Featuring Bill Arnott, Hollay Ghadery, Lucy Black, and Wayne Ng
Some close friends of The Miramichi Reader are celebrating book birthdays this fall! Here’s a special-edition look at why they wrote their books.
Bill Arnott, author of A Perfect Day for a Walk: The History, Cultures, and Communities of Vancouver, on Foot (Arsenal Pulp Press, September 2024)
Thank-you to my friends at The Miramichi Reader, for this opportunity to discuss A Perfect Day for a Walk, my new book from Arsenal Pulp Press. Although self-indulgent, sharing one’s story is fun, and keeps me from having to worry about editorial deadlines. Or at least put them off for a while, and not pretend that the bathroom needs cleaning. Again. (True story: I painted a room, twice, as part of a recent bout of procrastination).
About the new book. This is travel memoir, in its broadest sense. My primary genre. Which I love reading, and writing, and to my delight, other readers and book-buyers enjoy it as well. But following years of international odysseys, I was eager to share something close to home. Not just for accessibility, but because I’m acutely aware of my footprint. Excess travel can ruin a place, not to mention the planet. And for that reason, in part, I wanted a gig I could walk to. Walking, to me, is the ultimate form of environmental protection and engagement. The savoury pace of a stroll, the absorption of surroundings, which will always surpass views from a vehicle in motion.
Also quite fortunately, Arsenal Pulp Press, a superb Vancouver publisher, was keen to collaborate. And together we’ve created this mixed media book, a half-year of Vancouver neighbourhood strolls paired with my photos, as well as vintage shots from the city archives. Creating a stylized “now and then” feel to accompany the walking and prose. Like my most popular books, I share in present tense so that readers and I experience these excursions together, in real time. A style I find particularly sensory, and engaging. And again, I hope readers enjoy it.
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Bill Arnott is the author of A Season on Vancouver Island and the award-winning Gone Viking books, all published by Rocky Mountain Books. A fellow of London’s Royal Geographical Society, he’s a frequent presenter and guest on podcasts, TV, and radio. When not roaming the globe, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast.
Take a walk with Bill Arnott on our Patreon.
Hollay Ghadery, author of Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, September 2024)
Widow Fantasies is the result of my struggling to make sense of my fantasising about planning my husband’s funeral. If you’ve read my poetry collection, Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023), you may remember part of the poem, “Psychomachia” that reads:
A good-
for-nothing wife
with unruly thighs in the
hardware store.
Aisles with chainsaws,
ropes
or rat poison
bring to
mind empty rolls of toilet paper and socks
shoved between couch cushions,
bring to
mind visions of the baby in black, imported
kegs of my husband's favourite beer,
and me:
a butterfly,
pinned and
untouchable.
Don't tell me
you know
your own soul
so well.
This poem touched on a struggle I was having at the time: the fact that I was fantasising about planning my husband’s funeral. I didn’t want to kill him, really. I just wanted him not to be someone else I had to take care of and clean up after. I already had a bunch of young children. As much as these fantasies helped me harmlessly let off steam, I was concerned: I loved my husband. I couldn’t accept the notion that I really wanted him gone forever. I consulted a therapist and was surprised—then delighted—to learn these sorts of fantasies are not totally uncommon, especially for women in heteronormative relationships where they are responsible for the brunt of household, child rearing, and emotional labour, on top of often having jobs outside the house.
I learned that fantasising can be a useful and healthy way to explore and examine our lives and desires. While I wanted (and continue to want) my husband alive and well, I did need to have a discussion with him about being an equal and independent partner in our relationship. Of course there are times we need to lean on each other for support, but in our day-to-day life, I needed more balanced help. I was burnt out. I was frantic. Even after my discussion with my husband (which went very well; we’ve been married 15 years now) I continued to think more about how women use fantasies to escape their lives. I also began to think about how fantasies can be used to interrogate and subvert heteronormative, patriarchal systems and values. I spoke with a few close friends and realised I was (as the therapist suggested) not alone in my often dark but freeing thoughts. The stories in Widow Fantasies began to emerge.
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Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in various literary journals and magazines. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released in Spring 2021. Rebellion Box, her debut collection of poetry, was released in 2023. Her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released in Fall 2024.
Lucy Black, author of Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth (Demeter Press, October 2024)
While working as a vice-principal and then principal in several high schools, I regularly interacted with other administrative colleagues and on such occasions, we often shared our “war stories” — those difficult and heart-breaking situations we were attempting to help resolve. Most of us had learned not to communicate such stories with our families and friends or to outline such tales at parties and social events. Apart from the obvious privacy concerns, the distaste with which such stories were met was discouraging at best, and embarrassing at worst. Others who did not do what we did were shocked by our narratives, even when they were drawn in broad strokes — by the language we recounted and by the dire situations our students were struggling with. And we were also subjected to skepticism — how could this possibly be true? Who lives like that? The comfortable world of middle-class privilege was such that many of our acquaintances could not fathom the despair, the hurt, or the harm that we saw students navigating on a fairly regular basis. We often exclaimed, “when I retire — I’m going to write a book. People need to know this goes on.” And so, seven years after having done so, I have finally finished one.
