Shelly Sanders .com

Posted By Shelly Sanders on April 2, 2012

I had a serious case of grandmother-envy when I was young. Nana wasn’t like my friends’ demonstrative white-haired grandmothers, or the nurturing women I read about who baked cookies for their grandchildren, and had big family dinners in homes that smelled like apple pie and hot chocolate. For one thing, Nana had vibrant auburn hair and lived thousands of miles away, in Barbados, where she ran a resort with my grandfather, so we only saw them once or twice a year. She sent us postcards from their travels—Bermuda, the Bahamas, Trinidad—exotic places with white, sandy beaches and shimmering turquoise water.

I looked forward to seeing her for I was her namesake. She gave me books I cherished, Nancy Drew’s from Barbados with unusual cobalt blue covers that my friends envied, a beautiful white blouse with colourful pictures she’d embroidered, and best of all, a gold signet ring adorned with an ‘S’ that I still wear every day. Yet she was reserved toward me, my brother, and sister, not one for hugs or kisses. It was as if she was afraid to get too close.

“Sweetie, can you get the sugar for me?” Nana would say every morning when she visited, as she sat at the kitchen table with a grapefruit and a bowl of cottage cheese. Her voice still contained remnants of her Russian accent, with the slight roll of her R’s, and her W’s pronounced as V’s, and it was raspy from years of smoking.

I watched her sprinkle sugar on the grapefruit and cut the reddish-pink flesh carefully into sections. Once, I tried a piece, which soured my taste buds for the rest of the day.

When I was eleven, Nana was diagnosed with the same insidious disease that had killed my grandfather years earlier. Lung cancer. The severity of her condition didn’t really register with me until I visited her in Toronto, where she had moved to receive intensive treatment. She lived in a tall building with stores and mirrored escalators beneath the condos. Coming from suburban Illinois, where we didn’t even have public transit, I was in awe of this upscale urbanity, the hectic, exciting pace.

The mood in Nana’s unit was a harsh contrast to the liveliness below us. Cancer had shrunk her formerly sturdy body; skin hung loosely from her bones, her hair was now grey and sparse, and her once perfectly-manicured nails were cracked and broken. My mother and I helped her to the bathroom and bathed her, and we guided her to the kitchen where my mother urged her to eat. Sitting at her small table, I remember meeting her dark, sunken eyes, seeing her look away in shame.

We moved to Canada shortly after my grandmother died, to a small town an hour west of Toronto. When I was in our kitchen one afternoon talking about an upcoming school dance, I told my mother that my friend Lizzie couldn’t go because she was Jewish and could only date Jewish boys. (There were none in our school.) As I grumbled about how unfair Lizzie’s parents were, my mother blurted out that my grandmother had been Jewish. My mother’s face turned red and she averted her eyes from mine.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.

My mother released one of her long sighs before answering. “Nana didn’t want anyone to know; she and her family had to leave Russia because they were Jewish, but that’s all I really know. She wouldn’t talk about her past. I only found out when I was in my twenties.”

“But why the secrecy? It’s not like we go to church. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

My mother shrugged and stirred something on the stove. Even though my grandmother had been gone for years, I got the sense that my mother felt guilty for saying anything, as if she was betraying her by revealing things Nana had wanted hidden.

I clearly didn’t share this guilt, and the next day announced to Lizzie that Nana had been Jewish.

Lizzie’s coffee-brown eyes widened, as if they were seeing me for the first time. “That means you’re Jewish.”

“No, I’m not. We don’t celebrate Hanukkah.”

“It doesn’t matter. The Jewish line is carried down the maternal side. Your grandmother was Jewish, so you’re considered Jewish.”

This information hit me like a slap in the face. Did this mean my family would have been killed if we’d lived in Europe during the Holocaust? Was this why Nana had been so tight-lipped about her past? Questions filled my mind but it was too late to get the answers I needed. My grandmother was gone and had taken her secrets with her. Still, this revelation awakened a new and powerful interest within me. I wanted to know more about Judaism and Russia.

