Helping writers take the plunge
“It’s been a lonely year,” sighs Sheree Fitch, giving her assessment of 2020.
Not that the gregarious Nova Scotian author didn’t stay in touch with friends and family over the past 12 months from her Pictou County home, via phone or social media or the online meeting app Zoom through which this conversation took place. But thanks to her popular books for children like Toes in My Nose and Mabel Murple, as well as those for adults, she tends to be around more people than most.
Of course, writing is one of the more solitary pursuits a person can follow, and Fitch is used to long, quiet hours filling empty pages in a notebook or on a computer screen. But she’s also used to giving readings and making in-store appearances for a room full of eager, attentive faces.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, those didn’t happen for most of 2020. And she didn’t open her Mabel Murple’s Book Shoppe and Dreamery in River John, where fans and families drop by every summer to check out her work and say hi to the former farm’s resident donkeys.
“It hit me in the first week of July. We had 8,000 people in nine weeks come through, every year for three years, and that’s a lot of people,” she says.
“That’s a lot of kids, that’s a lot of babies I got to hug, that’s a lot of parents I got to talk to, so we really felt it when there was no laughter across the road, and the animals were wondering, ‘Where are all the people?’ ”
TAKING THE SPLASH! PLUNGE
No wonder Fitch looks forward to making some new friends digitally, when she joins the Cabot Trail Writers Festival’s Splash! Polar Dip Writing Workshop for five consecutive Thursdays starting on Jan. 21.
When she was approached by festival director Rebecca Silver Slayter to share her insights into getting creative, staying creative, and keeping to the path of a story or poem to its conclusion, she saw it as a prime opportunity to shake off the winter doldrums by helping others get their imaginations up and running.
The workshop title is meant to describe the act of diving right in: deciding on what you want to write about, the format you feel best suits the material — poem, short story, novel — and the elements drawn from life which will flavour the prose.
“When you’re alone, that can be a really hard thing to do,” says Fitch of taking those early steps. “But once you put it on paper, and commit to it, then in a circle we’ll be able to talk about that, ‘This is where I think I’m going,’ and we’ll see where we end up.”
Limited to 12 participants, Fitch says the sessions will ensure every voice gets heard while discussing ideas, writing prompts, in-class writing and sharing of their work, with a week in between for each person to work on or expand their writing.
“And then we’ll add on it, change it, question it, scratch it out, and build on it over that period of time.
“It’s amazing what you can do when you make the committment.”
WRITING TO COMFORT OTHERS
Known for brightly coloured volumes of stories filled with memorable characters and “lipslippery” wordplay, Fitch was in a more contemplative mood at the start of 2020, having just released You Won’t Always Be This Sad, a mediation on life and death following the sudden passing of her son Dustin in 2018.
In the spring, she was moved by the shootings of April 19 to write the poem Because We Love, We Cry, with her thoughts about how parents teach children about death, and grieving at a time when we couldn’t gather in groups to share our sorrow.
The importance of being creative, and having that outlet, has rarely been as apparent as it has been over the past year, and will continue to be in 2021 as we all reach for that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
‘CREATING IS NECESSARY’
For Fitch, making and experiencing art is akin to religion; a source of comfort that enables us to see the beauty in the world and contemplate what it means to be human.
“I feel like this is the time, more than ever, to realize that art is not a luxury. Creating is necessary,” she says.
“So often in hard times, people think it’s the least thing we need, and we have too many other things, but it is what saves me, and I feel it’s what saves a lot of people: the act of creating.
“Maybe not so much having that finished book in your hand, but the ability to enter into something and create something; whether you’re a rug-hooker or a quilter or a woodworker, creating is the only thing I’ve ever found to quell the anxiety, to put order to chaos, to make some meaning.
“So all the more reason that the arts are so important, and I really believe that with all my heart.”