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Fisher Lavell’s Working Words Blog


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All things working-class. My thoughts on working-class writing, writing in general, and A Seven Year Ache in particular. Book and Movie Responses. Dogs That Saved Me. Country Songs That Made Me. And True Story, tales of actual working-class life to curl your hair, warm your heart, raise your brow, or make your blood boil. 

When Good People Have Bad Grammar: Politics of Working Class Voice in A Seven Year Ache

2/27/2023

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We all recognize the stereotypical “redneck” in movies and novels, the working class guy. You know, the guy who comes up to the protagonist in the bar and, for no apparent reason, starts spouting racial slurs and being an asshole to women. He’s definitely a racist and probably a rapist, and we know him right away. He’s a bad person.

He’ll be beefy and ruddy-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be fat and pasty-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be skinny and balding and weak-looking, but you get it, he’s a bad guy.

And, of course, he’ll sound dumb as hell, misusing words, saying “ain’t” and “youz,” he’ll frown and scratch his head at the protagonist’s witty putdowns, and be generally incapable of stringing a sentence together. That’s the cherry on the cake of being a bad guy—poor grammar.

In the world of movies and in many novels, bad grammar associates with being uneducated, which associates with being stupid, and that associates with being a bad person.

Of all the classist tropes today, this is possibly the one I hate the most. I find it offensive, in part because it’s so hatefully inaccurate. Most of the working class people I know—family, friends, co-workers—regularly make grammatical errors and they are not bad people. Neither are they stupid, regardless of their lack of college degrees. Stupid and uneducated are not the same thing. 
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My own father, “unskilled labourer” though he was, was one of the smartest people I ever knew. He could drive anything, load anything, build anything, fix anything, and learn anything. He was self-taught on guitar and a wonderful singer. He had a million stories.

He was also, however, often grammatically incorrect. He used to say he “already done that” or that he “brung” something home with him, he’d tell you that he “borrowed” his buddy the sawhorses and who he “seen” uptown. 

As a teenager, I loved to help with his many chores and projects, but sometimes, let’s face it, I just didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. He’d chuckle, head shaking, and tease me, “Can’t learn ya nothin!” before showing me again.
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Often, he would say this with a toothpick at the corner of his mouth or sucking at his teeth because a dentist for dad was one of the many things we just couldn’t afford.
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In writing A Seven Year Ache, I was not unaware of the function, often at an unconscious level, of bad grammar as a signal of stupidity and bad character. But I knew that Rosie’s story was powerful and I knew the truth. That good people, especially if they’re poor, often have bad grammar.

In part because I recognized these insulting and untrue stereotypes of working class people, I made a conscious decision to stick to the voices I knew and be accurate in portraying them. My aunts and uncles born in the 1910s and 20s had little or no education and they did not speak standard English. And all my main characters’ lives were based on theirs.

So I wanted to show that these characters, whom I had portrayed as interesting and complex people, worthy of respect though flawed in various ways, also made grammatical errors. Rosie begins her story with the striking statement, “My Momma ain’t no girlie-woman,” telling the tale of the time Momma rescued Poppa from a rampaging bull, even though the men thought there “weren’t nothin’ nobody could do about it.”
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Sketch by Cindy Taylor. "But she grabbed him square, right by each horn, stood firm, cursing and shaking and going purple in the face" (A Seven Year Ache, page 2)
One of Rosie’s many characteristic errors is to substitute the present tense verb when speaking about an event in the past.  For example, in describing their first encounter with the bear, she says that it was in their second year on the homestead “when me and my little sister Carleen first come upon the big animal.” This is a convention of our oral storytelling that establishes immediacy and involvement.

Although readers can find Rosie’s grammar a little confusing at first, many have shared that, captivated by her rapidly unfolding story, they usually accommodate very quickly to Rosie’s voice, truly enjoying her engaging way of putting things. Her voice, like her imperfect character, does not diminish her worth, or their experience of her story.

But I went a little further because I wanted to turn the stereotype on its head; the one that says good and decent people speak correct English and bad people have bad grammar. I gave all the good characters, even those who would have had more education, a tendency to sometimes follow the grammatical patterns of the poor.

For instance, after the death of Eileen in chapter three, when Constable John Elliott is trying to stop Kenny and the boys from killing Ed Welsh, he says “You would have justice for a day. But then what? All of yuz in big trouble! And yur mother losing more childern” (page 92). And in dismissing the men afterwards, he says, “This here is alright. This is all took care of now” (page 94).
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Likewise, when Old Albert is diagnosed with throat cancer, Doc True tells the family, “If a person had money, you could take the train to Winnipeg and get the tumour cut out. But it wouldn’t make no difference. Cancer is cancer” (page 109).
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This act by professionals of taking on some of the expressions and grammatical structures of the poor was not meant as patronizing or talking down. Rather, as with many of the teachers and business people of my youth, it was perceived in the spirit of the interaction, as their way of being courteous and agreeable.

Perhaps this is why, after the council by the fire in Welshes’ yard, Rosie says of Doc, “Apart from that faded bow tie and the battered old black medical bag he’s never without, you would think Doc was just a regular fellow. He never puts on airs” (p. 94).

So, in A Seven Year Ache, I flipped the social class stereotype of bad grammar as signalling bad character. In fact, the only people in the novel who speak impeccably are the truly bad. The pompous eugenicist Mrs. Murphy has a stunning vocabulary and speaks with precision and eloquence. Her leering, sexist husband, the Major, also speaks perfect English. As does the racist, child-molesting, union-hating cad, Ronald Thorne-Finch.

