Fisher Lavell’s Working Words Blog |
 Bill and Ollie Up a Tree, Told by brother Tom Church Back when they were about twelve and thirteen, Bill and Oliver was out in the bush about a half mile from home, hunting for squirrels with a twenty-two, and they seen a moose. Well, it was out of season and the forest rangers were always around, keeping an eye out for poachers. They could fine you or even throw you in jail if you got caught. Because what with it being the Depression and people literally starving, you wouldn’t want some poor sod to shoot one and feed their children. Well, all they had was the twenty-two, not nearly enough fire power to kill something that big, but brother Bill decides he’s going to shoot the moose. So he takes aim, shoots him in the shoulder, which pisses off Mr. Moose and he comes stampeding after Bill and Ollie. So Jesus, they shimmy up a couple little poplar trees and the moose is madder than hell and starts ramming the tree that Bill is in. And Bill’s got the twenty-two, so he shoots the moose a couple more times, which only makes the moose madder and he’s going crazy on Bill’s tree till it feels like it’s going to topple. Bill can’t even get a bead on him anymore and then he drops the gun and it falls on the ground right behind the moose. So then Bill’s yelling for Ollie to get down and get the twenty-two, and Ollie says, “Why? Why does it have to be me? I don’t want to get down there.” But Bill yells at him to get the goddamn gun. So Ollie gets down, grabs the gun, and starts climbing his tree again, but this draws the moose so then he’s ramming hell out of Ollie’s tree. Ollie’s screaming, clinging on for dear life, and Bill’s yelling, “Throw it to me! Throw it to me!” So Ollie somehow manages to throw the gun back to Bill, Bill shoots the moose a couple more times, and lo and behold, the moose drops dead. Killed by a twenty-two. Well, the boys are just giddy, they got a big, beautiful moose, enough to feed the whole neighbourhood for weeks, and they go running home. Dad’s out in the yard and they’re all excited, yelling that they took down a moose with the twenty-two, they got him and he’s just out back down by the creek. Well, dad hauls off and cuffs them, cursing. “Don’t be ridiculous!” he tells them. “You know goddamn well a moose cannot be killed with a twenty-two! You need your head examined!” Ollie’s holding his ear there, crying, and then they see the forest rangers over by their truck in the yard. Apparently, they’d been doing the rounds, looking for poachers. Dad rants on at the boys about how it ain’t funny to tell lies and stop their damn joking and get them chores done like he told them. Forest rangers give it all another glare and finally crawl up into their truck and go chugging out the lane. Only after they’re long gone does dad say, “Okay boys. Let’s go get that goddamn moose youz took down with a twenty-two.”  Oh Yes, I Will, Told by brother Charlie Church That was me that took out my brother Bill Church’s eye, although it wasn’t on purpose. We were just little guys, I was six and he was five, and we were out at the barn doing chores. We’d been arguing for hours, trying to outdo and outbrag each other over every damn thing. We had watered the animals and shovelled manure and then I was up in the loft, pitching down hay, and Bill was at the bottom, telling me that he could do this better than me and he could do that better than me. And I said, “Bill Church, you shut up. Or I’m gonna poke you right in the eye with this pitchfork.” And he said, “Oh no, you won’t.” And I said, “Oh yes, I will.” And he said, “Oh no, you won’t.” And I said, “Oh yes, I will.” And I took a jab at him, just in play, jabbing to the right of his eye so I’d miss it, but at the same time, he ducked left. And I poked him right in the eye with the pitchfork. Hell of a thing. I never meant to do it and I told him after, I was so goddamn good and sorry. But Bill lost his vision in that eye at six years old. That’s what kept him out of the army when the war came around. But apart from that, it don’t seem to have kept him back from anything else much.