I began by documenting the lives of the girls who continued to haunt me. The girls I continued to worry about. The ones I hoped were somewhere safe and had found ways to be cared for. The girls I had, despite my training and discipline, wept for. But the lists and notes became stories, first one or two, then three or four, until, over the course of a few years, there was a collection. Even in fictional form, it seemed that nobody really wanted to read these narratives that were based upon my experiences. When I occasionally submitted one to a journal, I was told things like “nobody wants to read a sad story — can you change the ending and give us something more hopeful?” Such commentary frustrated me. The whole point was to highlight the desperation of the situations some of these young people found themselves in. Maya Angelou is purported to have said, (t)here is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. And I think her words apply particularly to the stories we feel compelled to share but know may be triggering or upsetting to others. So, the challenge for me was to find a way of providing deep insight into the work that takes place in schools without “trauma-dumping” on readers, while still yet highlighting the needs that were so obvious to me. If we believe that reading serves many purposes, then we must recognize the necessity of sharing stories that are reflective of the whole spectrum of human experience. And some of those stories hurt. They hurt to write and they hurt to read. But that does not mean we should shy away from writing or reading them.
And so, using the tools that auto-fiction provides, I have attempted to present a snapshot of those young people whose lives touched my heart — young people I felt that were not well served or supported by the systems we have in place. In doing so, I did not wish to be salacious or shocking. Rather I found myself motivated by the hope that in shining a light on lives such as these, discourse might be elicited about what we can do better.
What I dearly want to provoke with this collection is an awareness of the needs of vulnerable youth, and in particular, the importance of strong community partnerships and additional resources. Practical things are needed like: increased funding for CAS and social services to lighten case loads; the attraction of more clinicians with a specialty in adolescent mental health; providing school boards with increased funding for additional support personnel and training; reinstating funding for effective student success programs; and facilitating partnerships with a view to providing resources for youth such as emergency housing and wraparound care. I hope this small book contributes, in some way, to such important dialogues.
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Lucy Black worked as a corporate trainer and as an educator for much of her working life. Her writing life is about bearing witness to stories and people that she believes are significant. When she’s not reading or writing, Lucy loves spending time in the kitchen and in her garden. She is the author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella’s Carpet, and The Brickworks. Her new short story collection, Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth will be released October 2024. Lucy’s short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada in literary journals and magazines. She lives in Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.
Read an exclusive interview with Lucy Black on our Patreon.
Wayne Ng, author of Johnny Delivers (Guernica Editions, November 2024)
The easy answer to why I wrote Johnny Delivers is that I wanted to return to the world of the much-loved and critically acclaimed prequel, Letters From Johnny. But writers have been known to deceive not only readers but themselves.
While I had the plot, setting, characters and themes roughed out, the early drafts of the standalone sequel, Johnny Delivers, were a struggle. I desperately wanted to avoid Asian immigrant tropes of generational and cultural conflict, restaurants and gangs, duty and sacrifice, and emotionally distant parents. Taking it back to the seventies was re-opening wounds of an era when Asian representations generally included the stereotyped, humble, buck-toothed Asian caricature. Such depictions of Chinese made me cringe with shame at my roots and identity.
It wasn’t until I understood how emotionally difficult it was to create fiction from personal experiences that I realized how important the story was for me to move on from the shame. From a craft perspective, scraping the emotional crevasses and harnessing that would make for better writing. It would help create a new narrative while accepting some truths of the time.
For example, just about everyone I knew worked in the hospitality industry. Cultural and generational conflicts were and continue to be wedges in families. And yes, Hong Kong gangs parachuted into Canada in the seventies.
If I was going to write this, I had to expunge how Canada’s institutionalized racism negatively impacted my identity and the generations before me. But I had to do it safely through humour and satire.
The ’70s were my ennui high school years in Toronto. They were dominated by familiar immigrant family issues, a sense of rudderlessness, the indignity of poverty and racial marginalization.
However, something really big happened to Asians then: Bruce Lee burst onto the scene like a super nova and created a new Asian-male masculinity. In doing so, he singularly changed the worldview of Asians and created a new action-figure archetype in entertainment. Sorry, Jackie Chan, but Bruce is still the most recognized and revered East Asian in the world today. Sure, we still have a long way to go, but many recent gains are encouraging—hello, Michelle Yeoh, Simu Liu and Sandra Oh.
It was Bruce Lee who made it possible by resetting the narrative for Asian identities by refusing to play the stereotyped, kowtowing invisible, meek Asian caricature. Instead, he created and personified the heroic, kick-ass, going-to-do-it-my-way martial and philosophical artist.
It came at a cost to him (he died young and tragically). Others, like myself, revered him but could never measure up to that level of hypermasculinity. In some ways, Bruce dispelled one Asian myth and traded it up for another. It was ultimately a net gain, but it didn’t always fit seamlessly, and still doesn’t. Nevertheless, I wanted to pay homage to Bruce’s new Asian narrative but also humanize him.
Johnny Delivers provides laughs, some real tenderness and is a wonderful nostalgic romp. It embraces then pushes the conventions I dreaded, thus providing a more robust perspective of Chinese families. It skewers white saviourism as well as the Asian worshipping of westerners. Not only that, but it balances the fear and excitement of moving forward, and it reconciles the many mixed messages and confusion I struggled through as a teen and adult. This isn’t what I planned to write, but it’s what I had to write. It also gave me the opportunity to wade into the deeply buried and little-known chapters of Canadian-Chinese history, such as the paper families (to which the book is dedicated) and the importance of the Chinese community Associations. Ultimately, it was cathartic for me and, hopefully, a good story for the reader. I think I delivered.
Meet Wayne Ng on our Patreon.
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Wayne Ng was born in downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melons and kung fu movies. Ng works as a school social worker in Ottawa but lives to write, travel, eat and play, preferably all at the same time. He is an award-winning author and traveler who continues to push his boundaries from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Author of The Family Code, Letters From Johnny, and Finding The Way: A Novel of Lao Tzu. Connect with him at waynengwrites.com