In using bad grammar as a signal for good personhood, and reversing standard narratives about social class and personal morality, I wanted to stand up for working class people, highlighting their unique voices, and their smarts and strength and worth, in spite of a lack of education.
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Thus proving, perhaps, that my father did not “learn me nothin’” after all.
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why no happy ending? staying true to working-class life in a seven year ache

1/24/2023

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*Spoiler Alert: You may want to finish the novel BEFORE reading this essay.
 
We don’t know exactly what is going to happen to Rosie at the end of A Seven Year Ache, but there are reasons aplenty to suspect that it’s not going to be good.
 
Not only has Rosie lost Culain forever, but Doc True has passed away, Mitch is terribly sick and gone to the sanitarium, and Baby and Sunshine, Mother’s oxen, have both died, leaving the family more isolated than ever. Rosie seems determined to head north where there are “six men for every girl,” a plan with which we know Mother is absolutely not on board. The symbolism of Rosie’s intention to leave (baby) Hope behind is not lost on us, and Rosie’s dreams, often disturbing, certainly do not bode well at the end.
 
Most readers of novels expect, and are granted, a happy ending. Writers are taught that protagonists, over the course of the novel, will usually resolve the central conflict and, by changing themselves or their circumstance in some way, should obtain happiness, or at least hope, in the end. So even if it’s not a happy-ever-after ending, at least the reader is left with a sense of optimism and satisfaction.
 
The main reason A Seven Year Ache doesn’t have a happy ending is because it’s based on the lives of real working class people in the early Twentieth century, unconventional women with unconventional lives, and those kinds of lives just rarely had pretty endings.
 
All of the devastating things that happened to characters in A Seven Year Ache actually happened to my relatives on whom those characters were based. My little auntie Kathleen (Carlene in the book) really did die of fever in the early days. My Auntie Eileen really did get pregnant by her married employer and die of a botched abortion in 1937. My actual grandfather died excruciatingly of an untreated throat cancer.
 
And my then-thirteen year old Auntie Beatrice really was sexually abused by two adult men for whom, when my Gramma reported it to the constable, the only repercussions were that each was fined $5.00. But Beatrice was incarcerated in the Winnipeg Home for Girls, where she was sterilized and physically and sexually abused over a period of eight years, eventually emerging as a damaged and tragic, often violent, woman.
 
Similarly, I knew my Auntie Rosie well, and although A Seven Year Ache is a snapshot of her life and decisions in the early days, Rosie’s life went on in that same formative direction. A parade of new-man solutions, invariably turning into new man-problems. And I know where that pathway led her. It was not the devastating journey taken by Beatrice, but hers was also certainly not a fun fall.
 
So, having a view of Rosie’s story in the context of her larger life, I could not in good conscience weave a happy resolution at this point.
 
For those of you who were truly saddened by the novel’s ending—and I’ve heard from several—I can offer the consolation that you will meet our Rosie again in the second novel, Three Days Till Rapture. The protagonists for that one are Grace Kirk and Valentine Labeau, but Rosie will be there too, and you’ll have a chance to catch up on where her life has gotten her at that point.
 
Poor, dear Rosie.
 
So the truth of my aunties’ lives determines the resolution of A Seven Year Ache. But I feel that the lives of working class people today also demand resistance to the expectation that we “play nice” and smile for the camera.
 
You know, life is getting harder for the poor today, not easier. And when I look around me at my relatives, neighbours and friends, it is not a pretty picture I see. Many, many lives of quiet desperation, unmet dreams, failed relationships, and abandonment by adult children and extended family. Poverty. Addictions. Poor health. Hopelessness.
 
Years ago, when I had suffered yet another upset in my personal life, a beloved therapist posed this question to me. “Oh Fisher, when are you going to get your happy ending?”
 
These years later, I find humour in the actual wording of her question. In my writings as a therapist now myself, I have referred to the multiple and seemingly unending problems suffered by the poor. And to the lack of awareness of many counsellors about the persistence, and the sheer magnitude of problems we typically bear. The unsolve-ability. That’s why we just need therapists to listen! And midwife us along our way. Instead, they get discouraged with us, primed as they are for a privileged client and their typical one-time issue—then back to living the dream.
 
So, understanding the larger context of the lives of the poor, I do quite willfully write this subtext into my stories. That poor people, and particularly poor women, are dealing with myriad challenges and abuses that are unlikely to result in pleasant returns.
 
In Rosie’s case, there is also the lesson of the ethic, taught to every poor girl of that era at her mother’s knee. Be a “good” girl, follow the rules, marry the right man, and you should be okay. But break the rules, be a “bad” girl, and you will reap the whirlwind.
 
In Three Days Till Rapture, we will see how the “good girl” ethic works out for Grace when she meets her undoing in the person of Valentine Labeau.
 
But for Rosie and the story before us, the possibilities seem pretty bleak.

​And that’s the truth.
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true story: tom church and the liberation of holland

11/10/2022

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NOTE: THIS STORY IS BASED ON TRUE ORAL ACCOUNTS OF WORKING CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell
 
I try to envision him there in a Dutch field hospital in 1944, not the grizzled old man, Tom, sitting across the table from me, whose reminiscence is spare and plain. But Tommy, a boy of twenty-one, far from home; his strong, young leg blown away and what is left of his knee, shredded and bloody. The mattress is dank-smelling and dull, crusted here and there with clots of dried liquid—he does not want to know what. Surrounding him is a decimation of strapping, youthful bodies, a din of moans and prayers, the next shipment of life-saving drugs, uncertain.
 