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 When Joe Moneyas showed up at my house in 1996 with a tiny, sickly puppy, I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not need a dog, a dog was the last thing I needed, I needed a dog like a hole in the head. I had taken a job on reserve while my husband remained in the city, I was single-parenting my three children, and by two months into a teaching contract I couldn’t get out of, I had realized that I was in way over my head. I kept the dog, of course, a worm-ridden, starving pup who, at just three weeks old, had lost its mother to a speeding, swerving truck. My sons named her Xena, “the stranger” and we fed her milk from an eye dropper and let her sleep in Mommy’s bed.  I thought I didn’t need a dog the day she came, but I was wrong in Spades. Sometimes, gifts are sent to us that we don’t even know we need. And when I think back now to the many years that followed—hard, painful, disappointing years—I see that the only real friend I could count on for most of them was Xena. She sat with me in my loneliness, guarded me in my terror. She gave hours of quiet company as I worked into many a late night; companionship and stress relief on our long walks down gravel roads and up the trail to the Ferry Landing. With her quizzical expressions, crazy antics and boundless energy, she made me laugh a million times. She loved to swim in the Big Lake and to haul around gigantic logs that were many times her size. Though she looked more like a Border Collie than like her Rottweiler mother, she was a tenacious fighter, surviving several attacks by packs of reservation dogs, all of whom towered above her.  Fisher and Xena, 2007 She taught me about dogs and she taught me about people too, myself especially. I threw myself into those pack fights without hesitation, kicking and punching, willing to be torn to pieces for Xena. Until she came, I did not know that I was the kind of woman who would literally face death with a big "F you," just for the sake of my friend. The great Irish hero, Cuchulainn, was called The King’s Dog because of his undying loyalty and fierce fighting skills. I think dogs epitomize loyalty, not just because of their unswerving commitment to us, but also because of its reciprocal nature—they inspire us to return that loyalty in kind. She knew when I was hurting, my Xena, sometimes even before I knew it myself. When I wept, she would stay close, often touching me with her nose, showing care and attention. It makes sense that she could figure out what crying meant since dogs howl and kiyike when physically injured and distressed. But once, a woman came to my house who was not my friend and said some very unkind things to me in a completely normal tone of voice. Trying to fake not caring, I sat very calmly, matching her pleasant tone. I felt a light touch on the outside of my knee and, looking down, there was Xena, gazing up at me with rapt attention and deep understanding. It seemed she did actually sense my inner turmoil, even without any visible body language cues. After our first year at Hollow Water, Xena and I were often joined on our walks by three, four, or five other of the roving, mongrel dogs. A man once told me that the reason I was never bothered by bears or wolves on all those long walks on deserted roads was probably because we all were perceived by watchful eyes as a pack, the dogs and I together. In the ten years I lived at Hollow Water, I grew to know and love so many of those mongrel dogs, and they me. And their lives and hardships were often heavy on my heart.  Sitting together after a sweatlodge once, an elder named Brightnose answered my question about how to help the dogs. He nodded and said, “You know, before our people were horse people, we were dog people.” And then he told a story about how, when the People were in a time of great crisis, dogs were sent to them by Creator as a gift. And dogs worked with them, dragging heavy loads and assisting in the hunt, dogs loved them and protected them, and brought them healing. “That’s the dog’s job,” he said. “To heal the People.” But he said the People have forgotten that now, and they don’t treat dogs right or feed them or take care of them. And they don’t allow dogs the honour of healing them anymore, they don't let them do their job. And that is one reason why the People struggle. Because they have forgotten Creator’s great gift, the dog. It’s interesting how spirit teachings often align with science. I read a National Geographic article on the evolution of dogs and it said that, although most animal species emerge gradually over many thousands of years in a certain place on the globe, the archaeological evidence seems to show that dogs emerged, and merged their lives with ours, in multiple sites on many continents at around the same time, ten to twelve thousand years ago. Almost like they were just set down there, I thought, by some compassionate, unseen hand.  