This desire to understand more of my heritage surfaced with a vengeance when I had my first child, Amanda. The only person who could provide the information I needed was my great-aunt Nucia, my grandmother’s older sister, who lived in Montreal. But with her well-deserved reputation for being stubborn and uncooperative (one time, when her building’s fire alarm went off, she refused to leave her apartment), I had to choose my questions carefully or risk losing this valuable information forever.

“We lived on the top floor of a wooden two-storey house in Novosibirsk,” Nucia began, as we sat in her plant-filled apartment on a warm June morning. She smoked her cigarette and exhaled with a faraway look in her eyes, clouded over with glaucoma. If I closed my eyes, it was as if I was hearing my grandmother, for her voice and Nucia’s were almost identical.

“Why do you want to know about this?” she asked, turning to me abruptly.

“I told you; to give Amanda a sense of her past.”

“Hmmm.” Nucia inhaled deeply on her cigarette, looking unconvinced and skeptical. She bore a certain resemblance to my grandmother, only she had a lighter frame and more severe features. Her thin lips were outlined in red lipstick, smudged above her top lip; her eyebrows looked like they’d been drawn in with a pencil. And although she had smoked most of her life, Nucia hadn’t succumbed to the cancer that had taken her sister, brother-in-law, and husband.

“Our father made pickles and we were considered quite wealthy because we had indoor plumbing,” she continued. “One day, there were fires in our village, whole buildings burning, people screaming. It was a pogrom against Jews. We ran to the train station with our parents and younger brother, taking only what we could carry.” Nucia paused, put out her cigarette in the half-full glass ashtray, and gazed out the sun-lit window.

I wrote down every word my aunt said about the pogrom they’d endured, my hand shaking as I listened to how friends had been killed, how narrowly Nana’s family had escaped. If they hadn’t been as lucky, I wouldn’t be alive.

“Our mother ran a boarding house in Shanghai, and we went to a Catholic school, the Shanghai Gymnazium,” Nucia said.

“So you hid your faith in Shanghai?”

“No, Shanghai accepted Jews. We just didn’t go to a Jewish school.” She coughed, a phlegmy smoker’s cough. “Shelly had better grades than I did, and she wanted a career. So she worked in Shanghai for a couple of years, and saved money for university. Then she went by ship to California, to Berkley, and received a science degree in three years, in nineteen-thirty.”

I recalled Nana’s face in her apartment before she died, and realized how hard it must have been for such a strong, capable woman to give up her independence, to be seen as weak by her granddaughter.

My aunt explained that my grandmother gave up her Judaism when she met my grandfather, who was not Jewish. They eventually settled in Montreal.

“Do you think she ever regretted it?” I asked.

Nucia lit another cigarette before answering. “I don’t think so; it was the 1930’s and Canada didn’t welcome Jews.” She paused and gave me a hard look. “Your grandfather, he was in advertising, and if his clients had found out his wife was Jewish, they wouldn’t have done business with him.”

I asked my aunt if she had any photos of my grandmother as a young girl. She shook her head and told me again that she didn’t understand why I was interested in any of this. Before leaving, I went down the dimly-lit hall to the bathroom. Her bedroom was through a door on the left and on her floor was a pile of framed and unframed photos. I couldn’t resist, and after turning on the bathroom fan and closing the door, I crept into her room and began rummaging through the stack of black and white images. There were photos of my grandmother and her sister as babies, as little girls with their baby brother, and as young women, their hair down their backs in thick braids.

“Are you all right in there?” my aunt called out after I’d been gone a few minutes.

I put my hand over my mouth to muffle my voice and said yes.

My aunt mumbled something I couldn’t make out and I continued, stopping when I came to a photo of my grandmother standing beside her father, Max. He stared grimly into the camera, his eyes squinting behind wire-framed glasses, while my grandmother, her head tilted slightly toward him, had an almost sly smile, as if she knew something he didn’t, as if she knew her life would be anything but predictable.

This picture was taken in 1925, after her family had fled Russia, when Nana’s future would certainly have been tenuous, yet she stood tall and proud, like the grandmother I remembered before she got sick. I smuggled the photo out of my aunt’s apartment, determined to write my grandmother’s story one day.

