Delight and Horror
furious dancing in dark times
I should be happy. And I am.
Stay with me here, please. A few things threaten that happiness. I need to acknowledge all the concerns and still be truthful. Ultimately, I want to come through the dense brush of stressors to a place of equanimity. (Don’t we all? I ask.)
This is the view from my bed at Barbara’s house near Kaslo, BC.
Let’s start with the fun stuff:
I’ve been sleeping around. As a grateful guest in the homes of dear friends—on a Murphy bed; a queen bed on a dais (I should have taken a picture); a single bed in an attic; a tiny house’s sleeping loft; and a queen-sized bed with a view of a mountain lake.
And I haven’t cooked a meal or driven a car in six weeks.
with Anne DeGrace at Notably Books in Nelson, BC
In the last month, I’ve had two more wonderful book launches with deeply engaged readers and an online UK book club discussion. I’ve walked through an old-growth cedar forest, soaked in mineral hot springs, strolled through luscious West Coast gardens, feasted on fresh salmon, sablefish, and tuna, and enjoyed lively literary discussions with dear friends.
Although my trip west was nothing short of perfection in every sense, I cannot ignore the dark cloud drifting overhead. A few news items have dovetailed with my current project and messed me up real good.
We all are aware of the global terrors—I don’t need to list them. Or the political ones—we Canadians aren’t exempt from the current threats. Land, water, air, and freedom—all are in peril. I can do my itty bitty part by purchasing plastic-free biodegradable soaps, donating to ocean cleanup initiatives, and letting my lawn grow wild, etc., but these small measures do nothing to staunch the tsunami rising from every side of life on earth.
The bullfrogs sing bass trombone to the bird choir on my quiet river (I tune out the traffic) and more missing girls and women show up on my Facebook feed. Every single day there’s a police notice of another girl or young woman gone missing. Mostly Indigenous. Each image of a smiling, innocent, sweetly cocky face makes my feet go out from under me. As though girls are a commodity to be scooped up and…what? Please please, make it stop.
![The MMIP Crisis: We Must Not Be Silent[1] – Michigan Journal of Race & Law](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uW_e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a813430-32c6-4b53-ba9c-aae013e8c525_480x575.png "The MMIP Crisis: We Must Not Be Silent[1] – Michigan Journal of Race & Law")
How to manage the horror outside with the inner delight is almost beyond me these days.
Then there’s this:
My current novel, the one I’ve been turning inside-out for nearly fifteen years, concerns an accusation of sexual abuse with a minor. My comparable title has always been Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People.
So what does the news deliver next?
Alice Munro’s daughter speaks out.
The one issue I have with the story I’m writing is how to make the reader understand why a woman would believe and support a man who has been accused of sexual interference when there had been indications of transgression. How and why she was willing to turn a blind eye.
Discussions about Andrea Robin Skinner and her mother abound right now. Did Alice Munro stay because of financial dependence? Certainly not once she reached a certain status. So why the silence? Why the denial at her daughter’s expense? Did her love for her husband trump that of her daughter? Or did she fear public shame for having allowed such a thing to happen?
Fremlin was convicted in 2005—to media silence. What helped convict him were letters he wrote stating that Andrea—at nine!—had seduced him.
I heard this exact claim about a twelve-year-old girl from a man who was supposed to protect her, and who upheld his claim even after serving time for touching her.
Then, on a recent episode of The Shit They Don’t Tell You About Writing, they featured a query about an alleged assault so similar to my story that I wanted to scream.
Maybe it’s my fault that it’s taken me so long to get my story right, but it needs to be right. It just has to. Because it matters.
What can I do? We are all afraid right now—that our hard-won freedoms will be snatched away in a heartbeat. Or our daughters will disappear from a bus stop. Just like that.
It may seem that I’m writing about separate issues but trust me, I’m not.
Men, here’s the deal: You will never get back what you lost. You will never fill that darkness inside with the light you extinguish.
I’ll be at Bookapolooza in Haliburton this Saturday, and my publicist has lined up more appearances in Ontario. Stay tuned for upcoming events in Ottawa, Port Stanton, Stratford, Bayfield, and Chatham…
Audio Book coming soon!
Good morning Deepam, I read your blog in the car yesterday and could not send comments via phone. So I'm back during PJ Writing. I'm delighted that friends are hosting you as you tour your book across the country. And I share your despair in hearing another story being queried that is much like yours. There are many of us with these stories. That in itself is disturbing. But please continue. The rest of us will find our way in to our beginnings when the time is right.
As for Andrea and her outing of Alice, well done. What surprised me was not that the assaults happened and that the stepfather had been charged, but that the court judgements had been deep-sixed. Where was the outrage? How could life in Clinton return to any form of normal?
Alice wrote dark stories. They were familiar to me: My mother's family came from that part of the country and I knew there were sprouts of reality in each tale. When I was old enough to join the aunties in the evening, I heard similar stories at the kitchen table. In one of Alice's later books which I have not found the courage to find on my shelves, there are two stories that I found profoundly distressing. The one about a mother-daughter relationship that drifts into nothing. The other about predatory sexual activity by an older man with teenaged girls. I think now that Alice was trying to tell us that she was struggling. But who knows?
Unlike many readers/writers, I will not rid my shelves of Alice's books. I will reread each of her books. Her writing shone light into dark corners. It's possible we never wanted to believe the horrors/dangers that lurked there could be real.
Thank you, Deepam for opening up this subject for discussion. I've been thinking about it too, about Andrea Robin Skinner and her mother, Alice Munro. Say their names, I tell myself, because both names are important in this story. He robbed from them. Not only did he sexually abuse Andrea, but he broke something between her and her mother. He got in there and whatever trust existed between them, whatever love was there, he damaged it. He is the monster in this story, for me. He will always be the monster. As far as your novel, Deepam, please keep writing your story because I want to read it. We need all the stories.