Maria Meindl

Three excellent things …

August 17, 2012

My friend Todd Yeates is on the road.  Here’s his travelogue …

Terri Favro is very close to launching two books, one with Quattro and one with Grey Borders. Her blog post on the subject is here.

… and here’s a review by Noreen Shanahan of Outside the Box.

The Final Frontier

August 2, 2012

I’m at the top of the tower at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan, at a retreat sponsored by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. As the sun gradually sets, I look down over a landscape I’ve become familiar with — but have never ceased to wonder at — over the last two weeks. The prairie is not really flat (at least, not here) but there are no dramatic rises or dips in the landscape; it’s just rolling hills, partitioned into fields, and the occasional row of trees. The wheat is still green, the canola, a brillant shade of yellow. With canolas fields in the distance, the horizon itself seems to emanate light.

And then there’s the sky. The license plates here read, “Land of the Living Skies.” The sky here dwarfs the land, providing an ever-shifting cloudscape to watch and think … or not think at all.

The roads here fall into a comforting grid pattern. You can parcel off a perfect square covering whatever distance you want to walk. This means you can see light and shadow and cloud from all different angles, and never have to double back. I would feel embarassed, admitting to this enchantment with regularity, except that that all the other writers sharing the retreat seem to delight in beginning and ending their days with these symmetrical walks.

People have told me that you can’t imagine the effect of the prairies until you’ve actually spent time in them. I know, now, that it’s true. The way the space arranges itself here has a certain effect on mind and body that a photograph or film just can’t reproduce. It’s a minimalist landscape, not overstimulating but endlessly variable. The imagination can range far and wide in this landscape. It also allows for slowness, melancholia, and demands a kind of brutal honesty. Here, I find myself writing in spare prose, not flinching from painful topics.

Even in mid-summer there is no hiding from the harshness of this place. A couple of times during my stay there have been merciless lightning strikes, pounding rain. We watch from the haven of the Abbey, but it’s only too easy to imagine what it would feel like to stand out in a field, exposed to all that weather and far from any shelter. If you had shelter to go home to at all.

Watching the storms advance brings to mind stories from my mother’s friend Shirley. She grew up in rural Saskatchewan in the 1930s. She told us how you’d see the locusts on the horizon and soon you’d hear them, and there’d be nothing you could do but watch as they stripped your fields, then moved on to devastate another farm. When a dust storm was approaching, you learned to estimate how much time you’d need to close all your windows and run inside before the brown cloud would arrive, coating everything: “You’d taste it, you’d smell it, you’d comb it out of your hair.” There would be barely enough time to recover before the next one hit. And there’s be nothing you could do.

My grandmother was born in Saskatchewan, and last week, I did three readings from Outside the Box: one in Prince Albert, her birthplace, one in Melfort, close to where the family had a homestead, and the last in the marvellous McNally Robinson bookstore, in the book-loving city of Saskatoon.

Rolf was the driver, and a couple of times formed an embarassingly large percentage of the audience; still, it was thrilling to bring some of my research to life. The venue in Melfort was the Historical Museum and Archives, a kind of pioneer village where we saw the type of house Mona’s family might have constructed on its land. Proportions were tiny, amenities, basic. We imagined the extremes of temperature they must have felt in that house, how packed together the family must have been. How Mona’s mother, a city girl who had never farmed in her life, would have missed her comforts. We saw the farm implements they might have used, and the medical implements too. Mona was born in Prince Albert, a relatively large town, and I can see why they stayed there until she was several months old. We all know how dangerous childbirth used to be, but it came home to me now in a very personal way. In local graveyards, there are rows of stones from the early 1900s saying nothing but “baby” and the family name.

I also thought how hard it must have been to say goodbye to their loved-ones back in their native Elgin County, Ontario. Without photographic images to prepare them, without the sense that home was a three-hour flight or a Skype click away, coming here was an immense commitment. This was a place that tested you. The McTavishes were probably the second ones to take a crack at their homestead. The beginnings of a house might have been built here; maybe a fence or two. It gave the family a head start, yet they lived with the evidence that others had been defeated by the challenge of this land.

