Janice MacDonald's Blog: Notes on writing - Posts Tagged "edmonton"

On Thursday, May 29, 2014, I attended the YWCA of Edmonton's 2014 Women of Distinction Awards, having been nominated in the "Arts and Culture" category. It was a lovely party -- a sincere honour to be nominated, a thrilling experience to be in the presence of so many incredible women, and a delight to spend the evening with a posse of very vocal supporters. It also jogged some of my earliest memories of the organization.

When I was four, my mother signed me up for swimming lessons at the YWCA downtown, in a building which is long gone now. The swimming pool was in the basement, and I recall exposed pipes alternating with lines of little trident flags on a rather dark, low ceiling. I am not sure if there was even the height necessary for a small diving board in that pool.

There were bleachers along one side, though, and my mother sat there along with other mothers, breathing in the chlorine, reading her book, and waiting for this particular Saturday morning chore to be over so she could do the many other things crammed into her short weekends.

I am not by nature a floating sort of person. I wasn't when I was smaller and I still am not. I have to work to stay buoyant. While I am hard-wired to learn new skills with eagerness and joy, try as I might, the whole getting across the pool without touching the bottom of the pool never happened. The lessons went on, and I grew more and more sad every Saturday morning. Still, on we went, splash splash with the legs, cup and pull with the arms. Knowing how to swim could save a life, after all.

The last Saturday of the series of lessons was to be a celebration, and each class was to show their abilities to the full complement of parents in bleachers. The whole day-long roster of lessons were brought together to perform in a circus-themed performance. We had costumes and music. Of course we did. Those were the days that tulle was invented for, and if you weren’t twirling a baton, you were tap dancing like a grim little trouper.

Our class of little Esther Williamses were to be lions. We would dog-paddle in a line to the centre, swim in a circle and then dogpaddle, and stretch out into starfish. We had orange tulle ruffs for our heads, and we were told to look fierce. I was great at the looking fierce part, but the teacher wisely tapped another reluctant floater and me to be the central cubs. While the real swimmers did their circle, she and I -- who had trailed along with our paws fiercely parting the water, but our feet walking boldly along the bottom of the pool, stood in the centre of the swimmers and gamely growled and pawed the water.

My mother was sitting there, giggling, and the woman next to her said, "Which one is yours?" Mom pointed and said, "One of those two in the middle." The other mother said, "Oh thank God, mine is the other one1" When it was all over, I think we went out to lunch, to celebrate what my mom used to call "the art of showing up."

So, while I eventually learned to tread water and do a passable crawl that could take me the length of a pool, I didn't learn that at the YWCA. But the Y was where I learned one of the big lessons: how to grin and look fierce, even when you're not managing the right steps. And knowing how to do that can save a life, after all.

Grrrrr!

My husband and I been binge-watching some television series recently, and we've noticed that it somehow feels much easier to live in the world of a British series than it does an American one. Much of this I think has to do with the level of authenticity offered. British actors, on the whole, seem less airbrushed, don't you think?

Authenticity may be an odd thing to wish for in fiction, and yet even though we know it's make believe, there needs to be a knell of truth to the experience. That is why Randy Craig ages over the span of her stories, from a young-ish grad student in her first adventure to a middle-aged woman in her latest. It's also why she worries about her choices and decisions, and why she doubles back on herself on occasion. Many of those elements of characterization are incremental layers to the formula, as well. It is important to take the audience along on the quest, but a quest that goes in a straight line is satisfying to no one, neither detective reader or football fan. Real people second guess themselves five or six times a day, if not an hour. (I almost erased this whole page three times already.)

Vulnerability in our heroes is something we embrace warily. We think we want Superman. More often, though, we veer to the tortured Batman. Contemporary detective fiction is a world without the astonishing August Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance — who seem impossibly outrageous if placed in a modern context — and without their stalwart if duller sidekicks. It is a world in which ordinary people pit themselves against extraordinary circumstances. If you are lucky, a writer will enhance that formula with explorations of that detective's psyche, circumstances or political position in the world. That is when it becomes really fun to immerse yourself in their world.

I'm not saying we need to read a shelf full of anti-heroes, that characters have to be representative of some great political ideal, or that we can’t make our detectives into attractive figures. If you're asking a reader to live with them for a while, though, it helps to make your characters into someone they'd like to have a cup of coffee and some bread pudding with. I’m looking for someone who isn't airbrushed and who, like me, will have to walk off that last dessert.