Now, I wish I could tell Nana that her difficult journey to Canada inspired me to write my first book, that her struggle with religion has given me a healthy dose of skepticism, along with an acceptance of people, whatever their faith, and that her determination to get a degree in a foreign country and language has instilled in me a perseverance which keeps me going, even on my darkest days.

It will be years (hopefully) before I become a grandmother but when I am, I’ll be called Nana, I’ll tell my grandchildren about their great-great grandmother, and I’ll make sure they know that being different, anything but ordinary, is the best way to be.

 

–Shelly Sanders’ first novel, Rachel’s Secret, comes out April 16, 2012. Inspired by her grandmother’s experiences in Russia, Rachel’s Secret is about a 1903 pogrom that resulted in the exodus of Jews to Shanghai, the U.S., and Canada. In creating Rachel’s character, Shelly drew on her grandmother’s desire to overcome the boundaries set on women at the time.

 

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Tags: cancer, grandmother, memoir, pogrom, Russian Jews, secrets

Posted By Shelly Sanders on February 28, 2012

I resented the stereotypes I faced as a girl in the 1970’s, when pink was for girls and blue was for boys, when dancing was for girls and sports was for boys. In middle school, I rebelled, dressing like a boy in overalls, cutting my hair, and challenging boys in tetherball. My heroes were Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, for holding her own with boys, Tatum O’Neil, for outplaying boys in baseball in the movie, Bad News Bears, and Kristy McNichol, who also sported overalls and a stubborn resistance to feminine wiles in the television series, Family.

So when I’d reached the second page of the introduction in Michele Landsberg’s new book, Writing the Revolution, I was struck by one of her reflections: “It was difference that made me what I became.” She’s referring to her staunch refusal to accept the limitations placed on her as a female in the predominantly male-oriented 1950’s. Seeing the advantages her older brother experienced, just because he was male, set her on a
lifetime crusade for equality. Using powerful and eloquent words, she’s become the icon for female activism in Canada.

As I read how Landsberg peeled back the layers of old-school masculine superiority, I couldn’t help but compare my experiences with hers to see how opinions have changed. What’s interesting, and somewhat disturbing, however, is the fact that although Landsberg is the same age as my
mother, another generation altogether, in many cases things haven’t improved as much as I would have expected.

In her home, for example, Landsberg was annoyed at the disparity between her brother and herself; he was able to attend an elite academic school not open to females.

“I was a child feminist because of the gender preference, privileges, and entitlements heaped on males in our mid-century culture, made
sharply visible to me in the special status awarded my beloved brother, older than I by only a year and a half…I swam against the current in every possible way, defiantly wearing pigtails and my brother’s fly-front blue jeans to my suburban high school in the crinolined and simpering 1950’s.”

In my house, my brother’s affinity for sports, especially hockey, took precedence over everything else. I spent countless weekends at cold arenas breathing in stale coffee, refusing to join the other sisters who had started a cheerleading squad for the team. I sat by myself in the stands,
reading, and wondered what was so interesting about getting a puck into a net. I grew up resenting the sport for all it had taken from me. My brother ended up with a full hockey scholarship to Boston University. Though I’d worked hard in high school, achieving good marks, I received no accolades, no scholarships, and had to work part-time through both of my degrees. Sports, dominated by men when I was growing up, were more important than doing well in school. This was the clear message I received and today, sports scholarships are still going strong, while high academic achievement merits a few thousand dollars. Yes, girls are getting field hockey, soccer, and hockey scholarships now, but there are fewer available; meanwhile boys’ sports continue to dominate with higher-valued  scholarships and much more visible front-page media coverage.

As a busy mother of three, trying to balance parenthood and writing, I’m in awe of how well Landsberg merged motherhood, marriage, and
her career, how she wrote so persuasively and emotionally about pivotal issues such as violence against women, child pornography, rape, women’s rights in Afghanistan, and gun control. Her opinions resonated with me, as did her fierce support for both stay-at-home and employed mothers.

“The hypocrisy-soaked phony war between stay-home and employed mothers is the most lying, reeking, rotten red herring that ever
created a diversionary stink.

“All mothers work; almost all will work for pay outside the home at some time in their mothering lives. And no mother, no woman,
created this ridiculously inefficient, human-hating social structure that plops all responsibility for children on the frail shoulders of individual families.”