The post office and shops, the school and church would have been a welcome relief from the isolation of the farm.What it must have felt like to get a letter, in those days! Mona was too young to have been much of a book-lover, but she grew up in a place where communication was vital, and hard-won. A life-or-death drive to communicate marked her whole life. There was a mock land office set up, too. Mona and her family arrived during an enormous settler boom. Everyone around would have been new and transient, some moving toward something, some away.

Mona wasn’t much of a one for stuff; it was words that mattered to her. I read several of her poems, including “This Was My Brother.” I was choked with emotion, knowing that Mona’s words had come back to her birthplace.

The family returned to Ontario when my grandmother was six, and she had next to no memories of Saskatchewan. Yet I think it had a deep effect on her. In those days, there wrere no tidy fields of wheat and canola, no rows of trees to form a windbreak; instead they would have seen scrub and mud and wild grass. As a small child she got to explore her environment, to play with animals, watch things grow, get dirty.

And then, everything changed. She had not only the usual experience of school children being suddenly expected to conform to schedule, to sit straight and silent all day. There was the added constriction moving to the city. There were layers of clothing to be kept clean, brick buildings interrupting her view. And manners. She always painted herself as more plain-spoken than the stuffy people surrounding her. She prided herself on her simple, accessible poetry. A theme of her work – and the stories she told — was the desire to run away and find some frontier, a place where she’d be free. She never really found it again.

All this makes me think of home, how the first place you know marks you for life. On our second day in Melfort, we came downstairs to find the ubiquitous CNN playing in the breakfast room. There was news of a shooting, children hit by “stray bullets.” I knew where the story originated without looking at the screen. Toronto. My city.

I had the kind of pang I used to feel if my mother had a health crisis while I was away, an unreasoning urge to get to her. I ranged around, restless and preoccupied until I set foot in her hospital room. Toronto has been unwell, this summer, with relentless heatwaves, and violence in places where innocent people gather to go about their business. And I’ve been in a different place, a place with its own, very different struggles. As a visitor, I’m insulated from them.

Unlike my grandmother, I’ve lived in the city of my birth most of my life. There have been forays into other places, but for the most part, Toronto has been my horizon. I love it, but I have not always felt this way. For years, I believed that real life was elsewhere. The city where I was born seemed to lack mystery, lack the silence and darkness it takes to incubate ideas. A hive of business and prosperity, Toronto is all about doing. For me, writing means reaching a wall where there’s nothing to be done any more. The only thing on the other side is words.

I made a conscious decision to change that attitude, back in the 1990s. I abandoned my pipe dreams of escape and just let myself feel lucky to live there. In Toronto, people buy books when we have no money, organize events when we have no time. We have a community that shows up for plays and concerts and readings through epidemics and all kinds of weather. You can eat any kind of food, take any kind of lesson, listen to any kind of music. You have as much freedom here as you’d have anywhere in the world to configure your family or love life in a way that suits you. And the city keeps growing and changing. I’m fiercely proud of it.

Yet life can be hard, in Toronto. Housing is expensive, and among artists, there is overwhelming competition for every dollar. There’s the corresponding strain on our time, and our health and relationships as a consequence.This year, exhausted from juggling jobs and family lives and creative aspirations, Torontonians engaged in a fervent letter writing campaign to save our libraries and other amenities that are “not nailed down” from the push to privatization.

It’s really different, here, and this data about spending on the arts gives and idea of why. Here, even in small towns, I’ve seen cultural centres, galleries, museums and this retreat, all well-funded and accessible. Not a frill.

I know moving elsewhere would only bring another set of challenges, another set of letters to write; yet it’s important once in a while to get a total shift in perspective, to question even the terms of the struggle. As I composed my letter about the Literary Press Group and the Toronto Public Libraries, did I once wonder: why do I even have to raise these points? There wasn’t time.

WHAT IF we didn’t have to justify our existence as artists? It’s a powerful question.