Later, upright, the awkward man-hewn leg strapped to his hip, and newly learned to walk again, he had bought the pair of wooden shoes, a treasured gift for his baby sister, Violet, my mother. Hand-carved by a young Dutch woman named Greta—the meticulously painted blue windmills, the lone tree billowing beneath it. Majestic, golden, unbowed.
 
Greta had lost everything; her mother to starvation fever, young husband shot dead in the countryside stealing apples to feed their three-year old daughter, Yrena, who sickened that March anyway. And Greta had recovered her dead father’s carving trade, enough at least to fashion the wooden cross, inscribed Yrena 1942-1944, above cherubic hands clasped in prayer.
 
Tommy could see the depth of sorrow in the young woman’s eyes, could feel the gratitude from her heart to his when he handed over the last seven guilders he had to his name, then cradled the precious shoes, so marvelously light and strong and strange, to his heart.
 
They were stolen from his gear as he slept, fitful and fevered, on the rough crossing back to England.
 
My uncle Tom, the old man in his plaid cotton shirt and time-worn suspenders, is unperturbed by this. But I, listening to his story, am miffed. “Stealing from a wounded soldier?” I say, eyebrows vexed. “What kind of person would do such a thing!”
 
“Musta ben another boy,” he explains, graciously. “Whoever took ‘em. Musta ben a soldier too, prob’ly hurt and homesick and desperate to bring back something good. Something good outta all the bad. So I ain’t sore about it, not now anyways. I cried like a kid at the time!”
 
From my view looking back, he was a kid at the time.
 
I try to think of him before that, landing on the shores of Normandy on June the ninth, three days behind the D-day troops. Neck-deep in cold salt water, his two strong legs thrashing, finally able to right his balance under the eighty-pound pack slung onto him. Tommy. Dirty blonde hair all crazy curls, eyes like Manitoba sky on a summer’s day—blue, calm, promising.
 
Or back before that even, at the staging area on the Salisbury Plain. “We knew something was coming,” he says. “Turned out to be D-day, though we didn’t know it yet. We didn’t know what, and we didn’t know when. Just knew it was something big, and it was coming.”
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THE SALISBURY PLAIN
He says that when he first ran away from home at seventeen so he could lie about his age and get into the army, he was just in it for the three square meals a day. They had come from such poverty and hard times that the idea of becoming a soldier, getting fed well, wearing the uniform, and having a new pair of boots, sounded like a splendid deal. He’d sign up, he thought, the war would be over by Christmas like everyone was saying, and then he’d just come home again, new boots and all. Girls in town who wouldn’t give a Church boy the time of day were google-eyed over every man in uniform.
 
But by the time he had gone through basic training with the Princess Pats, more training in Ontario, and then shipped out to England from Truro, Nova Scotia, it had finally sunk into him that he was going into battle. And it had dawned on him, and everybody else, that people were going to die.
 
So when his friend Chris from back home in the Swan Valley, came to see him and said he should transfer over to his outfit so they could be together, Tommy turned him down.
 
Because he thought, if he was going to have to see people die, or if they were going to see him die, he didn’t want them to be people he knew and cared about. He didn’t want to have to see his friends die. Didn’t want to have to see people he knew get shot or blown up, and he didn’t want them to see him that way either. He thought, if that was what was coming, and he knew by then that it was, then he’d just rather be with strangers. That wouldn’t be as awful, to have to see a stranger die.
 
So he told Chris no, he would just stay put.
 
There were 50,000 men by then, amassing on the Salisbury Plain, ready, it was May, 1944, and minds and courage were frayed. And then, Chris came to see him again, scared shitless, and with this plan about a blighty. A blighty was a self-inflicted wound, not something serious, just something you could do to yourself so you’d be no good to go into battle. Shoot yourself in the foot, literally. Something like that. That way, you’d get out of it, you’d get to go home and no one would be the wiser.
 
But Tommy told him no. He said, “Look Chris, I’m scared, everyone’s scared, but I mean, this is what we came here for.” By then they had started to hear about the horrors the Germans were doing to the French people and the Dutch and others. And he said, “Chris, this is what has to be done.”
 
Tommy felt bad for Chris, he didn’t blame him for being terrified, everybody was, and he was scared as hell by then himself. But he just didn’t believe it would be right. Chris really pressed him too, and they had a big argument. “You think yur better than me!” Chris screeched, and he went away mad.
 
A few days later, Tom got news that Chris had been hurt while cleaning his gun and was being sent down to London before being shipped back home, He got an Honourable Discharge and he never went across.
 
Tommy didn’t judge him, but he just wouldn’t do what Chris had done. And the rest is history, as they say.
 
Within days, there was an immense movement, all the D-day troops went over, and then, on the third day after D-day, Tommy’s squadron was called up and over the Channel they went, landing at Juno Beach on the French shore. There were thousands upon thousands of Allied troops, they had won the day and driven the Germans back, and thousands were heading east towards Berlin. Tommy’s outfit would go north on foot, up the coast of Normandy, to the liberation of Holland.
 
I try to think of him, just a boy, marching up dusty roads, crossing fields and small streams, walking, striding, two solid legs carrying him onwards, curly blonde hair tousled by breezes, eyes blue and clear, heart strong.
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DUTCH CATTLE GRAZING (NETHERLANDS)
The Dutch people were a beautiful people before the war, he says. They kept dairy cattle and were famous for their milk and cheese and beautiful, healthy children. But those people, when the Canadians came, were in a terrible state. For three years, they had been occupied, the Germans had taken over their businesses and farms and food, and upon their retreat, whatever crops they hadn't eaten, they burned.
 
