Telling their stories
Memoirs from Saskatchewan women Lois Simmie and D.M. Ditson
Here are two strikingly different memoirs (both Coteau, $24.95) from two Saskatchewan women.
After success as an adult novelist, a beloved children’s writer, and author of a much-lauded true-crime book, Saskatoon writer Lois Simmie, now 87, brings us Finding My Way, a delightfully impressionistic ramble from her childhood to her adult writing life.
Simmie’s father was from Kentucky, her mother of Scots descent, and Lois got her start in Mervin where her father was an elevator agent. We get tales of rheumatic fever that kept Lois home from school for months, a St. Bernard dog sent out in the snow with a baby in a sled, and Lois discovering while sick with chickenpox that she could read. What adventure!
The family moves on to beloved Livelong and there are community dances, a café owner who burned down his place while too drunk to notice the hot oil, all replete with lines like, “I hear geese overhead, gabbling like souls on Judgment Day.”
Simmie continues with many great anecdotes, two of which take place in movie theatres: in one, as young adult, she fumbles her way into the dark and accidentally sits on a man’s lap, too scared to move. When she finally does, she sees that they are the only two people in the theatre. With another man on a date, she slides down the upturned seat and looks to find her skirt gone. She hisses at him, “Did I have my skirt when I left home?”
Simmie makes her way to adulthood and her writing career, surviving a harrowing marriage in Brazil, offset by gales of laughter at a radio station in North Battleford.
She tells wild tales of life on the road giving readings of her children’s books, getting lost at every turn, but leavening each supposed misfortune with humour and a wry look at our very human condition. The way she takes readers through her engagement with writing is a primer for all who think they’re too old or not educated enough.
What really stands out about Simmie’s memoir is a feeling for a now-faded Saskatchewan, a curious land of eccentric bachelors returned from war — and a few not-so-funny predators — oddball relatives, jobs long obsolete, houses without electricity or plumbing, and great gatherings of people all engaged in living with each other and the elements. Television has managed to democratize us and rub off many of our quirky edges.
Simmie remembers it all and, though not giving a pass to the creeps who were far too handy, has internalized and fed on this varied and idiosyncratic past. She has endured many hard times, but has soaked up with enthusiasm her delight and returns it in these colourful sketches and stories.
While stories can be both entertaining and educational, they can also be traps. Physician and meditation leader Deepak Chopra and Crown prosecutor/writer/ trapper Harold Johnson, for example, both caution against becoming victims of our own narrative, the one that says we’re bad, or weak, or a victim of some kind.
This is the very conclusion at which
D.M. Ditson arrives in her memoir of sexual assault and recovery, Wide Open. Employing a narrative tactic of beginning each chapter in Now, then going to some place in her past, from childhood to her teens and adulthood, she gives her story a strong momentum, grounding wherever she goes in the immediate present.
Ditson — she calls herself D throughout — was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home in Regina that, by her evidence, anyway, ill-prepared her for life in the world as most people seem to live it.
Her parents often pointed out her duty to obey them unquestioningly, but were unwilling, even unable, to have a debate about the place of them noisily engaging in sex in a room, even a tent, full of their children, at least one of them awake. When D struggles with the place of pornography in her common-law relationship — if there is a place — her father contends that he’s unable to help as he’s struggling with his own porn addiction: the Sears catalogue.