QWF Writes

Tag: in memoriam

  • The Circle of Mentorship—By Shelagh Plunkett

    The Circle of Mentorship—By Shelagh Plunkett

    Linda Kay—author, journalist and teacher—died last October. In 2006 she was assigned to mentor me by the Quebec Writers’ Federation, and in the twelve years that followed became a great friend as well as remaining a generous-hearted and gracious advisor. In the months since she died, during the hundreds of times I’ve missed being able to email or call her, I’ve thought often about what I’ve lost without her in my life and what I learned from having her in it. Perhaps most importantly, Linda showed me how essential mentorship is for a writer.

    Linda Kay
    Linda Kay

    Linda’s achievements as a writer and teacher were impressive (including no less than a Pulitzer won as part of a team early in her career), but recording them here would leave nothing more than a superficial sketch that failed to convey who she was. Similarly, outlining the empty space that her death has opened in my life would leave a hollow impression of our friendship. I’m left wanting to convey one of the most important things I learned from Linda: that mentorship is essential for a writer.

    When I moved to Montreal, I joined the QWF to meet writers. I applied to the mentorship program and was introduced to Linda. The first time we met she brought the essay I’d submitted with my application—a short piece about growing up in Guyana, in South America. “Send this in to the CBC Literary contest,” she urged me.

    I’d written it in a flurry of frustration one afternoon. It was the sort of writing I wanted to do but was unlike anything I’d ever tried, because it was not the kind of piece my freelance clients were interested in publishing. I didn’t know if the piece was good or bad, but I’d had fun writing it. Linda was adamant, so I took her advice.

    She was right; the essay won the CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction. Linda told me my life would change, and it did. With that award to reflect on and with her encouragement, I began to think I could write more than just simple news pieces, arts profiles, or lifestyle columns. I began to think I might have the chops to string a few words together that might have a deeper purpose, that might offer something more to a reader than a few minutes of entertainment. Linda suggested I approach publishers. “They’ll pay attention to you now,” she said. She was right. Penguin signed a contract with me and my memoir of adolescence overseas—born out of the essay I’d written—was published in 2013.

    In the years that followed, Linda continued to inspire me to take the work of writing seriously, because that’s what she did. She applied all her skill, insight, and effort to everything she did, from writing to teaching to friendship; to every assignment, be it a book or a short piece for Costco Connections. Ultimately, what we try to do as writers is communicate. Linda showed me that without giving one’s full passion, focus, and commitment, communication isn’t worth the effort.

    Linda didn’t tell me she was sick until quite close to her death, but in her last months we wrote often and our conversations continued to ramble around writing, family, new and old loves, life. She remained as she’d always been, even in our last correspondence, an email sent less than a week before her death from her hospital bed. Linda wrote that she’d passed on my name and the title of my book to a Guyanese intern she’d met, encouraging the woman to seek out my writing. Right to the end, Linda remained a supporter and mentor.

    It is not an exaggeration to say I would not be a published author, and would not be writing still, if not for Linda. And now, things have circled back for me: I’ve been hired by the QWF to fill the role for someone else that Linda did for me when we first met. As I key these words, I am embarking on three months of mentoring a promising writer in our community. Though I miss Linda immensely and often, I’ve not lost the gifts she was lavish in bestowing. I will turn to my memories of Linda now and into the future, knowing that by doing so I’ll be motivated to achieve much more than I imagine myself capable of. More significantly, her memory will inspire me to pass on to my mentee what Linda gave me as a mentor.

    ShelaghPlunkett_photocredit-NiamhMalcolmShelagh Plunkett is a past winner of the CBC Literary Prize for creative non-fiction. In 2013 her memoir, The Water Here is Never Blue, an extension of her winning essay, was published by Penguin Canada. It was shortlisted for both the QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction and the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize. Shelagh now lives in Montreal, where she is at work on too many projects. Her past hometowns have included Georgetown, Guyana; Kupang, Timor; Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto; Ricón-de-la-Victoria, Spain; and Salt Spring Island.

    Photo credits: Flickr (header banner), Courtesy of Emily Kay-Rivest (photo of Linda Kay), Niamh Malcolm (headshot of Shelagh Plunkett)

  • Three-Legged History: Paul Almond on Researching Historical Fiction

    By Paul Almond

    With an introduction by Barbara Burgess and David Stansfield

    Paul Almond

    On April 8, Paul Almond’s last book, The Inheritor, an autobiographical novel, was published by Red Deer Press. Almond, a member of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, intended to meet many of his fans and fellow writers this spring and summer, but he passed away on April 9.