Well said. And things are slowly changing. There is full-day kindergarten in Ontario now (though its future is in doubt because of the cost), specialized schools for kids with different religions, races, and interests, and parenting courses for single-parents, people new to Canada, and
for parents of kids with special needs.

I think about my oldest child, Amanda, in her first year of university, and how her childhood has differed from mine. She started playing soccer when she was four in a league that had an equal number of boys and girls. She even played on mixed teams for years. Now, she’s studying life
sciences and there are more girls on campus than boys, a trend that is prevalent at every Canadian university. In fact, there are just as many women studying medicine as men, and more females graduating with law degrees than males. Just the fact that she has such high aspirations, and has never felt inhibited because of her sex, makes me realize that her experiences have been different than mine, substantially better.

Much of this progress in equality is due to Landsberg, who wrote columns that have changed the way women are viewed and accepted. As I
finished Writing the Revolution, I wondered who will continue this movement when Landsberg steps down. We need a strong, passionate writer to challenge legal decisions, to hold politicians to their words, and to make sure we keep moving forward, not backward.

“Feminism dead?” she concludes. “They said that from the beginning, and they were always wrong: Feminism is a passion for justice and
equality, and that cannot die.”

–Shelly Sanders’ first  book—Rachel’s Secret (Second Story Press)—will be launched on Saturday, April 21, at a different drummer books in
Burlington, Ontario. She has received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council for the sequel.

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Tags: equality, Michele Landsberg, scholarships

Posted By Shelly Sanders on February 7, 2012

Only one course and a final writing project stand between me and my certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto. Seems like a no-brainer; finish the requirements and add the program to my list of achievements. Except the cost is $1,349, and I’ve already met my goal of becoming published. The question, then, is do I abandon the certificate even though it’s well within my grasp, or do I follow the advice I routinely give my children, and finish what I started? If cost wasn’t an issue, I’d already be signed up; I love classes of any kind, being with other curious and dedicated writers, venturing outside my little, lonely writing room. But I’m not sure I can justify spending more money on creative writing classes for myself, especially with one daughter in university and another due to begin in a year and a half.

In his piece in The New Yorker, “Show or Tell: Should creative writing be taught?” Louis Menand looks at the experiences of accomplished authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford, who attended writing programs, to calculate the value of these courses.

“The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart,” writes Menand.

I recall my first creative writing class, and how we had to write a couple of paragraphs, then read them to the class to be critiqued. Though I’d been a journalist for years, and knew the value of editing, I was terrified of opening my personal writing up to criticism. I worried that my words wouldn’t be interesting, that people wouldn’t want to read stories I made up in my head. Any criticism would feel more like a personal assault than critiques of my newspaper and magazine articles.

The teacher, author Elizabeth Ruth, gave us the ground rules for providing feedback: start with something positive, and don’t focus on grammar or punctuation, but on character, the setting, and the dialogue. Does it ring true? Do you want more?

I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember that by the end of the eight-week session, I was comfortable giving and receiving criticism, my scenes were more vivid and authentic, my dialogue believable, and my characters were better defined.

Menand goes on to explain that the most revered writing program in the world, The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which has had sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners come through its doors, refuses to take credit for its alumni successes. Menand quotes the Workshop’s website, which claims that their writers are high-calibre before they arrive, that writing cannot be taught, and that they merely encourage talented people.

After a number of courses with the University of Toronto, I see that there is some truth to what The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop says. There are no strict pre-requisites for the certificate program I’m in, and over the past two years I’ve encountered writers at all levels, from people who don’t speak English very well, to people who refuse to accept criticism of any kind, to people who are skilled and disciplined. I also see that among the graduates of this program, are authors like Marina Nemat (Prisoner of Tehran) who wrote her first manuscript before taking a course. This was also the case for me; I had written many drafts of Rachel’s Secret prior to enrolling in this program, and was already looking for a publisher when I took my first class. However, I did begin two of my other manuscripts during various classes, and received invaluable feedback from fellow students and teachers which helped me see flaws in my style. And in critiquing other peoples’ writing, I learned more about creating authentic dialogue, character development, and consistent narrative voice.

In the end, Menand concludes that “in spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work…I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.”