The Dutch people had been starving, literally starving, for years.  “And if you’ve seen that old black-and-white footage of what the Jewish people looked like when they were found, the few who lived through the concentration camps, just human skeletons with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, well, that’s what the Dutch people looked like when we found them.”
 
Arriving in the Dutch towns and villages, marching or driving, people were just crazy about them, cheering and making parades, patting their backs or arms as they went by. “They just loved us Canadian boys,” my uncle says. “And they were so grateful, it was kind of overwhelming. Here we were, just a bunch of poor prairie boys, not treated particularly well in our own country, welcomed and loved and treated like kings by these poor Dutch people. It was an amazing thing.”
 
But then, of course, the Canadian soldiers had to be billeted there too. They had marched hundreds of miles with only army rations, often running out before reinforcements could get to them, canned Spam and that sort of thing. So then, as they marched through Holland, at each town, a few of them would be billeted at homes and farm houses here and there. And those people, who had been starving, would feed them. The army made arrangements to pay them and kicked in some food too, and then the Dutch families would feed the Canadian soldiers.
 
He says he remembers sitting on benches at those long wooden tables in the farm kitchen, him and a few other fellows, eating. The man and wife would sit with them, and they’d have plates but not much food on them, just being polite, pretending to eat. And they’d load up the Canadian soldiers’ plates with steaming food, because that was their food that the army had paid for. And the children, little children of all ages, would be leaning up against a wall or peeking around a doorway, watching. “Watching us eat, with their hungry eyes,” my old uncle says.
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“Well, I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Little children. Starving. And we were sitting at the table, eating.” So while he was eating, he would take things, potatoes, chunks of meat and cheese, an apple, and he would slip them in his pockets, so he could sneak them out and give them to the children later.
 
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “we needed that food. We were pretty close to starving ourselves. Not like the Dutch were, but we had been on the move for months, marching, running, hiding, digging in, and we had had to fight, shooting and being shot at, bombs flying, and it wasn’t over yet. And all that time, we were carrying heavy gear, eighty pounds or more. It was hard physical work and we had all had to tighten our belts, literally, more than one notch. But how can a man sit and eat, with children going hungry?”
 
So he would go out to the yard after supper, lean up against a shed, and light a smoke. And the little kids would come out, shy, with their big eyes. And he’d wave them over, and give them his supper, as much of it as he could spare. And he was not the only Canadian boy who did that either, he’d see other guys from his outfit, over by the barn or leaned up against a tree, giving away their supper to the little Dutch kids.
 
Tommy was wounded three different times in the liberation of Holland. The first time was on the hike up the Normandy coast, a mine had exploded nearby and he took some shrapnel in the leg. One big rusty shard in the right calf and a bunch of nicks, cuts, and burns on the outside of the leg and thigh. Him and his sergeant dug out as much shrapnel as they could, and then they had a couple fellows hold him down while they pulled out that big shard.
 
“Jesus! I screamed and wailed and begged them to stop,” he admits. “I thought it was the worst pain possible at the time. . . Little did I know.” 
 
They put on sulpha powder so it wouldn’t go to gangrene and bandaged it up pretty good, and his Sarg told him he could wait on the side of the road for a field ambulance if he wanted. But they were half ways up the coast and Tommy didn’t want to leave the guys in the lurch. He said he’d be fine, he would just be gimpy for a day or two. He walked another thirty miles before the pain abated.
 
“It was just the first couple days it almost killed me,” he says. “But I had a chunk of wood I kept tucked back between my teeth, and I could chew down on that when it got real bad, and keep on going till the next time we took a break.”
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WAR MEMORIAL MONUMENT, CHARLOTTETOWN, PEI
​The second time he got hit was after they’d already reached the Netherlands.
 
“We were up north of Rotterdam, we’d been picked up by the rest of the Second Canadian Corps, a good bunch of fellows, we’d been joking and talking. Maybe I was too comfortable, distracted and had let my guard down, but anyways, it was early evening, we were posted around the central area and I figured I’d roll a smoke. I guess it was a grenade, but all I knew was there was a whiz and a thunk, “Jesus! Jesus!” some guy was yelling, and the next time I opened my eyes, I was laying in a hospital tent somewheres, cold as hell, head all bandaged up, with a headache that would kill a moose.”
 
He was there for about two weeks and the pain was starting to let off a bit. He wasn’t seeing double anymore and he’d gotten over that thing where he wanted to throw up every time he tried to walk. They said he got a pretty nasty hit, there was still shrapnel in his skull the doc said was too deep embedded, it would be more dangerous to try to get it out. So they just left it in there. He told them he’d be fine, he just wanted to get back to his outfit.
 
Well, the commander came in and he said, “Son, you done your duty. You don’t need to go back no more. As far as the Canadian army is concerned, you’ve earned your Honourable Discharge. You can go home. Just wait here till the next supply run is heading south and jump on. You could be there with your family in a month.”
 
Well, he told the C.O. he didn’t want to do that because all them guys in his outfit were still out there. Still getting shot at and dodging bombs, still sleeping in the cold. How could he go home and leave them here? He told the man no, he better get back to them damn fools in his outfit, or they might get themselves killed without him.
 