My grandmother’s parents pushed the boundaries of European settlement in Canada’s West; as a child, I watched a man land on the moon. In middle age, I have the feeling there is no place to run — from or to — any more. “What If” may just the the final frontier.

The Remiss Blogger

May 15, 2012

Well I took a holiday in April and have not quite recovered.  In the sense that I’m not quite up to speed yet.

That’s my excuse for not blogging for so long.  But I have been enjoying reading other people’s blogs, particularly that if Diana Kiesners.  I invite you to check out this fabulous entry.

I’m excited about two forthcoming events. The Hamilton Jewish Literary Festival Sunday, June 3, where I’ll be part of a group book launch for Letters and Pictures from the Old Suitcase.  There’s a rich slate of readings and workshops, not to mention intermittent snacks, and the price is right at $20. I’m offering a workshop on truth and fiction. Here’s the registration form.

On Wednesday, June 13th I’ll be reading at the venerable Toronto Wordstage at the Annex Live, 7:30 p.m. Outside the Box will be part of the reading, perhaps a section from the very neighbourhood where the reading will take place. But I may also read from some new non-fiction.

Hope to see you at one or both.

Second Wind

December 21, 2011

It’s a wonderful feeling when energy returns after I’ve met (and crossed) the point of exhaustion. Demanding on myself and greedy for experience, I prize those moments, and – I have to admit – depend on them.

A much-needed second wind came on Saturday night when I stopped in to the home of Lil Blume to collect my authors’ copies of Letters & Pictures from the Old Suitcase, which Lil co-edited with Ellen S. Jaffe. It was a thrill to see the beautiful book, which contains an excerpt from my second novel, My Luminous Ones, still very much in draft form. Seeing this tentative beginning in print got me dreaming about the future, and ideas and plans began to proliferate despite the inner voice which forever groans: Why bother? It’ll just create more work.

But I didn’t have to wait to see the book; I felt recharged as soon as I walked in the door. Rolf and I shed boots and coats in the hall and found a group of people around a big table, eating, drinking, and fervently talking. I bet everyone in that room was overtired and overcommitted, but the excitement of creating something new, and of being together to celebrate it, trumped all that. It was a great reminder that human accomplishment is not bounded by measurable factors: hours in a day, even years in a lifetime.

This is the pair’s second anthology, collecting essays, fiction and poetry by Jewish authors. Under the name of Pinkingshears publications, they’ve also produced a play and two Jewish literary festivals in Hamilton. I’ve been fortunate to be part of both books, and have loved the sense of community that Lil and Ellen foster. In this bizarrely public-yet-isolated business, it is truly precious.

How much of the literary activity in this world comes from people who don’t have time or energy to do it? I’m full of admiration and gratitude for people who somehow keep coming up with ideas, and somehow keep bringing them into the world.

For instance, have you seen the Advent Book Blog?

It’s a great sources of reading and/or gift ideas, but it’s worth a visit just to admire the creativity, industry and generosity of the folks who put it together.  Contributors are invited to send a 100 — word recommendation for a book, a great writing prompt in itself.

The brilliant and inspiring Kerry Clare took the time to recommend Outside the Box for the site, and a week later I took up the challenge to recommend Ann Scowcroft’s superb poetry collection, The Truth of Houses.

And while I’m in the recommending business, a couple of other poetry collections became dear to my heart this fall. They are The Pillow Books by Karen Mulhallen and The Onion Man by Kathryn Mockler. Both have strong narratives, and both invoke landscapes that brought them especially alive for me. In Mulhallen’s it was the Toronto Island and College Street, while Mockler’s book took me on a trip down a long-grown over patch of memory lane. Like Mockler’s narrator, I spent the summer of my 18^th years working in food services in London, Ontario and – in addition to creating an unforgettable character in a few elegant and poignant strokes – The Onion Man brought that early experience back, right down to the hairnet.

Now after all that I wish everyone a restful holiday. I’ll be hibernating.

