Power of words
Waterloo author up for national award
Pristine white boots. Ruby red wheels.
That perfect pair of roller skates sparkled on a department store shelf. The price? Just $44.97 at the Zellers in St. John’s, N.L. The year was 1981.
A 13-year-old girl begged her father, Gordon, to buy her the skates.
“I was getting nowhere until I drew up a very formal sounding contract promising my dad that I’d never ask for money again and I’d even put $3.75 towards it,” recalled Heather Theresa Smith, now a 49-year-old Waterloo author with a young adult novel up for a national award.
“It worked! My dad signed on the dotted line and I got my roller skates!”
The persuasive power of words got Smith her coveted side-by-side wheels. She lived on those skates for an entire summer.
She says she felt like Tootie from the old TV show “The Facts of Life,” always wheeling in and out of the scene. That 80-word contract with her dad got her the skates. And she never had to ante up the $3.75.
“This is a very nice memory of him,” said Smith, whose father died in February.
Smith has her own kids now, three of them between the ages of 12 and 21, and a Scottish husband named Robin from Aberdeen. Robin’s information technology job brought them to Waterloo in 1998.
Smith’s second young-adult book “The Agony of Bun O’Keefe” is a finalist for a 2018 Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award, with five Toronto schoolkids from Sprucecourt Public School set to make the final judgement on which of five authors gets a $6,000 prize. The middle grade-young adult winner will be announced June 20.
The power of words — there are about 45,000 in the story of a 14-year-old runaway girl set in 1980s Newfoundland — is not lost on Smith, who got pulled deeper into writing after attending workshops with author Kathy Stinson at the Kitchener Public Library nearly two decades ago.
Words used to torment her, growing up in St. John’s. In grade school, she had a speech impediment that kept her from saying R’s and S’s easily. She didn’t want to be laughed at, so she avoided words with those letters.
“Words were my enemy, in a lot of ways,” she said.
“I can look back and see how that constant thinking about words has helped me as a writer,” said Smith, who long ago overthrew her speech impediment. “All day long, I'm sitting down, thinking, ‘How can I phrase that differently or say that diffently or in a more interesting way?’”
And when she frets over elusive adjectives while typing her next novel on her laptop, Smith reaches for a cup of tea and a slab of toast scrape-coated in butter. It’s her writer’s comfort food, even if she had to recently vacuum the crumbs from her keyboard crevices.
But whatever happened to those roller skates, which have yet to write their way into one of her novels?
“I still have them — the contract too!”