New writing project

 In 2021, in the middle of Covid-19 I published my novel, A Girl Should Be.  After that, I felt lonely for a writing project.  I have written five Canadian historical novels centred on real or fictional women characters and populated both by imaginary people and people who existed in the past. I wrote about  the Manitoba women's suffrage movement and World War I; a family's involvement in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike; two separate novels about young women coming of age in the Roaring Twenties and the Dirty Thirties  (1920s and 1930s) and folk song collecting in Ontario in the 1950s  - not in that order.  In the years since my Master of Arts degree in History (Queen's, Ruth "Olson"),  I have kept on reading and thinking about history, and reading historical novels.  

Historical novels I read when young started me on the path to history and to writing this type of  novel.  This past year, still reeling from the impact of the pandemic upon all of us, I knew I wanted to write about someone who had faced adversity.  Since the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 had come into my novel, Votes, Love and War, and since it was too close to what we had just gone through, I didn't want to write about that again.  

Some crises bring change that is good, but Covid-19 hasn't done so.  We've seen natural disasters in other countries that have  led to the toppling of governments and their replacement by administrations willing to do more for everyday people.  After World War II the Canadian federal government brought in some social safety net programs to prevent  social unrest. In the USA during the 1930s the Roosevelt administration brought in relief and public works projects to alleviate the unemployment and misery of the Great Depression.   In Canada we've seen that type of measure during the worse of the pandemic, but we've also seen inaction by governments on the terrible holes in the social safety net that the pandemic exposed.

Then  I remembered someone who  tried to make a difference during challenging times, an activist who was honoured in her old age but hated and targetted by the establishment for many years.   I met her while doing research for my non-fiction book, The Story of the Canadian Youth Congress.  My thoughts went back to the 1990s and sitting at the antique pipne table in her kitchen having tea and asking her about her university days when she was active in the  youth congress and other organizations. Coming of age in the later years of the Great Depression, she, like many other young people, felt that the capitalist system had failed and should be replaced by a planned economy to ensure the necessities of life for everyone.  She first became involved in youth organizations that pressed the government for change, and then  found a job with a union, which she saw as a way of helping people get their fair share.

All her life she was happy to talk to younger people coming up about her life and times and her work.  She became a union organizer and an activist on behalf of women. During the Red Scare/ HUAC era she was labelled a communist   By the time I met her she had become an icon, but for many years she and her husband had worked without much money, worldly success or positive recognition, organizing workers whom other unions considered not worth the time.  

Talking with her and making notes, I felt that she radiated kindness, and hated to leave.  I could have listened to her forever, but she didn't have forever - she was busy with various causes - and besides, I had already covered the part of her life that was in the scope of my research on the Canadian Youth Congress. 

During her lifetime and since her death, articles have been written about her and collected into a book, and there are biographical fragments in an archives, but  no autobiography and no biography.  For various reasons, writing her biography is beyond me, but an  historical novel inspired by part of her life - that was a possibility. So last fall I began getting to know her through her archival material, the articles she wrote, the transcribed interviews she gave, and various books and theses about the labour movement in Canada from the 1930s to the 1960s.

In another blog I'll write about the challenge of writing an historical novel and achieving the right balance between history and story.