99 words for ‘tired’

December 6, 2011

The Inuit have 99 words for snow: one of those facts that seem dependable but fall apart when subjected to closer scrutiny (aka a Google search). This yields references to the Kate Bush album, 50 Words for Snow, as well as to numerous websites either debunking the notion or saying that the Saami people actually have 300. And some debunking that notion.

The (non)fact seems dependable because it makes sense. We should have ample vocabulary for something that we are very familiar with.

For me, fatigue is a lot like snow (except that I live with it all year round). It’s not just one single state, but a whole range of them, whose variations and gradations I – and I suspect, many others – know intimately. I’m fascinated with tiredness. The first sentence of my novel reads, “Rebecca is, above all else, tired.” (What happens when a story begins with someone who is tired? Where can she go from there? My heroine gets more tired in the course of the story though I’m considering giving her a blow to the head just to keep her in bed for a week.)

My grandmother coined the phrase ‘streetcar tired’ and I love her for it. She used it to distinguish between the kind of tiredness I felt at 35, from the kind she felt at 85.

‘Streetcar tired’ denotes a condition particular to people who are middle aged. It’s the way you feel riding a streetcar when you’ve got a day full of errands, an armful of packages, and a thousand people depending on you.

About five years ago while riding a bus I saw an elderly but spry lady offer her seat to a younger one. A very Toronto kind of struggle ensued, which resulted in the elder keeping her seat. She put up a good fight though. One of the arguments I heard was: “Yes, but you’re tired. I can see it.” She was right.

The past few months since the launch of Outside the Box have made me more tired than I’ve ever felt before in my life. Not as a care-giver, not as a student, not in my most demanding jobs. It’s taken me completely by surprise.

Yesterday – or was it a few weeks ago? – I attended a marvelous workshop called Feldenkrais Facial given by Susan Free. She worked with the jaw, the eyes, the neck and – because it’s Feldenkrais – everything else at the same time. When I lay down on the mat and closed my eyes, not trying to do anything, even sleep, it felt as if the floor were coming up to meet me. Of course, that wasn’t true. Instead I was at last yielding my weight to gravity after keeping up up up for who knows how long.

I silently dubbed the experience ‘nervous system tired’, as various twitches and twinges in my face and neck told me how much work I’d been doing to put my best face forward, and how all that extra work was leaving me a brittle mess.

Another kind of tiredness took me by surprise at the beginning of November. It was a Friday, and I’d spent the week making phone calls and sending out emails trying to tell people about my book, trying to set up readings, trying to take disappointments lightly and not get too excited about expressions of interest. As dusk fell that afternoon I stopped what I was doing, went downstairs and sat at the window. I felt empty, an emptiness that dwarfed any heartbreak I’d ever experienced.

I thought of my grandmother. In my first memories of her, she was about the age I am now. A recent widow, she lived upstairs from us, and I used to sit in her apartment while she “waited for twilight,” with the ubiquitous drink of whiskey at her elbow. As I learned from her papers, she had been spending her days trying to salvage her declining career in freelance writing and broadcasting, a career which had demanded she perform, produce, publish, and hustle from the age of eleven.

She was ravenous for attention, in a way that put a premature end to my childhood and drained the energies of everyone around her. That November Friday, I understood my grandmother in a new way. Did she feel this empty trying to sell her work and — let’s face it – herself to potential clients?

If I hadn’t been fifty-two years old before having to deal with this challenge, if I hadn’t been married to the strongest man I’ve ever met, if I didn’t make a regular practice of lying on the floor noticing every twitch and tingle and all that goes into them, I would believe what I needed was a drink. And more attention.

How to interpret this? Is it just a matter of separating the self from the book? My self needed attention at the end of the week, instead of my work. Or does the activity of asking for attention, paradoxically drain something deep within? I’m still figuring that one out.

A week later, just after Remembrance Day, another kind of tiredness caught me off guard. Walking along Queen Street after ten days of offering a poem of Mona’s to two hundred community newspapers for publication, and setting up a reading in Mona’s old stomping ground of Forest Hill, I felt – yes, tired of course I was tired – but it had a kind of lightness to it. My closest experience was having done a walkathon when I was twelve. That night, I felt as if I were being whisked off to sleep.

