WRITING | Personal history.

2018: Between 1998 and 2002, I was an undergraduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, Canada.

I guess you could say that my writing career started here, or at least that I decided to become a writer, and learned how to write while at school, even though I wasn’t studying writing.

Since I had relative success as a print journalist while I was still pretty young, people often ask me, “How do I become a writer?” Unfortunately, I don’t think I have a good answer to that question. You just write stuff. There are so many reasons people write, and even more reasons not to, but the key thing about writers is that they do. They just write stuff. So while I can’t tell you how to become a writer, I guess what I can do is tell you a bit about my own history as a baby writer and baby journalist, and a little about my first published pieces and minor successes. Read on, reader! I’ll try not to make it too boring.

Queen’s wasn’t my first choice.

Having spent time with an aunt in Vancouver, I wanted to go to UBC. Unfortunately, after more than a decade of being vocally and repeatedly assured by my parents (specifically my father) that paying for school wasn’t something I was going to have to worry about – an argument used to try to get me to turn down a variety of paid jobs in high school, from lifeguarding to cashiering – when it came time to actually attend university, the deal changed, and my folks decided that they’d only be willing to help me financially if I attended a school they chose. They wanted me at UofT, and living at home.

Eventually, my dad relented to an extent and settled on agreeing to pay my tuition, as long as it didn’t exceed the tuition at the university he preferred, and no other costs. I realized that while I may be able to swing rent on my own, travel to a province as far away as British Columbia put UBC out of reach. I considered UWO, where I’d been offered a partial scholarship, but since that would benefit my parents more than me, I passed. McGill was my true second choice, but I decided on Queen’s in the end entirely because residence and rent both looked cheaper in Kingston than they were in Montreal. I arrived at Queen’s knowing literally nothing about Kingston, the school, or its customs, and wearing a UBC tee-shirt purchase in 1992, which I actually still have.

It was a strange time.

Queen’s is basically a cult.

A small town cult. A white cult. But I loved it. I felt incredibly at home and happy there, and I fully embraced all of the school’s idiosyncrasies and traditions, which to outsiders appear completely bizarre, from chanting in Gaelic, to incomprehensible shouting and pelvic thrusts, executed on cue, in a sort of Pavlovian fog. I drank the Queen’s Kool-Aid, both literally and figuratively, since in the late 1990s “Purple Jesus” parties were still a thing – named entirely because they featured beverage service in the form of bathtubs and plastic trash bins filled with a sort of horrid grain alcohol/grape punch, communally consumed. (The “Jesus” part, I admit, I never quite grasped, but it may have something to do with the Jonestown Massacre.)

Despite limitations that included a boyfriend back home, a brownish face, and very little in the way of financial security (unlike so many of the school’s preferred cohort of peppy, private-school blondes), I did well at Queen’s. I would occasionally “model” for various pamphlets and promotional products, I believe because the school wanted to show that the student population was more diverse than assumed. (It wasn’t, but whatever.) One of those early “modelling” shots is shown below. I was on the Dean’s Honour List, I won a small Kathleen Ryan scholarship, I got to do a semester abroad. And I received my first serious writing commendation in 2001, which was basically a fluke.

Alias Grace, 1996.

Around the end of 1999, I unwittingly wrote a relatively-publishable (lol, maybe? apparently?) academic essay.

I was completing a course assignment on the Margaret Atwood historical fiction novel Alias Grace. It didn’t seem remarkable. It was homework. A few weeks after submitting my paper, my professor, Albert Braz, who I believe was just visiting Queen’s at the time, took me aside to quiz me about my academic background. Had I studied Atwood before? How old was I? He eventually revealed that it seemed my position was unique, and therefore, publishable, and he asked to send the paper to a “Best Undergraduate Essay” competition run by the Margaret Atwood Society (MAS).

More than a year later, the MAS commended my paper, entitled “Reinforcing the Guilty Verdict in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace” (an inspired and creative title, I know), and noted it in the Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society (an academic journal known since 2007 as Margaret Atwood Studies). This wasn’t the same as winning the competition – more akin to placing – but it was a huge deal for me at the time.

Understanding nothing about academe, I was proud nonetheless, and I feel like this teensy honour helped me gain the vague confidence I needed to start pitching at the newspaper where’d I’d been working summers, to try my hand at poetry, etc. Atwood was obviously a hugely successful and much-studied writer, but there was no cultural cachet associated with knowing her works (no critically acclaimed adaptations, etc.). I just liked the book and thought I’d come up with a reasonable argument, but my fragile ego rode on this win for a long time.

I knew I wasn’t “stupid” but at the same time …

I didn’t know. Most of the time, I felt like I was akin to a painted trash bag, and that the paint was flaking, or like it needed to be constantly reapplied so others wouldn’t figure out what I really was. I think there is now a name for this feeling: imposter syndrome (or the imposter phenomenon).

Little achievements like this helped. Writing and figuring out how to be a writer helped. Seeing my name in print helped. Shit like this seemed to stave off what I saw as the inevitable (everyone realizing “the truth about me”, “hating” me, a future as an obvious “trash bag/utter failure” – all real phrases and feelings I expressed in journal entries from this period).

Natural, gorgeous, yep.

Though I spent the summer after my first year doing admin work for a trucking company, as mentioned, I spent the rest of my undergrad summers at the Vancouver Sun, a job I gained entirely thanks to nepotism. (The aunt mentioned above was the Managing Editor and eventual EIC of the Sun. As of 2018, we have been estranged for near 15 years.)

I had no real interest in journalism.

In fact, I wrote in my journal at the time, after my first summer, that I was glad I tried it, but that I didn’t want to do it. I disliked journalism, had no stomach for it, couldn’t imagine actually working as that sort of writer, in that sort of environment, but when they called me back for another four months, and then another, with my finances in mind, I couldn’t say no. I was managing my bank account primarily by not eating, or eating very little, which wasn’t sustainable in the long term.

By the fall of 2000 I’d published my first newspaper piece, and things just sort of snowballed for me. I seemed to have a knack for writing pithy nonsense. It came easily. And I was diligent about deadlines and spelling. That’s apparently all it really took.

If you really want to become a writer, obviously, this little story isn’t likely to help you much.

It’s just one path, and not even one I’d advise anyone else to take. The best you can do is to write. Write as much as you can. Or stop writing. Honestly, if you can do something else, there are millions of better careers out there. But I guess if you can’t help but write, and if you really want to make that your job and become a writer, I can’t stop you. Go for it. If you choose it deliberately, instead of falling into it like I did, for all the wrong reasons, it’s possible you’ll be better off.

It is certainly strange that I locked myself into a more-than-a-decade long career that I never liked and never really wanted because I needed money, had a relative in the business, and accidentally wrote a publishable essay when I was a literal teenager. Life is very odd, in retrospect.

Published in Queen’s Today, Spring 2001.

Letter from the Atwood Society, Feb. 2001.

Just some crap I saved for posterity. It seemed relevant here.