“Well alright,” the C.O. said. “If you’re that determined, we won’t stop you.”
 
So he hitched a ride with the next supply shipment going north instead. It took him days but he finally caught up with the Second Canadian Corps just north of the Hague, and him and the guys traveled with them a few more weeks.
 
“That last time,” he says, “we were on reconnaissance, and clearing in the area north of the Maas River. They’d been rounding up any Germans still around and we were checking for stragglers. It was October, I remember, just a miserable cold, wet drizzle in the air, and we were out in the woods on this hillside, and there was a deserted cottage and some out buildings. So a bunch of our guys went to check the out buildings and me and this other young fella, his name was Les Dawson and he wasn’t much older than me, a good guy all round, well, me and Les went to check inside the cottage.” 
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GERMAN HOWITZER, 88
​“And pretty much as soon as we got in there, we could hear that German Howitzer begin to fire. That’s their big 88’s, the big guns. When you hear that thing, you know you only have seconds before it hits. But we didn’t really know exactly where it was going to land, outside where the other guys were, or on the cottage, or what. But, so me and Les heard the report and we both threw ourselves down on the floor. And as I dove down, the place had been all trashed and there was this long wooden table laying on its side and I threw myself that way and kind of got behind it. Only thing was, my leg sticking out.” 
 
“And it was a direct hit, I guess, on the cottage. Total direct hit. I don’t remember anything very well after that, but there was the damage of the explosion, the roof smashed right in, half the floor gone, and then  shrapnel everywhere. I was knocked senseless, but apart from that, I wasn’t bad. Because I’d been mostly behind that big table by the wall. Except my leg that was sticking out, which was bad.”
 
“But Les, my buddy there, well, he wasn’t behind nothing, there was jist him and the 88. He must have been dead right there on the spot, the moment that thing hit.”
 
“I looked down and I seen my leg, or where my leg used to be, I guess. And it meant nothing to me,” he says. “I actually didn’t feel a damn thing at that time, that’s how shock works. And then I was out again. I woke up in a French field hospital, that’s where they did the operation, and that is where the pain began. Jesus, I thought I would die just from the pain alone. . . But I still to this day can feel that damn leg at times, phantom leg as they call it. Sometimes the little toe still itches me mercilessly.”
 
“Oh,” I say. “So that is a real thing.”
 
“Yes,” Old Tommy says. “So that was it. That was it for me and the war, the liberation of Holland, and everything. I didn’t make it home for many months after that, because of all the surgeries I still needed. But I did eventually make it.”
 
I don’t really know what a person should say at this point. But I want to say something. “You lost a lot, my dear uncle,” I observe. “What a journey, what – what a gift you gave. What a sacrifice.”
 
“Yes,” the old man says quietly, looking away towards the small window. “Too much really. More than a man should be asked to give.”
 
I reflect upon the story my uncle has told, sitting amicably in his small dining room, the light of one small window going softly to gray. He refused to go into battle with boys he knew, because he didn’t want to see them die, choosing instead to go with strangers. Then wound up caring so much for those strangers, now friends, that he clawed his way back to them, not once, but twice, when he was wounded and could have gone home.
 
He lost his leg and more than that, for the love of strangers who had become brothers. A movie trope based on truth.
 
Beyond the window is a blood-red hummingbird feeder and a small yard; tame roses, big garden, and a wooden flag post, painted white, flying the Maple Leaf.
 
“But after all that happened over there, all that was lost, the leg, everything, I’m still glad we went.”
 
Our hands rest casually on the plastic cover of his dining room table, and he reaches out and slaps the back of my hand affectionately, blue eyes twinkling clear as ever. I grin quietly back, turning my hand so I can fondly take hold of his old paw.
 
“I wish I hadn’t lost my damn leg!” he concedes. “I’d give a lot for that. I’d give almost everything, I guess. But those were beautiful people, the Dutch people, and it was a crime beyond imagining what was done to them. It was not right. And what we done there, the Canadian boys, liberating those people and driving the Germans out, well that was a thing worth doing.”  
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CANADIAN AND DUTCH FLAGS AT TYNE COT WAR CEMETERY, BELGIUM
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i also saw the light: katherine mansfield's the doll's house

10/31/2022

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This is not a victim story. When my sister and I were in middle school, we were pushed, called names, laughed at, and regularly excluded by the other children. We were not invited for sleepovers. When the boys would shove each other into us and screech like maniacs, chasing each other around with “Lavell fleas,” the girls would sit primly on the school steps, giggling into their hands.

I offer this truth only by way of indicating how astonished I was, how utterly gob-smacked, with the parallels between our lives and those of the “poor little Kelveys” in Katherine Mansfield’s classic short story, The Doll’s House.

Written in 1922, the story shows how wealthier parents poison their children against the poor, and for poorer children, the social barriers against overcoming the position into which they, and their parents, were born.

In The Doll’s House, three little wealthy girls, the Burnells, receive an astonishing gift, an amazing doll’s house, fully furnished and realistic, and they use it as social capital, bringing the other proper little girls in pairs back to their yard to see the marvelous thing. All except two little unfortunates, the Kelveys. Daughters of an Irish washerwoman and an absent drunken father, Lil and Else Kelvey are disdained by the others, and so, of course, meant to be denied the doll’s house delight. But in the end, Kezia, the youngest Burnell, invites the Kelveys into the yard and, for a brief moment before being shooed away, they get to see it.