The poem was not “This Was My Brother.” It was another one, written after the war, called “Prayer at Queen and Yonge.” Though ignored by many newspapers it still made it into The Algoma News, The London Free Press, and Here and Now on CBC.

The Mona I remembered as a child had become known for one poem and one poem only. She never complained about it, but I must have sensed she was unhappy, as I sensed so much. The weekend of Remembrance Day, I discharged the responsibility of telling the world who else Mona had been. This was so not healthy: that I was given it, that I took it on. But I had done my job. Now I was – I let myself be – tired.

I also realized, struggling, hormone-tired, up the hill through the Bain co op yesterday that there are a few kinds of tiredness I used to feel, but no longer do.

The tiredness of anger which is turned inside.
The tiredness of boredom.
The tiredness of unrealized dreams.

I like it better this way.

Dia de los Muertos, Toronto style

November 8, 2011

It used to be all about Getting Away, either from Toronto or just The Place You Were From. Where did all that start? Some time in young adulthood. We talked about Europe, about New York, as the really exciting places to be. I remember seeing Leaving Home by David French, and discussing Getting Away as a significant theme in Canadian literature.

But for me, it started earlier than that. Migration felt encoded in my genes or at least in my expectations. On one side, I’m a second generation immigrant, and though the other side of my family has been in Canada for six generations, my ancestors migrated on a regular basis from city to town to farm to main street and back again, crisscrossing the country to find … what?

I always expected to do a certain amount of growing up here in Toronto, then go away. Find a place on the planet that resonated with something deep inside myself. That would be my true home. Life would start.

And so I find it a little surprising to be getting into my fifties here, in the city of my birth, unable to imagine what it would be like to settle elsewhere. How would I ever become intimate with the smell of another city’s air, the quality of its light, its moods and habits and unwritten rules? Even though I’ve done my share of moves within the city, Toronto is most definitely home.

My attempts to Go Away never worked. Each time I accused myself of lack of courage, failure to launch. Yet deep inside I welcomed each return. I breathe more freely here, walk more confidently laugh more heartily, feel engaged and stimulated and enfolded by community. And maybe — despite my conditioning — this is what I’ve wanted all along: to live in one city for years and years and years. Accumulating memories.

It’s the beginning of November, a time when in Latin America they celebrate Dia de los Muertos. The dead are thought to come out and join the living. For me, the holiday makes more sense with each passing year. It happens often these days: I rush up to an old family friend in the street, but just before I say hello, remember that that person is dead. Maybe it was a ghost I saw, or just a projection of my own desire to see them again.

But I am just as liable to run into the ghost of a former self. In one of my favourite books, Another World, Pat Barker writes that trauma has the effect of stopping time. Another dimension is opened, and haunting becomes a very real phenomenon. I would go so far as to say that all moments of heightened emotion — good or bad — alter our experience of time, and that the memories have a way of taking almost tangible form.

As I pass the gritty yellow brick facade of 66 Spadina Road, I look up to the seventh floor, where a family of four shares a one-bedroom apartment. A mother and daughter sit on straight-backed chairs in the semi-darkness, waiting, whispering: Where is he? Just a little to the south, I see the same pair, thirty years later. The younger woman pushes the older one in a wheelchair. She points to the flowers in the various gardens flanking the nursing home. Positioned one in front of the other this way, they don’t see each other’s tears. A young girl passes them, skipping, a book balanced on her hip. She has finished her first reader and is allowed to take it home. Further south, still there’s a rock garden kitty-corner from Jarvis Collegiate where a teenager sits eating a sandwich. It’s December. She’s coughing and her hands are chapped. But she’ll do anything to avoid going into the cafeteria. Further south, now to City Hall. A bunch of people rush giddily out of the building on an unseasonably warm day in March 2003, looking for a place to order a glass of champagne. They ask passers-by to snap a picture that includes them all. The couple in the middle hold their newly clad ring fingers a little self-consciously. All around them, in Nathan Philips Square, a protest is disbursing: US out of Iraq. 