Many years have passed now since Hollow Water. Sixteen years after Xena came to me, I sat with her on the floor of a vet’s clinic on a red-checked picnic blanket at the end of her life. I told her that she was a good dog and that she had done her job. “Xena, I wonder if you have any way of knowing,” I choked through my tears, “how much I love you.” And she gazed back at me, that look of complete adoration in her eyes, as if to say, “Mom, I wonder if you have any way of knowing how much I love you.” Then she lay down her pretty head on her delicate paws and went to sleep. The poem still kills me, The Rainbow Bridge. It says when dogs leave this world, they go to a beautiful meadow beside a rainbow bridge and for countless happy hours, they play and frolic with the other dogs there. Then, one day a dog cocks their head, looking down the road afar, and runs with joyous abandon to greet the person coming to them there. I see now that dogs have always come to me. In almost every photo from my childhood, you will see a dog. There was Pepper and Lady and Snowball, and then Sich and Sir and Hamish. Then the dogs of Hollow Water and all the others down through the years. I have always been a dog person.  Fisher Lavell, 1972 I live again now on the edge of my small town, and down the yard is a space I call Xena’s Rest, a peaceful grove where my old dogs are laid. My Xena, of course, beneath a young poplar tree. Then Sasha, a beloved though troubled old German Shepherd dog. And then, beautiful Dagger, a huge Malamute husky whose grandmother was a wolf. Brave and strong and true to the end. They lived to be old, old dogs, every one. And that is where, long years from now, my other dogs will lie, including the two snoozing under the camper here as I write these words, Crazy Ed the boxer and Shy Maggie, the big black I got from the Rescue. I was never big on the standard concept of Heaven: a dry, ancient city, streets paved with gold, a mansion of my own. Raised a barefoot country child, I wondered, how would I be happy there? No poplar trees, no crows or dandelions or dirt roads, no dogs. But the great evangelist Billy Graham once said, “God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he’ll be there.” So perhaps, in time, I will cross that bridge and find my dogs awaiting me there. My God, what a glorious pack we’ll make.   Bill Church’s Two-legged Dog/ Kids in the Fire Bill Church’s Dog, as told by brother-in law Don LavellBill Church had a dog, this was back in the Thirties, and right from the start, he was a great dog. A great dog for the bush, he’d scare up jumpers and chase them back towards you, a natural hunter. Just your basic mongrel dog, some Shepherd in him maybe, black and tan, but a good-size dog. Anyways, Bill Church was out mowing hay one day, just with the old metal mower pulled by a horse, the mowing arm was a shaft on the right, had these razor sharp blades on the bottom like a scythe that would cut the hay as you passed over. Well, I guess the dog had scared up a rabbit in the meadow there and it come careening up behind Bill, the dog in hot pursuit, rabbit sprinted around the mower and zigzagged away, but as the dog leapt over the mowing arm and landed, front feet behind the back feet the way they do, just then the blades swiped forwards and sliced that dog’s front feet clean off. Well, Bill Church jumped right down and run to the dog, tearing off his shirt as he ran, ripping off strips, and he bound up the legs first thing, tourniquet, shoved the feet in his pockets, and picked the dog up. Bill was just a short man like all the Churches, about five foot two and skinny, but he went running up to the house, that big dog cradled in his arms like a kid, just screaming. He got him quieted and stopped the bleeding—doctors wasn’t free for people in them days, never mind animals. He had tried to sew the feet back on but it wouldn’t take, so then he just kept it clean, sewed up the skin over the stumps, and hoped for the best. And Bill Church nursed that dog back to health, not knowing, like how the hell would he even get by with only the two legs? But that dog lived and not only that, but he was one of the best dogs you ever seen. He didn’t just favour the feet that were gone and hop around on the back legs like you might think. He actually taught himself to walk on them stumps, the legs with no feet, he would walk on them, slow and painful at first, till he got his callouses built up, like thick pads on the ends of his stumps. And you’d always recognize Bill Church’s dog at a distance, his outline was different, front end shorter than the rear, but he went back to hunting, eventually got just as good as before. He could run, he could jump, he could mate. And Bill Church’s dog, I remember, was crazy about a baseball. I was just a kid then, that was when we all lived out on the old gravel ridge about twelve miles north-west of Swan River, off the Ditch Road. And us kids would all get together on a summer evening, play some scrub baseball in the big field, Churches and Lavells and Mitchells and Howdles, the whole bunch. But Bill Church’s goddamn two-legged dog would jump straight up in the air and steal that ball on the fly, run like hell away with it, and it would be gone. You’d chase after him, call him, try to coax him, you’d look all over the goddam place for your ball, money was scarce to replace it, but that ball was gone. If Bill Church’s dog got it, you’d never see your goddam ball again.  