I encountered this story at three different times in my life; the first time, in high school. I had read stories before in which there were poorer characters, even stories that inspired sympathy for the poor. But I had never really seen a story that showed so completely an understanding of those characters. A story that was about those characters, and in which the reader was on their side.

It was the first story I ever read that clearly acknowledged social class hierarchy and prejudice. Though I was too young at the time to define what social class disadvantage even was, I knew and experienced its effects often.

The similarities between us and the Kelveys were undeniable. My sister, one year older than me and two inches taller, and I were often seen wearing other people’s hand-me-downs, faded dresses too long or too short. When out in the world, we were silent little, big-eyed urchins. My mother was not a washerwoman but she was uneducated and a Christian to boot, so yes, definitely seen as lacking the proper culture. My father, like the Kelvey father, was a rife subject for titillating gossip.

Leaned up against the brick wall of the old school at recess, reading, as was my typical way of making it through recess, I read this story over again. Too young and inexperienced to have a literary vocabulary, still, I could see that the author was taking the Kelveys’ point-of-view.

It made me personally happy that the little girls did get the chance to see that amazing dollhouse. At their age, I would have so liked to have a dollhouse like that. Or a pretty painted room of my own, like some of the girls at my school had, or a canopied bed, or a musical jewelry box. Or new clothes that looked nice.

I didn’t spend my days and nights craving them. But if I were to dream, while flipping through the Eaton’s catalogue, say, I would have liked to have them.

But more than that, my high school self felt somehow understood by that story. Validated. I felt the author knew me, and accepted me, kind of liked me. Just because of the story she had written.

Instead of a sympathetic tongue clicking at the plight of “those less fortunate than ourselves,” as the poor were then characterized, this story had a sharp finger pointing at the cruel “better” kids and their parents.

I read it as an affirmation. Someone . . . some woman . . . long ago, understood my life. She knew about the cruelty of children who had things. And where they learned that cruelty. She knew the degradations of poverty on the poor. Knew it wasn’t our fault. And she knew that what was done to us, though it hurt us, was not the sum total of who we were.

She ended the story back with the Kelvey girls, out of view of prying eyes and unkind judgements. And she had little Else, with one of her rare smiles, telling her sister, “I seen the little lamp.” 
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The writer seemed to see my spirit too, my hopefulness, my determination to get away, to move up, to be something better. And the possibility, maybe even the inevitability that, someday, I would prevail. That someday, I would transcend the shabby expectations I had been allotted.

She knew that the story of a girl like me did not have to be a victim story, but instead could be one of hope.

A writer did that.

And because of this story, and others, I decided that someday, I would be a writer too. Because I had those kinds of stories to tell. About poor people and who they really were; interesting, complex people whose stories were worth knowing.

In my university Literature course, I came to a better understanding of the symbolism of the lamp as transcendence. By grad school, I was the one pointing out the workings of social class and the place of figures of authority in maintaining social hierarchy. 

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Rustic dollhouse made by Uncle Art Taylor, artwork by Terisa Taylor, photo credit Cindy Taylor.

Around that time, I was also working on genealogy, building my family tree, and found an even stranger parallel between this story and my life. I discovered that my grandmother Josephine’s Irish granny’s maiden name… was Kelvey. True story. And that is why, in writing A Seven Year Ache, I bequeathed to my Rosie the married name, Kelvey.

There is a fond place in my heart for this story, and for Katherine Mansfield, the long-ago woman who wrote it. Just as with a first love or a first kiss or a first friend, The Doll’s House is memorable and bittersweet and stands, unblemished, in time. This story was the first glimmer in a life’s journey to read, and to write for, my own people.

And through this story, I also "seen" the light. 

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true story: a private audience with the queen

9/11/2022

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NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE STORY OF WORKING CLASS LIFE
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Only rare people get a private audience with Her Majesty the Queen. But the great lady granted one to my best friend Caroline in 1970 . . . though not by design.

That was the year of Manitoba’s centennial and for several days in July, the Queen and her family travelled across Manitoba by train, stopping over briefly at many a town and village. And our little town, Swan River, was lucky enough to be one of them.

This caused a great stir uptown, as all the town leaders got busy trying to put together a plan that would wow the Royal Family, something worthy we could present to them, a unique something our little town had to offer. It made sense that they came up with a little specialty rodeo, as the big summer event that always came later in July was the Northwest Roundup and Exhibition.

​Our whole town is a little horse-crazy, rich and poor alike.

All the important people of the town were vying for optimal seating at the event, and vying to get their daughters introduced to the very eligible Prince of Wales.

Down at our end of the tracks, we laboured under no such illusions. The one-hour rodeo was too rich for our blood. We were pretty poor and so lacking in prestige or influence that, even in the seventies (as to this very day), our roads were not paved and the town did not supply either waterworks or sewer services. The closest any of us would get to royalty was when the Queen and Prince Phillip and their two eldest children were to do a walking tour down Main Street to the Fair Grounds. The streets en route would be lined with adoring fans.

My dad did tease me though. “Don’t ya wanna get up there with the bigwigs and meet the Queen? Try to make googly eyes at young Prince Charles there? I hear he’s lookin’ for a wife.”

“As if!” I giggled, wrinkling my nose.

I would actually have dearly loved to go, but I had already agreed to babysit four kids for my regular lady so she could go and see them walk by. I sighed and accepted that I would miss the whole thing. 

And I did miss out on seeing the Queen that day. But my friend, Caroline, didn't. She got a private audience instead. 

