That GG glow
YA writer Teresa Toten is basking in the aftermath of her literary award
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B Teresa Toten Doubleday Canada
Teresa Toten is still giddy.
The writer of fiction for young adults is in the glow of winning a Governor General’s literary award for her book The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B. She has been nominated twice before.
The GG win is the big one for YA writers. There aren’t that many other prizes.
So on Thursday, the biggest smile in the room at Rideau Hall might just have been the one on Toten’s face. For the woman who came to Canada as an infant in the 1950s from Communist Croatia, then a part of Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia, this was a moment of triumph.
Her success is what she likes to call “overnight ... almost 20 years” and after eight other books.
Her books have focused on the young adult reader from 12-22 (although more and more adults are reading, she says) and she has really come to love that group.
“They are tough, they are critical. They reinvent themselves every five minutes.” And that disciplines the writer because, as Toten says, no kid is going to hang in there for 150 pages waiting for the point.
“It means grabbing them by the throat as early as I can and then playing with whatever is at the heart of the book.”
And she gets to write books that have hope in them. They are also a bit more straightforward to read, compared with so much adult fiction.
“For me personally there has to be ... some hope somewhere. The adult stuff can start in despair and end in hopelessness and I don’t want to do that. This age group generally knows that anything is possible, while our age group generally believes it’s not.
“The energy of that (age group) gives me a real charge.”
That’s not to say that Toten’s books are without darkness and hard edges. It’s just at the end something good flickers on the horizon at the very least. She says she tends to be “pigeon-holed — celebrated — as a writer that does tragic-comic, funny-sad.”
Toten has two children of her own that she is still parenting even though they are 27 and 25.
She began writing 20 years ago after she left a job in the federal public service and moved from Ottawa to her hometown of Toronto.
She wasn’t working and raising her children, so she went looking for an outlet and found a creative writing course. She knew pretty soon that she wanted to write for a teenaged audience. In her mind she was writing for a more specific teenaged person — her younger self.
“I was writing books that I think would have interested me and made me feel a little less alone when I was that age.”
Toten had the great good fortune to be ‘discovered’ in the course. The first book she wrote in the workshop was published and her first editor was legendary Canadian children’s writer and editor Tim Wynne-Jones; he was working with a small publishing house called Red Deer at the time.
The book was an autobiographical work called The Only house about an immigrant child “foisted upon a white Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood.”
In Toten’s own story, she arrived in Canada at 13 days old. Her Canadian father died when she was very young and her Croatian mother struggled in her new country, moving a lot until they finally settled into a home in the Bayview-Davisville neighbourhood.
Life experience “turned me into a hyper-vigilant watcher, which turned me into a writer. To survive too, those were some rough neighbourhoods.”
Her first GG-nominated book was The Game and it dealt with depression and mental health issues. The second, Me and the Blondes, began a series of books on the immigrant experience and discussed “how much of yourself are you willing to sell to belong. ... How to be a blond when you are not a blond. We are all ‘other.’ ” That one was set in her former high school and tracked some of the issues she faced. In a revelatory moment, she said she loved William Golding’s Lord of the Flies when she was a teenager and it is a book that she still regards highly because it takes “all the tropes to the extreme.”
She believes YA literature needs more respect in Canada. In other countries it is better treated, she says, but here it tends to be tucked away in the corner of bookstores. YA is “not all vampires and romance,” she says. Sometimes it has some meat on the bones. She believes Canadian writers stack up well with other YA nations. One of her YA heroes is Ottawa’s Brian Doyle (Angel Square et al). Reading his books “inspired me to write the way I write,” Toten says.
She picked up a Master’s degree in political economy from the University of Toronto and graduated in time to join the federal government at the end of Pierre Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister.
“To be young and in Ottawa working for the feds at that time, it was the place to be. Everyone there my age and a little older were so excited. It was a thrilling time to be a policy wonk.” That is long gone and “it’s painful” to watch, she says. She even briefed Trudeau himself. She was involved in the Canada Museums Development Corp., the agency charged with building the National Gallery and the Museum of Man (later changed to the Canadian Museum of Civilization and then the Canadian History Museum). She is not impressed by the sponsorship deal between the museum and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “Could you see that happening in Washington? Wince, cringe.”
She later worked for Geoffrey Pearson at the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, one of the very last Crown corporations Trudeau set up before leaving office.
“That was the last job I had before moving back to Toronto and I loved every minute of it. There were passionate debates between hawks and doves, but they were civil.”
Today, nobody listens. Making the shift to writing for younger people, who actually do listen sometimes, a very smart move.