Crazy about a baseball So next time you wanted to play ball, you had to learn see, and you’d have to first go tie up Bill Church’s dog, and then you could play ball. And that dog lived to be old, old, and that was only because of Bill Church. He was a quick thinker and a man of action. He would do something, Bill Church, not just think about it and see what happens. If you ever had a big problem in your life, a real crisis where lives were on the line, Bill Church would be the man you’d hope would be nearby. Kids in the Fire, as told by brother Tom ChurchMust have been about 1935 or ’36. Mom and Dad was away, it was blueberry season and they had gone up the mountain to pick berries to sell, leaving the kids with us. Eleven in the family, of course, it was hot in August and the little kids, Melvin and Violet, was sleeping in the house with the three big girls, us boys was out in a shed down the yard that we called the bunk house. Brother Bill was in his late teens then, not married yet, and I was a few years younger. But it was the pitch black of night and we woke up with the girls screaming, “Fire, fire, fire! The kids, the kids is in the house!” We swung open the door and the house was ablaze, there was flames eating up the roof, flames in the kitchen window, jumping, you could feel the heat all the way down the yard, like standing next to a stove.  The pitch black of night and the house was ablaze I turned back and grabbed my pants, we’d just been sleeping in our gitch, it was so damn hot, and I hopped back to the doorway, trying to get my feet through the pantlegs.
But not brother Bill. He just ran, gitches and all. He ran full tilt to the house, never slowed for a second, ran to the window and through the window in one fluid move, like jumping a hurdle, smashing the glass with his up-flung arm as he hit. I’d got my pants fixed and ran up to the house, but by the time I reached it, Bill had already got Violet, who was about five years old then, he threw her into my arms through the smashed window and went back for Mel. There was smoke pouring out the windows like tar, fire roaring like a beast in the walls, things cracking and breaking inside, the girls screaming and crying in the yard like a bunch of ninnies. Why the hell did they run out of the house and leave them kids in there? The heat was so intense, it drove me back, I had my arm up over my forehead, eyes stinging with tears, choking in the black smoke. I was yelling, “Bill! Bill! Jesus! Melvin! Get outta there!” But they were still in there, the roof creaking and moaning, getting ready to give way. And I guess Bill had found Violet right away, there on the cot by the window, but Melvin had got scared, he was only three years old, and he had crawled under the bed and shoved himself way back against the wall, so then Bill couldn’t find him. You could not see the hand in front of your face. But Bill had got down on the floor, I guess, crawling on his belly to try and breathe, groping around, swinging his hand back and forth in front of him, calling “Mel, Mel, come to brother.” Well, Bill’s hands finally found him, he grabbed him, jumped up and put Mel on his hip, and straddled the window, trying to climb through. And it was just at that minute that the lantern blew. They used to hang the coal oil lantern on a hook by the window there, but the air inside the house was so hot at that point, it ignited the oil, and the lantern exploded, spewing hot, burning oil all over little Melvin’s back and shoulders and neck and head. He was burned bad, Mel, because he was so little and he got the worst of the explosion. And brother Bill’s arm was bleeding like a son-of-a-bitch where it was embedded with all them shards of glass. But we had a good neighbour, Mrs. Krumm was her name, she had some kind of medical training, and she had come up with a buckboard when they seen the fire in the night. And she said, “Don’t touch them!” She bound up Bill’s arm best as she could and laid Mel on his stomach in the back of the buckboard, just draping clean sheets over him, and drove like hell for the hospital in town. They said that Melvin had third-degree burns to 90% of his body, they did not even think that he would live, but he did live, although he was in the hospital for months, in tremendous pain, poor little guy. They had to bind his arms to the bedpost to keep him from gouging out his own skin from the pain and the itch as it healed. But he lived. And that is why you will see on a sunny day, when men take off their shirts to work, my handsome young brother Melvin with that mottled gray mess of scar he calls a back, and just the one arm-sized strip of clean flesh across it. And working along side of him, quiet and strong, my short little brother Bill Church, with a matching scar on his right arm, a weird-looking bubble where the infection was from the glass he broke going through that window. Yessir, I stopped to put my pants on that day, but not brother Bill. He hit the ground running, and both them kids, Melvin and Violet, only ever had a life because of it. END OF PART 1 OF 3  True story 1940s The first time old Andy came to the little house in Pretty Valley, Daisy thought it was just a regular neighbour visit and offered him tea. But very shortly, he grabbed her and she fought him, shoving and yelling and trying to wrestle away. That’s when he punched her in the face and she came to on the floor with him raping her, but she fought him even then, gouging and raking at his face. He stopped long enough to punch her another time, then he finished what he was doing.
