As she spoke this week, a circle gathered around her. Everybody in the group was genuinely eager to listen, to discover, to be inspired. In fact, that’s where author Ruth Walker started her discussion with members of the Uxbridge Writers’ Circle. She asked those gathered on Tuesday afternoon:
“What inspires you?”
“Nature, the outdoors,” said one.
“My family and relationships,” suggested another.
Then, we asked Ruth the same question back. That’s exactly what she wanted. The Oshawa-based writer, who’s a published novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright, has a fistful of awards to her credit – a semi-finalist in the Chapters/Robertson Davies First Novel competition, third-place winner in the 2007 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award, and long-listed for the Montreal Poetry Prize. More important, I believe, she helps writers – amateur and professional alike – think better, come up with stronger ideas, and express themselves more clearly (in her Writescape workshops) than just about any teacher I know.
“What inspires you?” one of us asked Ruth.
And she showed us. Growing up, she said she recalled her family taking a tenant in the basement. The German boarder hired Ruth and her mother to do his housekeeping. Ruth remembered finding everything in his apartment in perfect order from kitchen to bedroom to closet.
“The apartment was spotless, but empty and perfectly orderly. You could put a ruler where his shoes were lined up in a perfect line,” she said. Based on that mystery tenant, and research she completed later in Germany, she composed her first novel “Living Underground” to several editions and great acclaim.
Inspiration has always intrigued me. It’s often intangible. It’s not the same for everyone. And it isn’t always positive. I had a writing instructor back at Ryerson Polytechnical (before it was a university). Christina MacBeth taught us to write better news stories by using what’s called “active voice.” Not forms of the verb “to be,” but verbs that were transitive, had impact, that actually did something in a sentence. I remember the day she entered the lecture hall with our first assignments marked. She literally tossed them in the air at us. We sat in stunned silence.
“This is the most lame copy I’ve ever seen. Too much use of ‘is,’ ‘are,’ ‘was,’ ‘were.’ Lifeless crap!” she said. “From now on you are prohibited from any use of the verb ‘to be’ in your stories.” We thought she was crazy. And she was. Crazy like a fox. She inspired us to expand our vocabulary, come up with active verbs and make our stories leap off the page. She truly inspired us.
Now that I’m on the subject of writers, there’s another I’ve always considered an inspiration. Few of you will remember her, but Lotta Dempsey became one of Toronto’s most popular newspaper columnists back in the 1950s and ’60s. She entered the news business when it was male-dominated and editors relegated her to so-called “women’s beat,” covering horticulture, fashion and society. OK, she thought, I’ll show them society.
And she wrote about women bringing about social change, slowing the nuclear arms race, and fighting for equal pay for work of equal value. So, she wrote about women working in munitions plants during WWII.
“It began to happen that hour when Canadian girls left desks and kitchens, elevators and switchboard,” she wrote, “then stepped into overalls and took their places in the lines of workers at lathes and drills, cranes and power machines, tables and benches in the munitions plants of Canada.” That’s when the move to gender equality began.
Who else inspires? Well, Mother Teresa inspired a generation when she said, “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” And for that matter, Marilyn Monroe inspired women who believed they had something to say in the world; she once quipped, “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
I’ve always been inspired by the life of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and then attempted a similar feat flying around the globe, but just fell short. And athletes have always inspired me – Billie Jean King, Clara Hughes, Haley Wickenheiser, Nancy Green, Christine Sinclair.
I was thrilled when they finally issued the new Canadian $10 bill with Viola Desmond on the back, the women who challenged racial segregation at a film theatre, lost her case, but led the way for civil rights for Canadians of African heritage.
Toward the end of Ruth Walker’s talk about inspiration for the Uxbridge Writers’ Circle, the other day, she asked me what inspired me.
“Deadlines,” I said. “I’ve been writing the Barris Beat column, in one form or another for nearly 40 years. And every week, when the deadline approaches, that’s when I’m inspired.”
You might have noticed that all those I’ve highlighted as inspiration in this column are women. It’s no coincidence. It’s my homage to International Women’s Day tomorrow and the inspiration that women give us all.