First things first, p.1
First Things First, page 1
Cape Breton is
the Thought-Control
Centre of Canada
RAY SMITH
A Night at the Opera
RAY SMITH
Going Down Slow
JOHN METCALF
Century
RAY SMITH
Quickening
TERRY GRIGGS
Moody Food
RAY ROBERTSON
Alphabet
KATHY PAGE
Lunar Attractions
CLARK BLAISE
An Aesthetic Underground
JOHN METCALF
Lord Nelson Tavern
RAY SMITH
Heroes
RAY ROBERTSON
A History of Forgetting
CAROLINE ADDERSON
The Camera Always Lies
HUGH HOOD
Canada Made Me
NORMAN LEVINE
Vital Signs (a reSet Original)
JOHN METCALF
First Things First
(a reSet Original)
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN
FIRST THINGS FIRST
FIRST THINGS FIRST
EARLY AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN
BIBLIOASIS
WINDSOR, ON
Copyright © Diane Schoemperlen, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Schoemperlen, Diane
[Short stories. Selections]
First things first : early and uncollected stories / Diane Schoemperlen.
(reSet books)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-1-77196-070-0 (paperback). — isbn 978-1-77196-071-7 (ebook)
I. Title.
ps8587.c4578a6 2016 c813’.54 c2015-907402-9
c2015-907403-7
Readied for the press by Daniel Wells
Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson
Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support
of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
For John Metcalf and Leon Rooke
PREFACE
The first story in this collection, “The Diary of Glory Maxwell,” is my very first published story. It was written way back in 1974 when I was only twenty years old, a student with a major in English and a minor in Philosophy at Lakehead University in my hometown, Thunder Bay, Ontario. The story was published a year later in Lakehead’s literary journal, The Muskeg Review. It has not been reprinted anywhere since—until now.
Let’s go back to the beginning. In those days, Thunder Bay was a city that proudly called itself “a lunch-bucket town,” its main industries being the grain elevators and the paper mill. Our little war-time bungalow, in the neighbourhood called Westfort, was so close to the mill that the smoke spewing from its giant red-and-white stack twenty-four hours a day left a fine white residue on everything: the garden, the car, the back step, the clean clothes hanging on the line to dry. Neither one of my parents had finished high school. My father worked in the grain elevators and my mother ran a post office outlet in the back of a drugstore. Other than cookbooks, the only books we had in our house when I was growing up were an old edition of the Webster’s New World Dictionary that my father used when doing crossword puzzles and a set of the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia that you could buy at Safway, one volume per week for 99 cents each.
I have no idea where my early interest in reading and writing came from. My mother liked to tell the story of how, long before I knew how to read, I would pull her cookbooks out of the drawer in which they were stored under my bed and pretend to read her stories from them. (I also have no idea why the cookbooks were stored in a drawer under my bed.) I distinctly remember once getting into serious trouble for printing words in coloured chalk on the underside of the kitchen table.
After I started school and learned to read, I always spent my weekly allowance on books, chosen from the small shelf hidden in the back of the Westfort hardware store. My mother found this habit of mine quite disturbing and often asked why I didn’t buy a doll or a stuffed toy or something—“like a normal girl.” I was writing stories by then too—adventures inspired by the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books I was buying at the hardware store.
During my high school years I broadened my reading. I was now devouring the work of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler. I was fortunate to have more than one high-school teacher who encouraged my writing. I started university in 1972—back in the dark ages, back in a time about which my son, when he was three or four years old, asked if the world, like television, was still in black and white. Certainly it was a time long before there was any such thing as a Creative Writing Department or an MFA Program.
There were, however, two Creative Writing courses I could take at Lakehead, one in second year and one in third, both taught by the same man. He was tough and his criticism of my work was often very harsh. I still remember some of his comments. In response to an assignment in which we were to write a descriptive paragraph about autumn, I wrote what I thought was a lovely lyrical piece about a single maple leaf falling from a tree. His comment was “Peanuts could say more in a three-frame comic strip than you’ve said here.” I often went home from those classes and cried. But I was determined, I was stubborn, and I always went back. Much later he told me that his tough criticism was intended to weed out the weak, the writing life not being for the faint of heart. True, it’s not. But I do not agree with his method and still sometimes wonder how many other students in those classes who might have written some great things gave up because of it.
I wrote “The Diary of Glory Maxwell” while in his class and it was one of several of my stories upon which he commented: “Obviously written from the sensibility of a young woman.” As if that were a bad thing!