When he was gone, Daisy dragged herself up and sat on the chair by the window, crying and holding herself. What if he came back? Her face was bloody and swollen, lip broken, and she was burning bad in the lady parts, he’d been very rough. The baby was wailing back in the room. But she could hardly move, sat there dazed and crying till Danny came home for supper. In bed, they talked about what to do. Danny said they’d go to town and report it to the constable, but Daisy said, “What good would that do? Everybody knows the family I come from, dirt poor, have-nothings. And him an upstanding citizen, it would be my word against his.” And then, talk would spread all over, she said. How could she bear for people to know… what was done to her… and judge her for it? Danny stayed home with her all week, watching the road, on guard. The fever he had had as a child had twisted his legs and bent his back and although he was only twenty-five, he was stooped like an old man and often in pain. Daisy smiled sadly. “Danny,” she told him, “what in the world would you do if he did come?” But he didn’t come and when Danny went back to his job on the Monday, they were not happy with him. “Either work or don’t work,” the boss told him. “You’re lucky to have a job at all.” The second time Andy came down the long dirt road, she grabbed the baby and shoved herself back into a dark corner behind the dresser. But she was found and dragged out, begging and pleading, “Please, no, no, no.” He was a big, muscular man and she, barely five foot tall. Gouging his fingers in her fleshy arms, he growled, “Are you gonna put that kid down or do you want to have it in the mix with you?” So she put the baby girl in the crib and he threw Daisy on the bed, laughing, saying why should he hurt his knees on the floor when there’s a nice soft bed. He jumped on her rough, tearing her clothes, and started raping her but she tried to resist, crying and begging. He stopped moving and looked her in the eye. “Do you want it nice? Or do you want to fight? Because I can fight, too.” She turned her head aside and stopped the struggle, just sobbing and flinching, while he finished taking what he wanted. When Danny came home, they talked. Again, he said they’d go to the constable in Swan River and again, she said the constable would do nothing and it would only come back on them. He said what about her brothers, could they go talk to old Andy? She knew what kind of talk he meant and she said she didn’t want her brothers to go to jail. What good would that do? “Well then, I’ll go talk to him,” Danny said. And she cried and clung to him. “Danny, no, he’ll kill you. I just know it!” She cried and wailed. “Don’t go up there, Danny, please God. Please don’t go up there.” And they cried all night and clung onto each other and didn’t know what to do. He stayed home the next day but they were almost out of flour and sugar both, down to potatoes and turnips in the bin. They desperately needed the money Danny made and she was terrified he’d lose his job. So the next morning, she got up early and made him a nice, hot breakfast. Porridge and salt and the last of the butter. Then she called him and said, “Time to go to work.” At the table, he was quiet and sad, but she said she’d be fine. “It will be alright, Danny,” she told him. “You’ll see.” It was a week later the next time Andy came. He was on the porch already when she heard him, but she just walked into the bedroom and put the baby in the crib. He marched into the room, ready for battle, but she just took off her bottoms and lay down on the bed, staring up. So he mounted her and did his thing, not even rough or mean, and when he was done, he sat on the edge of the bed, chatting all friendly while she got up and straightened herself. And that’s how it went for months when old Andy came around. Sometimes, he asked her for tea after and she would give it to him. And he’d talk about the kind of crops he had planted, or how much he missed his deceased wife, or how he had modeled his house on the sturdy, stone houses they used to build back in England. Whatever he felt like. Once he asked if she’d play a game of cribbage with him and she paused. “Well… if there’s time before I gotta make Danny’s supper…” So they played a quick hand and he left. The following spring, they got a chance to move to a place near Kenville that was closer to her mother and closer to the mill, where Danny might get work. And when the baby was born in the summer, she named him Dan Herbert, after his father. They both were certain he looked just like Danny. “Why, lookit his eyes, the curve of his little head,” Danny grinned. “He’s a spittin’ image of me.” One day, Danny came home for supper, saying he heard that Mary and Fred Halindale had moved into the house they used to be in, down the road from old Andy. They were building a big, new house, big barn, and everything. Lots of money in that family. Later, lying in bed with the little guy between them, he asked her, “Do you think Mary Halindale will be alright?” “Probably,” she said. “Her husband is tall and big, and they got them two boys, healthy big sons.” When the baby finished nursing and drifted off, she laid him gently into the little cradle, then snuggled further into Danny’s warmth. “Anyway, better her than me,” she said. *This true story from the 1940s was told to me in 2005 by Daisy’s sister, Petunia. All names changed to protect the innocent (and the guilty).  