Featuring Margaret Nowaczyk, Joanne Jackson, Mark Foss, and Jan Fancy Hull
Why do your favourite Canadian authors write the books they write? Let’s find out in this exclusive feature here at The Miramichi Reader.
Margaret Nowaczyk, author of Marrow Memory (Wolsak & Wynn, June 2024)
I wrote the first essay of this collection to express the inner turmoil of an immigrant finding her life in a new language. It was 2011 and twenty two years after I arrived in Canada with only grade ten English and functionally mute. “You, in Translation” is a list essay depicting milestones in my acquisition of the English language. I had an epiphany when I answered a geneticist mentor’s question whether I still spoke Polish with “I’m bilingual,” and suddenly, surprisingly felt the rightness of that statement. I was bilingual, equally comfortable in both my mother and in my acquired tongues, no longer a stuttering immigrant with an unrecognizable accent. In my mind, finding the correct word was satisfying; in my body, it felt as a physical relief. The experience made me realize the power of precise naming and, by extension, the power of arriving at the apt word, the exact phrase while writing. Correct words, felicitous phrases, cogent sentences give form to the formless.
Writing provides space to examine events for more details, to link memories in new ways, to find connections where none existed before. It provides a fresh focus and it endows the story with more nuance, both intellectual and emotional. Writing always moves me beyond simply reacting, toward reflection, and grants power where there might have been none. When I find the words to describe the tumult of emotions and ideas, I am able to order them into a manageable whole. Ideas and feelings and hurts and joys are tamed, domesticated in our minds, but remain empowered, still dynamic and compelling. Once named, emotions and ideas can withstand the toughest, strictest examinations and result in a deeper, more nuanced understanding of events and ourselves. It is by writing that I make sense of the world around me, whether it is in understanding a years-long obsession with a nineteenth-century peasant woman ancestor in “His Aunt Must Have Given Birth to Him!”, or why a radio play heard in childhood remains cherished in “This Is Radio Warsaw”. Writing, I examine my passion with the multitude of malformations that can befall human fetuses and why I am fascinated by them in “There but the Grace of God…”. I gain a deeper understanding of the traumas of medical training and coping or, as the case might be, not coping with them in “Ad infinitum”. Pen on paper, I examine the transcendent beauty of an art masterpiece and its effect on me in “Matisse, the Sea, and Me”; the trauma of a long-ago sexual assault in “The Art of Loving”; the relief brought on by laundering and ironing bedlinens during the pandemic in “Laundry DNA”.
The pieces in this collection have been written over more than a decade as writing exercises for graduate school, for contests, in answer to submission calls as well as for no reason at all other than the need to explore the questions life throws at us. Maya Angelou famously said: there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you, so here I am, telling my stories and hoping they will be heard.
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Born in Poland, Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatric clinical geneticist and a professor at McMaster University and DeGroote School of Medicine. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Canadian, Polish and American literary magazines and anthologies. She lives in Hamilton, ON, with her husband and two sons. Visit her website at www.margaretnowaczyk.ca.
Mark Foss, author of Borrowed Memories (8th House Publishing, June 2024)
With Borrowed Memories, I wanted to juxtapose two completely different worlds with the narrator as the go-between. Ivan Pyefinch, an Ottawa translator, may struggle with the demands of caring for his elderly parents, Horace and Aida, but he is still on familiar terrain in Eastern Ontario. What would happen, I wondered, if a stranger from a completely different culture entered their lives?
The filmmaker Mia Hakim, a Sephardic Jew from Tunisia who immigrated to Quebec, was about as far from cottagers in the Thousand Islands as I could imagine. Yet were they really so different? Even as Ivan copes with his parents’ mental decline, he learns Mia is covering up her own illness. As their stories diverge and intersect, I wanted to reveal their shared humanity. Exposure to different cultures may push them all out of their comfort zones, but they are ultimately richer for the experience.
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MARK FOSS is the author of the novels Molly O and Spoilers, as well as the short story collection Kissing the Damned. His fiction and creative non-fiction have also appeared in The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, subTerrain, Numéro Cinq, carte blanche, Montréal Serai and elsewhere. A radio drama, “Higher Ground”, was broadcast on CBC. He lives in Montreal.