For me, I did learn about the craft of creative writing through my courses; I’d been a journalist for so long that I needed to break out of my concise, non-fiction style, and open up into a more visual, reflective voice. I learned from all of the people I met in classes, and have become even more observant about the world around me, and realize the simplest things can be the most meaningful.

I understand that it’s impossible to calculate the financial value of writing courses. You don’t need a Masters’ degree in creative writing in order to get published, or any piece of paper to prove you can write. The proof is between the covers of a book, the pages that are printed by a publisher who endorses your ability and talent. Still, I’m grateful for all the constructive criticism I received during my writing classes, and happily admit that I’m a better writer because of this program. Over the last three years, I’ve discovered that writing is a never-ending journey and the more I write, the more critical I am of my own work. In order to keep moving forward, to keep improving, I must continue seeking input from others.
My class begins April 24.

—Shelly Sanders is the author of Rachel’s Secret, published by Second Story Press (Orca Books in the U.S.) She has received a grant to work on the sequel and is currently booking school visits for Rachel’s Secret.

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Tags: Elizabeth Ruth, Joyce Carol Oates, Louis Menand, Marina Nemat, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, the New Yorker, University of Toronto

Posted By Shelly Sanders on December 16, 2011

Fewer kids enjoy reading today than ever before. At least, that’s what a report released December 12 by People for Education has found. Disappointing but not entirely surprising, given the impossibly large number of video games, Internet sites, movies, and TV channels competing for kids’ attention these days. Kids are used to instant gratification; they don’t want to spend time reading books with complicated plots or characters, or even magazine articles longer than a page. I suppose they’re simply mirroring their parents, many of whom get their news on-line, abbreviated articles highlighting the main facts.

You would think that book sellers would be looking at new ways to entice kids to read. Not so. Starting in January, books will only have 45 days on the shelves at Indigo, before being returned to publishers. Currently, they’re on shelves for 75 days, an extra month, before getting shipped back. And Heather Reisman, owner of Indigo Books & Music Inc., is also planning to increase her stock of non-book products from 25 percent to 50 percent within a couple of years. Her message is clear—she wants fewer books on her shelves because she sees a decreased number of people buying them.

Based on the report released by People for Education, she’s probably right. If only half of Ontario students from grades 3 to 6 said they enjoy reading now, compared to 76 percent of Grade 3 and 65 percent of Grade 4 students a decade ago, the future for reading looks grim.

In a Toronto Star article, Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education, suggests the Ontario government “set targets to boost the number of students who say they like to read, just as it has set targets for standardized test scores.”

But in a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star, a parent (Martha Kurtz Hogan), argues that standard tests are to blame for turning kids off reading. “The relentless focus on preparing for the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) tests meant that, instead of being urged to find books they loved and talk to the class about why they loved them, students were endlessly being asked to identify three text-to-self (or text-to-text or text-to-world) connections in set stories assigned at school.”

Though I realize the purpose of standardized tests, as a parent, writer, and avid reader, I have to agree that forcing particular stories upon students, and then evaluating them in terms of expected test answers, would pretty much destroy anyone’s love of reading.

Perhaps the solution is more time for reading in classrooms. Any books will do, so that students can discover new genres and styles. And there should be no assignments associated with this reading time. I remember having a couple of teachers who allowed ten to fifteen minutes a day for reading. It was my favourite time of the day, when I could immerse myself in words and images, and forget about fitting in. This didn’t seem to take away from what they needed to teach, and I don’t recall any major behavioural problems during this reading time. Well, maybe there were one or two kids who had zero interest in reading, but there will always be a couple of non-conformists.

We also need to ensure that books are accessible to all students, regardless of location, language, or income. This means books in stores (please pay attention Ms. Reisman), media campaigns promoting reading, making it look as cool as it is (think Nike commercial with books), and more incentives for reading from schools, bookstores, and libraries.

While there will continue to be debate about how to increase students’ love of reading, one thing is clear: if the number of devoted readers continues to fall, so too will the next generation’s ability to write well. I imagine a written world consisting mainly of concise text messages, and see the beauty words create disappearing as quickly as you can delete whole pages on the computer. I see shelves of books gathering dust in Value Village, as parents line up at a nearby Future Shop, paying hundreds of dollars for the latest video games, and wonder where we went wrong.