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Queen Elizabeth visits with crowd in Swan River, Manitoba, with James Richardson, MP, in the background, July 12, 1970

Caroline was a different kind of girl, she didn’t even care about seeing the Queen. She was a tough girl who lived in jeans and would always rather be out somewhere on God’s green earth, not crowded in with a bunch of preening girls, trying to get seen.

So when she told me the next day that, actually, she had met the Queen and they had a nice visit, I just thought, “Well, that figures!”

She said that in the evening after the town’s big deal, she was with her then-boyfriend, Roe, riding horses on the path between Railroad Avenue and the tracks. They had Flicka, the big black work horse, and that beautiful palomino mare, Dolly.

And suddenly, running down the tracks towards them, flashing badges, was about twenty guys in suits.

We didn’t, and don’t, get a whole lot of guys in suits down our end of town.

So then, they didn’t know what was going on, Caroline and Roe, and they got down from the horses as  told, nervous, surrounded by this sea of suits, and wondering what the heck was going on. Were they in some kind of trouble?

And then, the sea of suits parted and some lady and this young guy come walking up to them. And it was the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales, no kidding, wearing boots and pants and she's wearing a kerchief on her head and he’s got on, like, a little birding cap or something.

And they just come right up to Caroline and Roe, and start chatting with them. Asking like, how old the horses are, what their breeding is, what is their feed, normal stuff. And the queen actually comes in by Dolly, and says, “May I?” and Caroline says, “Sure.”

And the Queen takes hold of her bridle and strokes Dolly’s cheek, she’s just a natural with the mare, and she smiles up and coos to the horse, a look of pure, soft delight on her face. “Now aren’t you a beautiful girl?” she says.

And they continue to chat a little, quietly, just casual, like when you meet any other human being along the path on a Manitoba evening. And then the Royals leave and go walking back up the track to their train.

And this is a true story. This really happened in July, 1970. My friend Caroline met up with the Queen of England on a path by a gravel road. Completely unrehearsed.

And she just seemed like a really nice lady, except for being the Queen.

And she knew a beautiful horse when she saw one. 
​
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what year were colours invented? vibrant lives of long-ago women

8/29/2022

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A friend of my son’s sat at the table, looking through old photos with us. “What year were colours invented?” he asked, absently.

I cocked my head. “You mean colour photography?”

“No,” he said. “I mean colours. Like, back in the day, they had no colours. Like this,” he said, indicating a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, circa 1920, chopping wood in the yard of the old homestead. “Like, there was no colour, see? The trees were gray, the sky was gray, her clothes were gray. What year did they start having colour in the world?”

After shushing my son’s laughter, I explained that, actually, there was colour in those days. Everything was in colour. The poplar trees in the yard might have been an emerald green, the sky was blue as a Manitoba morning. In 1920, my grandmother’s hair was likely still the colour of straw and her dress would be a little faded, no doubt, but it was probably made of gingham, so it would be a lively pattern of white with either a bluebell blue or maybe a soft, sturdy pink.
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“The world was full of colour back then,” I told him. “And people’s lives were as beautiful and colourful, or as ugly or plain or hard, as ours are today. Just that we can’t see it in the pictures. They didn’t yet have the technology, colour photography, to really let us see their world in full colour as it was.”​
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WE JUST CAN'T SEE IT IN THE PICTURES

In some ways, reading historical fiction is like this. I know that women long ago must have been fully human, complex and multi-dimensional, perhaps a little flawed, but large as life. And yet, too often, the characters I read are just … lack-lustre. One-dimensional. Syrupy good. Or, on the other hand, they are powerhouse women, full of confidence, and brandishing suspiciously modern sensibilities, attitudes, and worldviews. Sometimes, they possess scientific or medical know-how not in keeping with their place in history. (Being a medical doctor who has travelled back in time helps here: winking at you, Diana Gabaldon.)

This is the job of the writer of historical fiction; to bring to life, in ways both believable and meaningful, characters from forgotten times. The best kinds of historical fiction show women’s lives in full, vibrant colour.

This vibrancy begins with accurate details of life in their place and time, which requires the writer to research, research, research, and study actual history. Most writers of historical fiction tend to focus on a particular time period; for instance, Scotland during the Jacobite rebellions, or Southern Ontario in the Nineteenth Century, or Western Canada during the Great Depression. To study that history, we read copiously, but with focus, about our period. We read coursework, we do library research, we read biographies, go to museums, examine historical artifacts and tools and processes. We hear oral histories. ​  
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RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH

For my novel, A Seven Year Ache, based broadly on the lives of my kin and set thirty years before my birth, besides coursework and reading in history, sociology, and women’s studies, I had inherited many oral stories about my mythic grandmother and aunties, and was also able to conduct life story interviews with elderly relatives. And I did many hours of genealogical research, corroborating the stories with censuses, marriage, birth and death records, county maps, homestead records, and newspaper clippings.

Along with the research, writers also spend copious hours thinking and planning, especially when pre-writing and while drafting. We think about our characters and we think about what our characters’ lives would actually be like. Some writers begin with extensive written notes and storyboards. I did a great deal of thinking while walking my dogs down long, gravel roads and while highway driving back and forth to my home town. I walked the fields and roads of Pretty Valley, where my characters had lived; I kept company at every season with the once-noble Roaring River. Sometimes, if I had been worrying at how to handle a certain character arc or how to reveal the next plot point or how to work the next bit of dialogue, I would actually awaken in the morning, having dreamed the solution.