    Almond spent the last twenty-five years of his life researching and writing The Alford Saga, the eight-volume series of adventure novels which culminated in The Inheritor. The series depicts the lives and loves of his Gaspesian ancestors. Even in his eighties, Almond crisscrossed North America, talking about his books on radio and TV. He did over 100 book launches in the last five years of his life, often donating half the proceeds to charity. But what about all the months and years of research that precedes the writing?

    Almond consulted Canadian historians, linguists and scholars; combed through Library and Archives Canada; pored over Canadian soldiers’ diaries and his ancestors’ letters; read archived newspaper columns and essays; and even referred to daily weather reports recorded by historians. For the autobiographical The Inheritor (book eight), Almond also returned to his own letters to his mother.

    On October 30, 2013, Almond drafted the following piece for QWF Writes, sharing his vision and experience of historical research in writing The Alford Saga. Barbara Burgess, Almond’s publicist, recently found the piece among her letters from Almond. She and David Stansfield, one of Almond’s main literary consultants, prepared this piece for publication. Paul Almond:

    “I have been asked how I do my research. This Saga, written over the last dozen years, has indeed taken a lot of research, mostly arduous and thorough. I liken it to looking through binoculars based upon a tripod of three legs: Oral Tradition, Documents, and Intuition.

    Oral tradition

    In rural communities all across Canada, the oral tradition is strong: grandparents love to tell stories of their own grandparents. In cities, such a thing may not be possible, but in tiny Shigawake, Quebec, we have many such stories.

    About fifty years ago, an aged cousin told me shortly before he died that the first Almond climbed through a porthole of a British battleship in Port Daniel Harbour. That intrigued me. I did more research. (The story of the porthole is in the beginning of The Deserter – book one.)

    The Inheritor - Paul AlmondDocuments

    Now, as anyone might imagine, almost no English documents from 1800 exist on that largely unexplored coast off modern-day eastern Quebec. Archival material tells only of prime ministers, treaties and so on. Nothing explains exactly how a farmer drank water when clearing land. (Answer: a Piggin). But in New Carlisle, the county seat, an old box in a basement under a hat rack produced a paper from 1816, which revealed that a terrible famine had affected the Coast, caused by a volcanic explosion on Mount Tambora. A schooner had come from Quebec City to relieve the starving inhabitants; in order to get your barrel of flour to survive, you had to say who you were, how many were in your family, and so on. The paper noted that one Thomas Manning, aka James Almond,* had fought on the battleship Bellerophon, and had settled in East Nouvelle, as Shigawake was then known.

    Intuition

    In due course I discovered that behind Port Daniel, true wilderness then, a Mi’kmaq settlement thrived. If you deserted the British Navy in the early 1800s, your punishment was death. So the Marines would have chased deserter Thomas Manning. And where would he have gone? Back into the interior. What was there? The Mi’kmaqs. Bingo. There’s the story.

    This third leg of the tripod involves not just your own intuition and common sense, but advice from others. No Mi’kmaqs on this side of the Bay really knew anything about the 1800s. However, in New Brunswick, I found an Elder whose grandfather, and the grandfather before him, had been shamans. And there was an ethnologist at the Gaspe Museum, an Iroquois who had studied the Mi’kmaq all his life. And so gradually, my first book, The Deserter, grew out of their oral traditions, documents I found, and from what I intuited.

    And so I went, looking through my binoculars on their tripod. I looked into the 1850s, when my grandfather trekked on snowshoes six hundred miles to Montreal (described in The Pioneer). Then to 1900 when my uncle went to the Boer War (in The Chaplain), and from there on to 1914, when my father fought in WWI (described in The Gunner), and on…”

    * James Almond was Paul Almond’s great-grandfather. He settled in Shigawake in 1810 or thereabouts, founding the oldest homestead there.

    Paul AlmondIn addition to the eight volumes of the Alford Saga and several other books, Paul Almond produced, directed and in many cases wrote over 120 television dramas for the CBC, BBC, Granada (where he created the documentary Seven Up!) and various networks in the U.S., plus a number of feature films. www.paulalmond.com

    Photo (top) of Paul Almond © 2012 Northernstars.ca

    Photo (headshot) of Paul Almond © Joan Almond

    David StansfieldDavid Stansfield, a close friend of Paul, wrote 400 television scripts for TV Ontario in Canada, the Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S., the Discovery Channel, NHK, Encyclopedia Britannica and Time-Life, plus half-a-dozen feature film screenplays and nine books, seven of them novels. www.davidstansfield.com

     

    Author Barbara Burgess worked with Paul Almond for the past two and a half years, helping him arrange book launches, copy-editing and handling some of his literature-related correspondence. www.thecacounacaves.com