Shelly Sanders’ first book, Rachel’s Secret, will hit shelves in the U.S. and Canada April 16. This means you have until May 30, in Canada, to purchase this book before it’s whisked back to Second Story Press.

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Tags: Annie Kidder, EQAO, Heather Reisman, Indigo Books & Music, People for education, reading, standardized tests, Toronto Star

Posted By Shelly Sanders on November 16, 2011

The summer before I started high school, we moved from Rolling Meadows, Illinois, to Waterloo, Ontario where my father started his own business. Moving was not new for me (this was my fifth change of address and my sixth school), and neither was the anxiety that gripped my insides like a snake coiled around my gut. It was so hard for me to make friends in the first place, only to say goodbye within two years, that I’d spent many lunch periods in my previous schools hiding in the library.

I didn’t really mind being alone, surrounded by books. For me, a budding bookworm, it was a chance to read in peace, away from my annoying younger brother and sister, away from the constant stress of being the new kid. It was also an opportunity to expand my fiction background from Nancy Drew and Little House on the Prairie, to classics by Charles Dickens, Madeleine L’Engle, and Harper Lee. There weren’t a lot of books in my house, as neither of my parents were readers, so I had read and re-read my small collection over and over. The school library gave me new books to read, for free, and I loved the atmosphere— the smell of the books, and the promise of new stories, places, and people within their pages.

But library lunches were not meant to be in high school. For some strange reason, I was immediately taken in by the ‘cool’ group, which led me willingly down a not-so-stable path that included alcohol and smoking. I barely read at all for a year and a half, shunning books for parties. By the middle of the tenth grade, I was exhausted and looking for a way out. I changed high schools for a fresh start, and began eating my lunch in the library again. The continuous silence calmed me, and took away the familiar strain of being the new student. I re-read books that had warmed my heart, and read others, like Catcher in the Rye, that made me see how I’d been trying to be someone I wasn’t for the past year. The library became my sanctuary, the one place I could be myself.

At university, my love of libraries was still going strong, only I spent more time studying and writing papers than I did reading fiction there. And I started having problems getting books back on time, especially those I required for essays; often, I needed the book for more than the two-week loan period, but wouldn’t be able to renew it as another student had put a hold on the same book. Not wanting to lose the book when I was in the middle of an essay, I kept it out and paid the fine. At first, the amount was small, ten or twelve dollars, but by my fourth year, I racked up a couple hundred dollars in overdue fines. As I paid my last fine before graduating, I promised myself that never again would I have overdue books.

A few years and a couple of kids later, I was using the library again for movies, music, and books. My girls loved taking books and movies out of the library and before long, my limit of three items each was gone. I walked out with bags of books, thrilled that my kids were going to be avid readers. But I could never locate all the books in the house when they were due, and with a hectic schedule along with sleep deprivation, I sometimes forgot about the books until they were a week overdue. My fines escalated to gargantuan levels, with a dollar a day in charges for movies, and there were a few books that had mysteriously vanished in our house.

One day, when I stood at the checkout counter with my kids and discovered I didn’t have enough money to cover my fines, I used my oldest daughter’s library card so that we could check out books. For a few weeks I diligently got everything back in time, but old habits die hard. Again, I found myself standing at the checkout counter without enough money for overdue fines. This time I used my younger daughter’s card and vowed to be more responsible. And again I failed, misplacing a video somewhere. I ended up with three library cards and an embarrassingly high fine.

Now, when I think about all the fines I paid because of my own disorganization, I figure it was money well-spent. All three of my kids love books; my two oldest have volunteered at the library during the summer; the money I paid went toward a worthy cause; and my kids are obsessive about getting their library books back on time. As for me, I’ve realized that I simply can’t trust myself to adhere to the very reasonable library deadlines. I still use the library, to read and to write, but I buy my books. It’s cheaper for me.

Shelly Sanders is an avid reader and will have her first book—Rachel’s Secret—published by Second Story Press in the spring.

