Retreating

On Thursday of last week, I drove to Pembroke, about 150 Km up the Ottawa River with two interesting passengers, all of us bound for Marguerite Centre, a former convent and now among other things a venue for meetings, conferences and the like. While our backs were turned, spring blossoms and leaves exploded all over Ottawa and when we returned on Sunday afternoon colourful beds of tulips and trees laden with magnolia and cherry blossoms, and delicate new green leaves greeted us everywhere. A few days earlier we had advanced on Pembroke to attend a Writers' Retreat, where a small group of us, eleven in all, engaged in intensive discussions about how to write memoirs. Mine are already written. I began in about 1990, revised, rewrote, and added to them about ten years later, and now I want to weave Wendy's version of events into mine wherever I can, using her diaries and letters as source material. I found the retreat, especially the interchange of ideas among all of us who went there to learn how to write memoirs, very helpful. Yet I still have much to learn, and might take a formal course in the autumn, if the course is offered again this year. Last year I was a full time care-giver for Wendy and too emotionally preoccupied to cope with it. After reading Karen Trollope Kumar's memoir of the years that she and her husband Pradeep lived and worked in the Himalayas, and after reading several other memoirs, I'm all fired up to use the techniques of creative non-fiction, especially invented dialogue that is reconstructed from remembered events; although I've long forgotten the actual words spoken by others and me, I can recall the occasions when the conversations occurred, so I know what's required: dialogues that capture the sense of what was said, if not the actual words that were uttered. Memoir writers and others have been doing this since Plato recorded the dialogues of Socrates, so it's hardly a recent innovation, but it's one that if I can use it successfully, will help to breathe life into what I think is now a very dull and boring record of the events of my life. Of course some snatches of conversation are carved into my brain. "Sit down. What are the causes of tetany" was an oral examiner's greeting to me when I failed the examination for membership of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1952. And "Never think thoughts like that if you want to work for the Commonwealth Health Department!" was the unveiled threat of a senior bureaucrat in Canberra when I proposed a modest health care research project that could have answered a worth while question, whether it makes a difference if a qualified surgeon or an experienced GP does straightforward abdominal operations like repairing an inguinal hernia and taking out an inflamed appendix. That bureaucrat went on to tell me that I was there to do what the government told me to do, not to "behave like an academic" -- which I was, because I'd been recruited as a lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, not as a public servant. This threat to my inquiring mind led directly to my family's departure from Australia and our relocation in the academically friendlier atmosphere of the University of Vermont in Burlington, and all the academic progress I've made since 1963. I've wondered sometimes how our lives would have turned out if instead of hostility and negativism, my research proposal had been received with enthusiasm. In fact it was more than 30 years before an answer to the question was forthcoming in Australia. But I digress (or do I?). That unpleasant conversation was a major turning point in life for me and my family. I've mentioned it in my memoirs. Perhaps I should enlarge on that event, add some creative non-fictional dialogue. We didn't hear much about creative non-fiction at the writers' retreat, but its use was implied in what several participants and our facilitator said. Creating 'conversation' from remembered fragments is probably easier than creating invented conversations as most novelists do. I've tried it, and I am not very skillful at doing it. Probably, I hope, I'll improve with practice. (The photo shows our group, with Emily-Jane Hills Orford, our facilitator in a red shirt; and Carl Dow, of Ottawa Independent Writers second from the left, and perhaps it captures our enthusiasm for memoir-writing).