Joanne Jackson, author of Sunset Lake Resort (Stonehouse Publishing, June 2024)
My husband’s grandmother, when, after the death of her husband, was faced with having to make her own way in the world, bought some land at a northern Saskatchewan lake and had a cabin built, which she rented out for extra income. The bathroom was an outhouse at the back of the yard, and the fridge was a hole dug outside the front step with a barrel with a tight-fitting lid wedged into it. There was no television so entertainment was watching the lake.
When Grandma’s daughter had children, she also took them to the lake and when my husband and I married, instead of going to Hawaii, or Mexico, we went to the lake. It was June, so we had the place to ourselves. The peace and quiet you experience being at a northern lake when there is no one else around makes you feel like you’re the only ones left on the planet.
Eventually, my husband and I began taking our own children to the lake. I have many memories of swimming, floating on air mattresses, and building sand castles, then having a wiener roast, or going for a long walk around the lake, even in the rain. There was even a used bookstore a fifteen minute walk away, something both my daughter and I appreciated.
Now, my granddaughters spend their summers at the lake. They take swimming lessons, have wiener roasts, and go for long walks, just as the previous generations did.
Grandma has been gone for many years, but I hope she knows how her foresightedness gave many generations so much happiness. I wrote this book as a tribute to her and to the women of the world who are making their own way, and doing it well with dignity and grace.
We still have no television at the lake as some people do with their satellite dishes and internet connections, and the bookstore has been replaced by a cannabis store, but there are still long walks in the rain.
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Joanne Jackson is the author of three novels. The Wheaton was her first and released in 2019. A Snake in the Raspberry Patch came next and won the best crime novel set in Canada in 2023, and was also shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her newest novel is called Sunset Lake Resort. Joanne has been married for 50 years and is the proud mother of two fantastic kids, and two wonderful grandchildren. She is an avid walker and on most days of the year you will see her and her border collie, Mick, walking in rain, sleet, snow or sunshine.
Jan Fancy Hull, author of Trespasses (Moose House Publications, June 2024)
Trespasses is the sixth novel in my Tim Brown Mystery series.
Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How are critical tools in mystery-solving, not always in that order. There is a conventional trespassing in this novel, and When and Who figure large in Tim Brown’s unorthodox investigation. Also, he struggles to determine if he personally has been trespassed against, or by whom, and what to do about it. Inadvertent customers of police “just following procedure” may appreciate that I address this question a little. Tim’s a nice person, but so is most everyone, at least some of the time. We all face challenges (potential mysteries) daily; whether large or small depends on whether you are the subject, object, or reading about it in the newspaper. Some people may struggle privately to get out of bed in the morning, or to attend to daily needs, or to return to the “right” bed at night. Why they do or don’t may become a mystery to someone.
Trespasses explores what kinds of trespasses (or “debts”) require the giving or asking of forgiveness, amongst other ideas. Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant is mentioned, as the little children are trespassers. That reminded me of “Trespassers Will” from A. A. Milne. I got a kick out of that, so was compelled to give it a playful mention.
These bits are peripheral to the story, but do add dimension. As tension rises, I watch for an opportunity to insert a little gentle humour. Mysteries should be fun to read, even if the hero/ine doesn’t pack heat or drive fast cars or live on bourbon (Tim prefers wine and his weapon of choice is a black marker and sheets of manilla paper).
If you had seen what shocked Tim that fine June morning, what would you do? What would anybody do? That’s the part I really enjoy writing about, while Tim is busily delving into whatever has erupted. Should he walk away? How would he feel about it? Will he reveal his predicament to a friend or loved one (he cares for a lot of people), or just let it go? Perhaps this is why a reviewer1 favourably compared my novels to Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series. I write to explore what strength of character is required when a person of average intellect and ambition, and impeccable moral compass, works on obstacles in his path, even ones he chooses. I write to learn what he thinks about what he does.
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Jan Fancy Hull lives in Lunenburg County. Prior to being awarded the 2022 Rita Joe Poetry Prize, her poetry was published in The Antigonish Review, and in an anthology, Gathering In (Windywood). She has also published two collections of short fiction, three mysteries in a series of twelve, and a non-fiction book (Moose House Publications)