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Tags: Charles Dickens, Harper Lee, library, Little House on the Prairie, Madeleine L'Engle, Nancy Drew

Posted By Shelly Sanders on November 8, 2011

There are certain people, strangers I’ve never met, who have had significant impacts on me. Lucille Ball. Roald Dahl. Alfred Hitchcock. Alice Munro. Andy Rooney. So when I read that Rooney had died, just one month after his last appearance on 60 Minutes, a heavy sadness settled in my bones, for I had grown up with the irascible Rooney and his weekly comments about everything from diets to hangers to the President’s breakfast. I read his weekly newspaper columns and started watching 60 Minutes when I was in high school, and continue to watch it today with my kids, (when the stories interest them). But I never had to persuade them when it came to Rooney; even my youngest, now twelve, has been a fan for the last few years, waiting expectantly for Rooney’s craggy face to fill the screen, for his weekly satirical criticism.

What I loved most about Rooney, was his way of saying what the rest of us were thinking, the way he wrote so clearly, the way he made me laugh and think. Once, in the nineteen eighties, he talked about letter writing in his nationally syndicated newspaper column, and how this “is one of the good things about a civilized society, and it should be encouraged.” He went on to say that he didn’t get five “genuine, personal letters a year.” Today, thirty years later, this topic is even more relevant, as far as I’m concerned. Not only am I an unapologetic collector of stationary and note cards, I still look eagerly in the mail every day for a letter. The Christmas season is the best time of year for this, though the number of cards we receive has been dwindling lately. Letters kept from the past have shown us what life was like, what people were concerned about, what they did for fun, and how our language has evolved. E-mails are so temporary, they hardly seem to exist. By pressing a key, an e-mail can be deleted, lost forever in cyberspace. There won’t be the same record of our lives years from now. I agree with Rooney, who closed his column about letters by stating: “Personal letters should go for a five-cent stamp.”

Being open about his faults was another likeable trait about Rooney, especially when I shared the same defects. One week, he pointed out his poor memory and height. “Being tall and being able to remember things are probably the two most desirable human characteristics I don’t have,” he wrote in his column. Then he went on to say that he finds “people with good memories for names, exact times and dates are dull.” I don’t agree with his assessment of people with good memories; I actually married a man who can recite historical facts with alarming accuracy, and I depend on him to remember important details for both of us. It’s strange, though, how my husband has developed a more selective memory over the years, forgetting to pick up things on his way home from work, yet remembering the entire NFL schedule. But it was Rooney’s words at the end of this column that resonated with me: “When I look back at what I did a long time ago, it’s hard to think of it as me. I see it clearly, but it’s as if someone else was doing it. It’s only my memory of me that’s doing those things. It’s like looking at the water in a river. The river looks the same all the time, but the water is always different.”

Probably the column that affected me more than any other, was his tribute to his high school teacher, Mr. Hahn. “He didn’t do a lot of extra talking, but when he talked he was direct and often brilliant…He was the kind of person who gave teachers the right to be proud to be teachers.” Rooney was deeply affected by Mr. Hahn’s death, and had great remorse for not calling or writing to tell him that, “No one influenced my life more than he did. Now he’s gone and I don’t think I ever told him.” I also had a teacher like Mr. Hahn, my grade eleven English teacher. His name was John Wright and during his classes at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate, I developed the most important trait a writer can have—a thick skin. He covered my essays in red pen, devastating me in the process, for I thought I was pretty good. But Mr. Wright taught me that pretty good isn’t good enough, a philosophy I’ve carried around in my head since then, a way of thinking that helped me get through years of rejections. When I found out that my first book, Rachel’s Secret, was getting published, I wrote Mr. Wright a letter and thanked him for being such a good teacher.

When he was sixty, Rooney began to worry about age and the effect it would have on his body and his writing. “I hate it and I constantly inspect my brain and my body for signs of decline,” he said in his weekly column. This is a fear all of us have, judging by the enormous sales of anti-aging creams and the growth of the Botox industry. Like Rooney, I worry more about losing my lucidity than physically deteriorating. As long as I can read, write, and talk to people, I will be happy. Rooney ended up working for thirty-two more years after writing this column. On his last 60 Minutes broadcast, he said, “I wish I could do this forever.” He may not have been able to write forever, but he did what he loved almost right up to the day he died, and he did it well, going out in the same sardonic style that made him a household name. I’ll continue watching 60 Minutes, but as I’ve found already, without Rooney’s last word, it will never be the same.

