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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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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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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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