Through sorting my grandmother’s papers, I became intimate with those powerful moments in the lives of previous generations in my family. In that sense, my own memory, my own ability to be haunted, goes back to before I was born.

Last week, I walked around the shops in Forest Hill, putting up flyers for my reading at Type Books, 427 Spadina Rd on Saturday, November 12th. The reading is important to me, because my grandmother lived in Forest Hill during the Second World War. The time also happens to coincide with Remembrance Day, a day that was like my grandmother’s second birthday in our house.

It is a fine day; I zip open my coat and turn my face to the sun. And here she is, Mona, in a trench coat and high-heeled pumps, rushing past me on the sidewalk. It’s 1942. My grandfather in away in the army, and she’s living with my adolescent father in an apartment building just a little north of what is now Type.

I want to know more, to complete the picture. I visit the Toronto archives and seek advice from one of those magical people who open the doors of the past so that stories can be told (a librarian in other words). He sets me up at a microfilm viewer with the city directory for 1942. He shows me how to fast-forward to S (Spadina) slow the dial, then focus in to find “Forest Hill.” It’s beyond the point called “city limits.”

427 Spadina was a fruit store back when Mona lived there. There were also two drug stores, a barber, a dry-cleaner, a grocer and a bookseller. My grandmother would have hurried along this sidewalk many times doing errands. She was busy in those days.

I have some idea how she felt in the fall of 1942. Her personal life was fraught with pain and fear. Her brother and her lover had been killed in the war, both losses so sudden and brutal they must have seemed surreal. Each day brought greater anxiety for another two men in her life, her husband and son (who would soon be old enough to fight). At the same time, her career was blossoming exquisitely. “This Was My Brother,” the poem she wrote to express her grief, was run on the back pages of newspapers across the country. There were plans for her first book to come out in the spring. She was in demand as a public figure in her job with the Red Cross. Her housewifely role behind her, she finally had a chance to let her ambition soar.

Mona walked the streets of Forest Hill in the grip of powerful emotions, and I have no doubt she’ll be there at the reading on on November 12th. Since her death in 1999, Mona’s been known to set small fires, launch deafening rounds of microphone feedback, confiscate jewellery, and bounce plates off a rail on the wall. I’m not making any claims here, but it may not be a coincidence that in the very moment my authors’ copies of Outside the Box were deliverd, there was a small earthquake in sothern Ontario. She’s never done any serious harm, just enough mischief to get people’s attention. I’m happy to oblige.

So excited to read this …

November 6, 2011

Here’s a review on Noreen Shanahan’s excellent blog:http://rampantwithmemory.com/2011/10/31/introducing-mona-gould/

An interview, and a promise …

October 26, 2011

I promise to write an actual post with content, any day now!

Meantime, here’s an interview with Anne Lagacé Dowson
in The Montreal Review of Books:
http://www.aelaq.org/mrb/

Over the bounding main

September 1, 2011

The great thing about being married to someone very competent is that you get to be in love in a swoony, “My husband will take care of it,” kind of way.

The not-so-great thing is that you can let him take care of a few too many things, and become less and less competent, yourself.

I’ve always been a cerebral person, and I never managed to learn certain basic skills – not because I couldn’t but because there were other things I’d rather do. The result is that at fifty-two, I can barely swim or ride a bike. I never learned to steer anything bigger than a shopping cart. Now I feel the window on learning to drive rapidly closing. And no matter how hard I fight it, this tendency to live in my head is getting stronger and stronger as I get older.

It’s words, words and more words these days. Which I seem to love more, the more I work with them; still, they won’t keep me alive in the woods. These days, I feel just a little too tentative and fearful in the face of physical challenges.

So in the spirit of balance, I went out sailing with Rolf last Sunday.

