Jane Bow is Peterborough’s quiet, thoughtful fiction writer
A cosmopolitan childhood and love of the written word has guided her path
Living here for the last 40 years, undiminished in her creativity, Jane Bow is largely unknown to most Peterborough folks. An accomplished writer, with four novels and three plays over the past 20 years, Jane’s modest presence and highly informed conversation are the outcome of a cosmopolitan childhood and youth lived in many countries.
Her parents, Malcolm Bow, originally from Edmonton, and Betty Roberts, a war bride, rose in the diplomatic service to become Canada’s ambassadors to Czechoslovakia and then to Cuba during the Cold War.
As a child, Jane, who had been born in Edmonton, lived in these and other countries, went to boarding school as a teenager in England and spent holidays behind the Iron Curtain.
At York University’s Glendon College, she met her spouse, Grant Collins, now a retired Peterborough lawyer; married, raised two children and taught at Fleming College and Trent University while writing. Always, she says, she used a fountain pen and unlined paper, “because when ink flows, there can be a convergence of thought and imagination.”
Jane then commits her work to a computer, where corrections are easier to make.
In the 1990s, she researched the life of Martha Holland Hutchison, the wife of Peterborough’s first doctor, John Hutchison from Kirkcaldy, Scotland, who lived with eight children in the limestone house on Brock Street, which was built by volunteers in 1837 and is now lovingly kept by the Historical Society.
Impressed by the strength of Mrs. Hutchison, who was widowed at age 41 and lived on in the house with her family until financial straits drove her to Toronto, Bow wrote a play called Through the Fire that was successfully produced at Hutchison House. It portrayed Martha Hutchison both in the fullness of her life, and in its anonymity as the doctor’s wife.
The play was presented to great success but some Hutchison House board members felt it negatively presented the doctor.
“It was a kind of early feminist interpretation of the silencing of a key figure in local history,” Bow smiles.
Astonishingly enough, Sandford Fleming of railway fame, was a cousin of the Hutchisons and stayed in the house for some time at age 18.
Bow’s first job was as a court reporter for a Thunder Bay newspaper and she has long been interested in justice for marginal people. Her newest novella, Homeless, explores the dilemma of a sophisticated forensic psychologist who is examining an accused woman by the order of the court. The accused won’t give her name, and the narrative becomes a kind of mystery, as well as the journey of the 38-year-old professional psychiatrist to new self-knowledge.
In 2001, Jane Bow went to the Greek island of Crete with her daughter Sarah, a psychologist. She was taken by the place, and has returned many times. Her novel Cally’s Way, published in 2014, is the story of a 25-year- old Canadian business graduate on a kind of pilgrimage to her mother’s birthplace in an effort to understand her roots. Cally has an unexpected romance with an American draft dodger. The heroism of the people of Crete under Nazi occupation is dramatically portrayed in the story.
In 2005, Jane Bow was diagnosed with a form of multiple sclerosis. It has not deterred her from a full life and a rich writing life. She has studied her illness, and has been going to a movement class at Trent for a year. She walks with the assistance of walking sticks but also plays tennis, is unself-conscious, and drives and cooks .
“I meditate,” she tells me, “and I read good fiction from all over the world.”
She recommends to me Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.
Jane Bow’s calm and accepting demeanour conceals a rich and sophisticated inner life that bursts forth in unforgettable storytelling.
Jane Bow’s calm and accepting demeanour conceals a rich and sophisticated inner life that bursts forth in unforgettable storytelling.