Dad storytelling at the table, 2004 I come by storytelling honestly; I was raised in a working-class storytelling culture. Both my mother and my father were storytellers in their own right. My father was the teller of manly stories. Tales about men and work and fighting, animal attacks, tragic accidents and gruesome death. Split-second decisions with powerful consequences. Heroism and success, or strife and payback, or tragedy unending. My mother’s stories were more the private sort that women tell out of earshot of men. Stories often focused on what she called the double standard--sexism. True stories of the dark sides of certain men; assaults, unwanted pregnancy, ruined reputations. And then women’s resistance, through speaking up, telling off, fighting back, banding together. Or, in the absence of power, sometimes a more womanly sort of come-uppance, through secret channels and covert allies. When all else failed, she chose a sort of serenity, leaving with God, or Fate, the final justice. “He’ll get his. Don’t worry,” she would say. “He’ll get his in the end.” Do not imagine us sitting cross-legged at the hearth, nodding thoughtfully, while the wise elder holds forth. An oral storytelling culture doesn’t relegate stories to performance alone; rather, storying is a way of thinking and communicating. In the working-class, rural culture where I grew up, stories were ingrained in our thought, they were part of how we talked. Rather than conversing in a linear way, polite and formulaic or with logical arguments unfolding, our conversations would naturally just veer off into stories. People might be talking together on any topic at all and then, when a point was to be introduced or illustrated or deepened, the speaker would simply tell a story. This was often followed by a story on the part of the other speaker, and that story might echo the first speaker’s point, or it might detract from it, or it might introduce another factor or perspective, and the conversation would proceed from there. An illustration. In 1995, I was away at university taking coursework in Education and Gender Studies. Home for a summer visit, I was sitting with my dad in the yard on old banged-up kitchen chairs, watching my children run and play in the big field. I was telling him about some of the things I was learning; women’s 20th Century history, the suffrage movement, sexism in the professions, women disallowed in faculties of law and medicine. “This was when your mother, my grandma, was a young woman,” I observed. Then I shared an anecdote about a professor who I felt had it in for me because I had missed an assignment deadline when my children had been sick with Chicken Pox. I said I thought the sexism towards women was still real, it had just gone underground. “But,” I told him with a chuckle, “they ain’t gonna stop me now.” There was an amicable silence, followed by my dad’s quiet chortle. “Jesus!” he said, grinning. “Sometimes, I wonder what kind of woman my mother even was.” Then he told the story about my grandmother in 1905, fighting a bull who was goring her first husband. Literally, she took the bull by the horns and wrestled him off that man.  Grandma Josephine Lavell, 1960 This is the story of Josephine that leads off the first chapter of my novel, A Seven Year Ache. I have ten-year old Rosie conveying the story as told by her big brother, Kenny. But it’s my dad’s story, and told in his voice. Oral stories can be a treasure trove of material for the writer. And stories can be ambiguous in a way that linear argument cannot. There are often multiple possible interpretations of meaning and intent. That’s as it should be. I am not saying, by the way, that every story is wide open to interpretation and can mean whatever the listener wants. No, oral stories have a limited number of possible interpretations, especially since the listener knows the speaker and so this, rightly, informs the most likely meanings and intentions of the story. When you grow up in a working-class, storytelling culture, not only do you develop your own repertoire of stories, but you also can keep a hope chest of the stories of others. I cannot express how powerful it is for me that, with my parents, grandparents, and all my aunts and uncles having left this earth, I still have their stories. At