out of terror.

I’m in Ottawa for the League conference. I registered a couple of months ago and then more or less put it out of my mind. In retrospect, I was probably reluctant to bring it IN to my mind. The day before yesterday it came home that I really had to get on a plane to Ottawa in forty-eight hours. Yesterday, I finally put together a list of things to pack, based on the fact that Ottawa has had a heat wave for the past week.

I arrived to find the weather has done a back flip, cooled down and clouded over. I unpacked to find that – in a suitcase large enough to take me to Mars and back – I had virtually nothing that matched, nothing that suited the weather, and nothing to suit the conference agenda either. The most serious gaps were something to wear under the only jacket I’ve brought with me and something to wear for the evening events that would hit the right note of poetic-talent-at-the-cash-bar.

I’m nervous about being here. I’d like to stamp myself on the memories of at least a few other poets. But this is the kind of gathering where I’m worse than useless – not even a wallflower. More like flower wallpaper. I’m also conscious of being forty-seven – hardly a hot young star in the literary sky.

So I want to look good, as good as possible. Only I can’t get away with skimpy little tops and tight skirts any more. I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard, even though I’m trying as hard as I can.

And of course this is one of those weeks when I feel homely. There are times I look in the mirror and see all the lumpishness that flesh is heir to. Heiress to. Other times, I can live with my reflection. (I don’t know what to make of these alternating realities. I mean, it’s the same mirror, the same body the same eyes. It’s a bit like Schroedinger’s cat, existing in a nervous superposition of states.)

When the going gets tough, as the saying goes, the tough go shopping. I can flex a credit card with the best of them. But when the going is this tough, so is the shopping.

I went tramping round the Bywater Market, looking for trendy little shops where I could get something ‘interesting.’ Finally gave up and went to the shopping mall on Rideau. Bought wildly anything that looked like it might work.

Now I have a closet that looks as though I intend to stay here through at least three seasons and a weird black vest that I will probably never wear. (Who wants to stand out that much?)

I still look dumpy in this godforsaken mirror.

And tomorrow I still have to go down and attach myself to a wall with suction cups.

- From a journal entry, May 23, 1996

In September, 1989, I was invited to a writers conference up in Grande Prairie. It was the first time I’d been the ‘expert’ at a Blue Pencil Café, where beginning writers bring a sample of their work for critiquing. It keeps you humble…

… I feel so for these people bringing their work for review. With women writers in particular, there is that narrowing and reddening of the eyes that presages tears. You are putting so much of your ego, yourself, on the line.

One lady, a Mennonite woman in a round cap, in her mid-sixties, wrote a lot of greeting-card verse. It had the merit of being reasonably scanned and well-rhymed, but it was platitude after platitude. I pointed out how, in some poems, she might have escaped the general and got down to the particular. And she too, a woman older than my mother, had that verge-of-tears intensity in her eyes as she would say, “Yes, I see what you’re getting at.” In fact, I think she did see – but whether she can translate that into her writing, I don’t know.

Then she showed me a little book of stories that she had written, which had been printed and illustrated by some Mennonite organization. The illustrations were quite charming. She told me that the printer had recently called her to say they’d run out of copies and could they reprint?

Over 10,000 copies of these little books are floating around! I thought wryly that’s she’s probably been read by far more people than will ever read me, the ‘expert.’ So who am I to say that platitudes don’t give people pleasure?

It reminds me of something that Granny used to send us from time to time – a yearly collection of sentimental verses and anecdotes called The Friendship Book of Francis Gay.  The rhymes were gentle generalities and yet people seemed to find them a source of satisfaction and inspiration. Not unlike a contemporary version of the same genre I found in the book store recently. It was a collection of sayings, one for each day of the year – a banal best seller.

If I’m feeling smug, I think that these versifiers have a blind spot for language – that they’re like colour-blind people trying to paint a picture. But maybe I’m the one who is colour-blind, unable to see why a particular shade of blue that seems ordinary to me is so ravishing to others.

Journal entry, October 1, 1989

How quickly you run into moral dilemmas.

When I had this bright idea of mining old letters and journals for blog entries, I was going to copy them verbatim. They’d be an absolutely unchanged record of who I was and what I was thinking.

Then I started re-typing that first one, below, about Williams Lake. I felt a little squirmy about the bright young thing I’d been and her arch prose. But what the heck – I kept going until I came to one part that described some of the street people, the ‘troopers’ of Williams Lake, who were mostly Aboriginal.

I couldn’t make myself put it in. It wasn’t meant to be mean. But it was off-hand, insensitive, essentially ignorant. I had never met a Native person in all my years in Toronto. When I thought it was romantic to find myself in ‘cowboys and Indians’ territory, I hadn’t a clue.

So I left that bit out. And since then, I’ve been questioning my motives. Was it to avoid hurting people carelessly with words? Or was it so that you wouldn’t think the worse of me? I’d like to think it was for the first reason, it’s probably more for the second. Maybe it’s just a case of two different interests landing on the same decision.

The other question is – what will I do next time I run into the same kind of dilemma?  I don’t know.

I’ve been blogging for decades … on paper. I have a shelf full of journals, files full of letters. So rather than reinventing things to say, I thought I’d dip in and out of these non-electronic records and share some of them with you.

- Alice M.