When I read this story now, yes, I can see myself trying hard to be clever and dramatic and deep, writing about characters and situations that had nothing to do with my real life or my understanding of the real world. When I read this story now, I want to give my younger self a big hug and say, “Keep going. You’ll get there. The more you write, the closer you’ll come to figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it.”
I would also congratulate my younger self for having broken one of the many rules that professor repeatedly proclaimed. He said—and he said it often—that a story must never be written in the first person present tense. What? I don’t remember his reasoning behind this particular rule but I do know that even at the time this struck me as questionable—and every time since then that I’ve written a story in the first person present tense, I’ve done it with a sense of glee.
In the summer of 1976, immediately after graduating from Lakehead, I took the six-week summer writing program at The Banff Centre, headed at that time by W. O. Mitchell. A cliché though it might be, it is not an exaggeration to say that this experience changed my life. Not only did I get to have Alice Munro as my teacher for one week out of the six, but for the first time in my life, I no longer felt quite so strange. There I was surrounded by people who were just like me, people who were interested in the same things I was and who did not think I was crazy for wanting to be a writer. Certainly back home in Thunder Bay, this dream of mine was, shall we say, suspect. That fall I moved to Banff, then lived in Canmore for the next ten years. I began submitting my stories in earnest to Canadian literary magazines. Many of them were rejected ten or twelve times before finding a place. I am stubborn and I persisted. Each time I received a rejection, I put that story right back into another big brown envelope and sent it somewhere else. I had taken to heart something that W. O. Mitchell often said at Banff: a writer requires an apprenticeship just like anybody else—an apprenticeship, he said, of ten years at least. In addition to all those rejections, there were just enough acceptances along the way to keep me feeling hopeful.
As it turned out, W.O. was right. In 1984, exactly ten years after the publication of my first story, Coach House Press published my first book, Double Exposures, a fictional novella accompanied by old black-and-white family photographs I had rescued when my mother was threatening to throw them out. As it also turned out, most of those early stories that were rejected so many times in the beginning did eventually appear in my own later short story collections.
The twenty-four stories gathered here were written between 1974 and 1990. In addition to “The Diary of Glory Maxwell,” another seven of them, written mostly in the seventies, have not been previously collected. When I read these early stories now, I can see myself slowly but surely finding my subject matter, my sense of humour, and my voice—finding myself on t he page. Sometimes it’s just a line or two that jumps out at me. In the story “Prophecies” for example, written in 1978, there’s this: “So what have hearts to do with love? They have no sense of humour.” Almost forty years later now,I’d still be thrilled to write those lines.
I also note that, while some of these early stories were written in a more traditional manner, my fascination with innovative forms and structures was there from the beginning. There are several stories written in short sections, many containing lists of one sort or another, one modeled after a true-or-false questionnaire and another set up as a multiple-choice test. The story “Life Sentences,” written in 1983, is a kind of fill-in-the-blanks interactive piece, where sometimes the missing word is obvious and sometimes not. I can’t honestly say what gave me the confidence to think I could do all these different things. What made me think I could just break the “rules” of conventional story writing and do it however I wanted?
In the introduction to my 1991 collection, Hockey Night in Canada and Other Stories, John Metcalf wrote: “What readers must understand is that the shape of a story is the story. There is no such thing as ‘form’ and ‘content.’ They are indivisible; they are each other. New shapes are new sensibilities.”
This makes perfect sense to me now but how did I know that then? I don’t think I did, at least not consciously. Reviews of my work over the years have often referred to me as a writer who is “challenging the short-story form.” I can assure you that never once in my life have I sat down at my desk and thought, ‘Now what can I do to challenge the short story form this time?’
Most of the stories included here were written while I lived in Thunder Bay and then in Canmore. In 1986, I was invited to teach a weeklong summer workshop at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. This turned out to be another life-changing experience. Two months later I moved to Kingston with my year-old son, my ten-year-old cat, and a hundred boxes of books. As my life changed and moved forward in unexpected ways, I remained committed to writing. As the single parent of a small child, I remember often thinking that short stories, conventional or otherwise, were the perfect genre—because they were short.
In retrospect, I realize it was not confidence that made me think I could do whatever I wanted in a short story as long as I was telling that story in the best way possible, regardless of convention or tradition. It was that stubbornness of mine. Whereas confidence is a flighty temperamental quality that will always wax and wane, stubbornness is a good solid thing, not always wise but certainly reliable, steadfast, and dependable. Confidence is just as likely to up and leave you flat without warning just when you need it the most, but stubbornness can be a splendid thing that will never let you down.