After getting his bronze designation last year, he felt comfortable taking a newbie out on the water. He’s suited to it: flexible and strong, with a clear eye and quick reflexes. He also loves it. Trussed up in a lifejacket with him at the helm I felt pretty safe, though I did wonder how I would free myself of the profusion of ropes at the bottom of the boat if it capsized.

(This reminds me of my problem with cycling. Even as I ride the bike I keep thinking of what could go wrong, and by that time it has …)

The minute we got out into the wind I understood the appeal. For one thing, the incessant flapping stops when the wind fills the sails, and you’re quietly skimming across the water. Also, it’s simple, in the way ancient things are. It has the elegant quality of the most time-tested technology. People have been doing more or less this activity, using more or less the same materials, for centuries.

The basics are pretty simple to learn. Beyond that, it’s all a matter of practice. Each day has its own particular combination of wind and water conditions. It’s a matter of dancing with the elements.

When not swooning as I watched my competent husband doing something he loves and is so very good at, (and who, I noticed, kept the whole ride smooth and pleasant, never barking sudden orders to me as “crew”) I thought of, what else, words.

I felt the way I had visiting London, the way every second street and building is commemorated in a song. I was struck by how infused our language is with nautical expressions: clear sailing, being on an even keel, keeling over, being in irons or being dead in the water are just a few that spring to mind.

English has, I suppose a seafaring history, but is that the only reason for the pervasiveness of nautical images in our language? Is there something metaphorical about the act itself, this dance with the elements?

Yet another of the things you don’t have time to think about when you’re at the helm of a boat!

Congratulations Judge Ferguson

August 9, 2011

What a thrill it was to learn that Judge Edra Sanders Ferguson has been appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. Turning 104 this week, she’ll be the oldest person ever to receive the honour, and it’s richly deserved.

Judge Ferguson is best known for being the first female alderman in St. Thomas, Ontario. Later, she became a judge, and campaigned for the rights of women throughout her long career. Here’s an article about it in the Toronto Star.

It was Judge Ferguson who, back in 1999, gave me the necessary push to start writing a biography of my grandmother, Mona Gould. In a matter of weeks, this enormous project will come to fruition and the book will be out.

A month or so after Mona’s death, Judge Ferguson summoned me – I don’t think there’s another way to say it – to meet her for lunch at the University Women’s Club. That day, she began to help me research a book I hadn’t yet admitted to myself I would write. 

She had only met my grandmother once or twice, when Mona was a young reporter in St. Thomas, but she knew she could provide me with a vital link to the past. St. Thomas was where Mona first ventured away from home, where she cut her professional teeth, and where she fell in love and married. It was also home to a girls’ school called Alma College, which graduated many accomplished women through the years. Judge Ferguson made a point of introducing me to some of them, even though Mona wasn’t herself an alumna. I felt like I was tapping into a deep well of female strength and creativity.

I needed it. By that time I had, with deep ambivalence, started sorting through the many chaotic boxes of papers Mona left to the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. Back then, the task seeemed insurmountable, but Judge Ferguson’s combination of severity and encouragement helped me get over my reluctance and commit to the project.

She had no qualms about cautioning me that Mona’s peers were all dying, and that I had to interview them while I still could. Steeped as I was in my grandmother’s stories about the past, I did not grasp the poignancy of what Judge Ferguson was saying. At least, not for a long while. What struck me instead was that this vital woman was over ninety years old, and had clearly done lots of insurmountable things in her life. Not only had she survived, she’d thrived on the challenges and was still looking for more. Something about the way she simply assumed I would – and could – complete this project seeped in. And I have.

Some five years later and deep into the research I had the feeling – as I often did – that I was missing a whole dimension in looking back at my grandmother’s life from my present-day vantage point. I needed to talk to someone who’d grown up at the same time as Mona and in similar circumstances. I wondered what might have been on her mind from day to day, what she expected in life and what was expected of her. By that time, I’d seen enough loss that I was deeply grateful to find Judge Ferguson still alive and willing to spend a whole afternoon talking to me.

Something tells me that I’m not the only one Judge Ferguson has encouraged with a daunting task over the years.