For most of the history of the world, the vast majority of women were what we today would call working-class; people without professions who worked with their hands and on their feet. Often, they had little or no education. Granted, there is an inordinate amount of interest in the stories of that tiny group of women with the servants and castles and elegant, ritzy social affairs in need of attendance, but that was not the experience of most women. For most women, on a daily basis, there was work to be done, actual physical work, without which, in many cases, they and their families could not have survived.

So, women in good historical fiction don’t have a lot of time for primping. Or daydreaming about Prince Charming. They are busy, busy, busy.  Probably, as in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, bringing herbs and expertise to an 18th century Scottish clanswoman in labour. Or, as in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, at the tender age of sixteen, having to earn one’s keep as a housemaid. In fact, even while incarcerated in the penitentiary, Grace was hired out as a domestic servant to the Governor. ​
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19th CENTURY JAIL CELL

In A Seven Year Ache, set in Manitoba during the Great Depression, the prairie women are, by necessity, hard workers and their work often carries the novel onwards. My Rosie cooks for her family and her mother’s, nine children in all. This requires chopping and bringing wood for the stove, preparing vegetables she has herself grown, and using meat from animals she has herself raised and slaughtered. She has to milk the cow before churning butter, and carry and heat water from the well before scrubbing clothes on a scrub-board and hanging them on an outdoor clothesline, winter and summer. Rosie also supervises and directs all those children and feeds and changes the babies, all while finding time to ruminate on her unsatisfying marriage and an ever-present ache for passion and fun.

Women of that place and time were kind of busy. Hence, the old saying, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” ​

Characters in good historical fiction must have engaging, well-drawn personalities and interesting yet believable responses to their context. But again, it’s a thin line writers walk; to build deeply engaging and relatable characters that inspire the reader's empathy—but minus the implausible 21st Century worldview and mindset. 

Vibrant women characters engage in realistic but appealing ways with the world in which they live. They influence, and are influenced by, the contingencies of that world. Atwood’s Grace, though from a poor background, works her situation to attain any benefit she can. Outwardly cooperative and grateful in her relations at the penitentiary, still, she is careful in what she reveals to Simon Jordan, often manipulating the interactions so as to retain her own control of the truth.

Roaming through the Highlands on horseback with Jamie Cameron, fighting the King’s dragoons, was dangerous, tedious, and cold for Claire Randall in Outlander, the food was nothing to write home about, and oh, that rocky ground she and Jamie had to lie on! Sometimes, they just tossed and turned for hours! ​
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OLD MAN OF STORR, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

My Rosie was a feisty girl, taking after her tough, unconventional mother. But she got worn down by the unending, backbreaking work, the poverty and hopelessness, the dirt and the failure and the kids coming one after another. Weak to temptation and devastated by deaths in the family and other terrible losses, her eye was drawn to someone she was not supposed to be looking at, an error of unknown consequence.

This is our final gift of vibrancy to the lives of historical women; we bequeath to them deep and riveting emotional lives. They have dreams and desires, sometimes unrequited; they have sorrows and longings and, in some cases, a mean and unrelenting ache. Claire’s longing was for her true husband. Grace’s longing was for privacy and justice and freedom. Rosie’s was for passion and excitement and … something, just something better than the hand that was dealt her.

It all begins with a writer’s certainty that women in the past were real people. Knowing this, we paint them large and true. ​
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A CERTAINTY THAT WOMEN WERE REAL PEOPLE
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bill church part 2: bill and ollie up a tree

6/26/2022

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NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell
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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 game wardens 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!”
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Ollie’s holding his ear there, crying, and then they see the game wardens 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. Game wardens 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.”
​
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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 just five years of age. 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.

​End of Part 2 of 3

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dogs were sent me: the coming of xena

5/31/2022

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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.
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​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.
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My sons named her Xena, the Stranger, 1996
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.
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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.
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Their lives and hardships were 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.
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Set down by a 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.

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Fisher Lavell with Lady's puppies, 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.

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Xena forever
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BILL CHURCH part 1: bill church'S TWO-LEGGED DOG/ KIDS IN the fire

4/24/2022

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NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell
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​Bill Church’s Two-legged Dog/ Kids in the Fire

Bill Church’s Dog, as told by brother-in law Don Lavell

Bill 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.
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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 Church

Must 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.
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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
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TRUE STORY: ASSAULT AND MAYHEM IN A LITTLE HOUSE

2/17/2022

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​NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell
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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).

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ORAL STORYTELLING CULTURE: A TREASURE TROVE OF STORY MATERIAL

2/6/2022

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​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. 

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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.

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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. 
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WORKING CLASS WRITING: ABOUT, FOR, AND SOMETIMES BY, COMMON PEOPLE

1/19/2022

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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.
The key is that the stories centre the lives of working-class characters, whatever their colour or identity, and show understanding of those lives.

The irony is that, unless you’ve studied social class at university,

you’re probably not even sure how to define it. Most of us aren’t.

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Working-class people least of all.
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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.
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My hope is that, in spite of all, this website and blog will help get me out there to you.

I think you know I come from the poorest of the poor. And every story I tell is about poor people, my people, often my family, and their actual lives.

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Yet, this isn’t about being a victim. Being poor is not synonymous with victimhood. And my characters aren’t portrayed as victims either. They are victimized often, that’s true, but it’s not what their stories are about.
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?
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    FISHER LAVELL IS A WORKING-CLASS WRITER. HER FIRST NOVEL, A SEVEN YEAR ACHE, IS A TALE OF LOSS, UPHEAVAL, AND LONGING.

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