To all my friends on shore – an in-depth study of Williams Lake

In 1980, I needed to escape a muddled love life in Toronto and landed a reporter’s job on The Williams Lake Tribune. I accepted without knowing where Williams Lake was. Since it was in B.C., I thought, surely it was on a coast …

This was my first Xerox letter to friends.

Williams Lake, B.C. (CP) – To quote Billy Barker, well-known explorer, prospector and bon-vivant, “So this is Williams Lake.”

Billy Barker is not a figment of your correspondent’s facetious imagination. He was the first white man into the Cariboo district, started off a gold rush in eighteen hundred and some-odd, spent a fortune and died stony broke. He did not go down unwept, unhonoured and unsung, however. At this very moment in the town of Quesnel (60 miles away, which is about the same emotional distance out here as the distance between Toronto and Etobicoke), the residents are celebrating Billy Barker Days … a four-day whoop-de-do during which few people find gold, but a lot of them lose their fillings, not to mention their teeth.

Back to Williams Lake, via Highway 97.

There really is a Williams Lake. The town (also known as “the laketown” or “Billy’s Puddle” by those of us in the know) is clustered at the western end of it. 

The countryside is beautiful. We are in a valley about three or four miles wide; then the land climbs steeply up to the level of the surrounding plateau. So almost any direction you look, there are lines of hills that like to drape themselves artistically in purple hazes and morning mists.

The landscape has more of a flair for the aesthetically pleasing than the town itself. It would take a full-scale pea-soup fog to make Billy’s Puddle all that picturesque. Buildings seem to straggle along in a miscellaneous sort of way, especially to someone whose eyes are used to tidy Toronto geometry … Nice, neat, urban-looking buildings are cheek-by-jowl with some of the dippiest-looking specimens of non-architecture I’ve ever seen. When you start appreciating the just proportions and pleasing design of the McDonald’s restaurant, you know you’re suffering from culture shock …

Your correspondent noticed an advertisement for ‘clean, comfortable rooms, weekly or monthly rates” at the Lakeview Hotel. When I innocently asked if it might be a good place for me to stay, three people nearly choked on their soup.

The economy of the laketown is partially based on five sawmills which contribute a lot of employment locally, as well as a lot of fly-ash to the air. People around here are inclined to say, “at least we don’t have a pulp mill.” Everything’s relative, I guess.

The rest of the population is largely employed by the provincial government. This is the administrative centre for the Cariboo region, and it takes more administrating than you might think. … at last count, there were three provincial ministries, something called the Agricultural Land Reserve, twelve commissions and any number of Official Settlement Plans that have to be consulted before you put up an outhouse. Heaven help you if you want to build a two-car garage.

For instance, one sore spot here for the past five years has been an area called Fox Mountain. Williams Lake has been hassling with the Agricultural Land Reserve ad infinitum and ad nauseam about putting in a subdivision there. In the meantime, the Ministry of Forests inadvertently sold a timber lease on the property, which pretty well renders it unfit for anything except picking up sticks.

The truism about small-town people being friendly is, surprisingly enough, perfectly true. They invite total strangers to dinner, fix bicycles and look out for apartments. It doesn’t keep your correspondent from wanting to creep into a corner and suck her thumb at times, but it sure helps.

And it’s great country for rainbows: they grow them big and bright out here.

Urban transportation in Williams Lake is strictly limited to four-wheel-drive and logging trucks. They are considering an urban transport study, but that first bus is a long way down the highway yet. So I have bought a bike.

Unlike my hop-and-go-fetch-it down-east bicycle, this one has five speeds. (You can’t get anywhere in B.C. without low gear, literally and metaphorically speaking.) My bicycle is also fitted with every reflecting device known to modern science. To the unsuspecting car driver who gets me in his headlights at night, I must look like a pedaling U.F.O.

It also has a man’s frame. I couldn’t get anything else. This has not been a problem since the first time I forgot the crossbar was there while dismounting, and came down in an elegant heap in front of four surprised shoppers at Boitanio Shopping Mall…

That was only on day one of the Tour de Guillaume’s Lac. Since then, I have been tootling back and forth to the Tribune in a very competent, two-wheeled way, wearing blue jeans. You’d think I’d never seen a three-piece suit or Bay Street in my life.

I still don’t have a permanent address, but I am temporarily and very comfortably ensconced in a guest cottage behind the publisher’s house. They’ll have a tough time getting rid of me – I have a clear view of the lake, willow trees, birdsong in the morning, and raspberry bushes outside the door. Positively idyllic.

What I have seen to date of apartments in Williams Lake doesn’t quite measure up to those standards. They seem to run to three-storey buildings with 1950s-style balconies that only an exhibitionist or a geranium would want to sit on. Inside, they specialize in combinations like pale pink walls with gold fiberglass drapes.

Still, there’s always paint – I follow in the footsteps of my sister Carol, who claims her ambition is to give the world two coats of paint and a college education.

I still haven’t told you about the town ambulance, which looks like a remodeled Dickie Dee truck … or about being drafted as the official starter/photographer/babysitter for the Lac La Hache sailing regatta … or about my first reporting assignment at the Cariboo Regional District Board meeting … and I’m not going to. (Sighs of relief all round.)

Final comment: re-rooting isn’t all that easy a process. Sometimes I feel like sitting in a corner and wilting. Sometimes I feel my leaves getting pretty brown around the corners. Sometimes I put out a rootlet or two, almost in spite of myself.

But it’s an interesting experience.

Alice

July 18, 1980.