This collection is my fourteenth book. After more than forty years of writing and publishing, I am often asked to offer advice to new writers of all ages. To them I say what I would say to my younger self:
Keep going.
You’ll get there.
Read good books.
Be stubborn.
Be patient.
Read more good books.
Always remember that you have to do the first things first.
THE DIARY OF
GLORY MAXWELL
(1974)
January 12
You’re wondering about my name, aren’t you? You’re wondering how this pale person with the glasses got such a heroic blaze of a name, aren’t you? My name is Glory simply because I am—glorious, I mean. I don’t intend to sound vain—at least, I don’t think I do.
Once, before she went to live with that young man who collected ships in glass bottles—once, my mother tried to explain it to me. I must have asked her about my name then, although now I can’t remember doing it. She explained it to me very carefully, talking loudly, as one does to a foreigner newly come to this side of the ocean. She must have seen the foreign syllables in my eyes—she spoke very close to my ear. Her breath was hot and sweet like fresh corn. She said that there had been an argument in those larva days when I was new. An argument between my father and herself. You see: on the evening before I came to be, there on the delivery table, she had remembered a magazine story about a famous lady with beautiful legs and too many men. Her name was Lori and my mother wanted that for me. So she had named me Lori—in her mind, at least. But there was a problem: my father had chosen a name for me too—had chosen it during those long nights of lying awake beside that walrus woman who snored and gritted her teeth in her dreams. He had chosen a name for me—he had planned that I be Gloria.
I was to be just that to him. A glorious face which never cried, a glorious golden head rising to smile at him from beneath the covers of my crib. And I was. And I am glorious. Even though my name is really the child of two. Like me—and you.
A glorious compromise just the same—and still, I am Glory. My mother has been gone for almost a year now and there have been no tears and no terror in these rooms since she left. That day, she screamed about the animals again.
“But, Mother, they’re only stuffed and Father loves them.”
You see, my father is—was—a zoologist. He is Dr. Julius Maxwell—almost a household name, but not quite. He is a man who loves the animals, even the dead ones, because they are more real than his woman, his baby and his supper. He still loves them—I’ve seen him watching the eyes of the mounted moose on the library wall. Sometimes he smiles a little just to see those eyes smile back. And I know that he is happy she is gone. Because now he can fill his days and his arms with books instead of with her yearning lizard skin.
But my father is a sick man now; diseased. The disease is carcinoma—that’s “cancer” to you, I suppose. I’m not sure yet exactly how it works but I will soon know. I’ve asked a special favour of my biology professor and he’s going to explain it to me—just for a moment between the chlorophyll and the process of osmosis.
Have you guessed it now? I knew you would. I too am a zoologist. Because my father loves the animals, so do I. Perhaps that’s what drove her away. But I don’t mind; I feel no guilt. I am beautiful and glorious now. I have risen long-winged from the ashes of what she called their “marriage” and I am free to love the animals—and my father. I am the phoenix. And I will live such a very long time because I am Glory.
February 23
A night to remember. That must sound like a cliché to you. It does, doesn’t it? Don’t worry. If it does, you can’t hurt me that way. To me, it is not a cliché—it is real and maybe even a little more than glorious. My father was much better last night. Not quite as well as he was last month, but much better than last week. He told me that his body had grown hard and chivalrous like his soul. He really said it just that way. And I believe him. I will remember.
We spent the evening in our library, feasting upon the California Condor and the Owl. His fingers memorized the diagrams of wings and beaks and round marble eyes. He brought colour to the pages of black and white with the blood of his hands. There is new blood in his bones now—he told me that he can feel them again and they feel good. He says the cells have stopped climbing atop each other in their eagerness to poison him. He says that he is whole.
Last night, he read to me and I to him. His voice was so familiar, it made the words so much easier to understand. They are so much easier to remember because now they have his face upon them. He read to me from a book about owls. A book written by a scholar whom he used to know. They were friends at school, he said. That man is dead now, we decided. Because he had learned enough and written enough, he was ready to die.
My father isn’t ready yet. His shoulders are too thin and he limps too heavily to the left—that is, when he can stand up and face the floor from the sky instead of from his wooden wheelchair. So he isn’t ready yet. He needs more words yet to die.
For now, he is content to be alive with me. So we shall spend many more evenings cloistered in our library, mounting the words upon our minds and drawing the animal names into our flesh. He clutched at my sleeve with his new-blood fingers and cried for me to look.