times, I feel that, having their stories, in some small way, I still have them here with me. And those stories, in actual fact, sustain me in my darkest hours. “Buck up,” I tell myself. “You are the granddaughter of Josephine Lavell, for God sake.” They are not beautiful stories in the conventional sense; in fact, they are almost always hard stories, complex and unsettling and difficult to hear. Yet in this, they guide and warn and give depth and inspiration to my life here and now. When my father was a little boy in 1937, his big sister, Eileen, then seventeen years old, was impregnated by her married employer and died under questionable circumstances. The fact my aunt Eileen had died at age seventeen was general knowledge. It was only in the 1990s, during a visit with another elderly aunt, that the whole truth came out. The truth that the women knew and quietly carried over the years. The story of Eileen became the flesh and the bone for my novel’s third chapter, Mother’s Constitutional. My father had seven sisters, my errant Lavell aunties. Their worlds abounded with every kind of abuse imaginable. They lived troubled and difficult lives, often dying young. Today, in my mid-60s, I have already out-lived six of the seven.  True Story, Eileen Lavell d. 1937 “Ever remembered, ever loved” I never met my auntie Eileen, she died so long ago. But because I know her story, she is both real and important to me. And a couple of times a year, I still go and visit her grave. I place a single flower there, my black Shepherd dog lolling in the grass, and I tell my auntie that she is not forgotten.
Oral stories, handed down, illuminate the lives of people long ago, but they also illustrate themes of social class and gender, showing how, on personal and systemic levels, people’s money, prestige, and power, or the lack of these, could enhance and privilege their lives, or bend them, sully them, and pervert them utterly.  Working-class writing is writing that takes seriously the lives of working-class people. Working-class people are the common people, regular people who don’t have university degrees, who work with their hands or on their feet, and who get paid an hourly wage. Working-class fiction is usually for, about, and by working-class folks. Think the works of Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Kit de Waal. But it also has been written by more privileged people such as Dickens and Steinbeck. Sometimes, the story is about the workings of social class itself. Katherine Mansfield’s classic tale, The Doll’s House, comes to mind, as do the works of several authors from days of yore. Some fiction categorized as African American or Indigenous or gay lit. is also working-class fiction. Examples are found in the works of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and James Baldwin.
But think about a triangle with the skinniest point at the top. The working class of any nation, usually the majority, are just north of those in poverty and just south of the middle classes (business owners and professionals such as teachers, social workers, doctors, lawyers). The tiny group of truly wealthy are way, way above the rest. The more privileged, the fewer people in each group. Class is relevant to everything. Just like race, just like gender. Everyone has a class background, lives in a certain class (usually the one they came from), and class-based attitudes, realities, and experiences weave in and out of our daily lives. For writers, most importantly, the class we come from, the class we write from, the class whose side we’re on, affects the authenticity of our stories. Class can even determine who gets to read us. Actually, a writer’s class origins can often influence whether anybody gets to read our stories at all. Publishers tend to be moneyed people, increasingly blind to the rest of us. Weirdly, the more that institutions focus on identity politics, the more they seem to be erasing working-class lives, working-class voices, working-class stories.
The opposite. Their stories are about agency. Their agency, what they actually did about the things that happened to them, which often were not fair. Their stories are about what they did right and what they did wrong. Their stories are about how they struggled and fought.
Or how they cheated the ones they loved and then lied like a sidewinder. Or how they were patient and loyal and determined, they wouldn’t let go of each other—how they sank or swam together. How they could keep on going, imperfect, limping, and then sometimes, just for a moment, how they would rise up with fortitude and grace, and speak the God damn truth. If writers can’t give us that, then who can? |
AuthorFISHER LAVELL IS A WORKING-CLASS WRITER. HER FIRST NOVEL, A SEVEN YEAR ACHE, IS A TALE OF LOSS, UPHEAVAL, AND LONGING. Archives
June 2022
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