Shelly Sanders’ first book, Rachel’s Secret, will be published in the spring by Second Story Press. She is represented by HSW Literary Agency.

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Tags: 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney, memory, teachers, writing

Posted By Shelly Sanders on October 25, 2011

My name almost killed my wedding. I wanted to keep my maiden name, the name I had grown into, the name on both of my degrees, the name on my first few magazine pieces. Shelly Sanders. But my husband, then fiancée, disagreed.

“It will be confusing for our future kids if we have different names,” Steve said. “Besides, both of our mothers changed their names when they got married.”

“That was a different generation,” I argued. “Neither of our mothers had careers after kids.”

We continued like this for days, volleying arguments back and forth like debaters, only there was more at stake than a trophy. And Steve made it clear he wasn’t going to budge. Now, let me just say that in every other matter of our relationship, he was laid-back and willing to compromise. Movies to see, restaurants to try, even our wedding plans. Not much fazed him, except my married name.

Eventually, I suggested hyphenating both of our last names. He thought about this for about one second.

“So you would have a hyphenated name and I wouldn’t?” he asked. “What about when we have kids? Do they take my name or your hyphenated name? Or do you want me to hyphenate my name with yours, so they’re the same?”

I could see his point. This could get complicated. Plus, I didn’t have a good track record with hyphenated names. My first name was legally Shelly-Ann, after both of my grandmothers. But as soon as I was old enough, I’d only answered to Shelly, much to my father’s annoyance (Ann was his mother’s name). I told him that Shelly-Ann sounded like a farm-girl’s name (The Walton’s was a big television show at the time), that I was teased at school for my double name, and that it was nothing personal against his mother’s name.

“Then, what happens when our kids get married?” Steve continued, gathering steam with every word. “Do they hyphenate their already-hyphenated name with their spouse’s name?”

I considered this, and realized that in a couple of generations, our descendants could be faced with the prospect of four last names. Still, I was willing to consider a hyphenated last name, so that my future children would think about both sides of their parentage.

A month before our wedding, Steve came home from work with a broad smile. A fellow lawyer had given him the answer we needed. Her maiden name had been added to her last name without a hyphen. She basically had three names.

Shelly Sanders Greer. This would be my name; I could shorten it to Shelly Greer for my personal life, and use Shelly Sanders Greer professionally. Our kids would have Greer as their last name and Sanders as a middle name.

This has worked well for the past twenty years; our three kids know they come from two equal, sometimes dysfunctional, sides. But then, after finding out my book—Rachel’s Secret—was going to be published, I found myself struggling with my name once more. Shelly Sanders Greer was so long and cumbersome for a book cover. But if I went with Shelly Greer, then people from way back, who knew me only as Shelly Sanders, wouldn’t make the connection.

In the end, the smooth and tidy alliteration of Shelly Sanders, plus the fact that Sanders is on my two degrees and on every article I’ve ever written, won me over. The only problem would be convincing my husband.

I told him my decision one morning, as he rushed to get ready for work. Probably bad timing but this was when I felt ready to break the news. He straightened his tie, grabbed his cell from our dresser and gave me a long, searching look, as if he was trying to determine if I really meant what I said.

“I had a feeling that’s what you’d do,” he said genially, without rancour. Then he told me to have a good day and headed down the stairs.

What? No argument? No discussion? I sat down on the edge of my bed and thought about his surprisingly calm reaction to the name he’d vehemently opposed twenty years ago. Maybe our time together had changed his mind about the importance of names, or maybe he simply agreed that the alliteration sounded good, or maybe, just maybe, he was just too worn out to argue.
–Shelly Sanders’ first book—Rachel’s Secret—will be published by Second Story Press in the spring, 2012. She is represented by the HSW Literary Agency in Toronto.

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Tags: hyphenated names, maiden name, Marriage, surname

Posted By Shelly Sanders on October 19, 2011

While I was at the University of Waterloo, working on my English degree, I became intimidated by the writers I studied, by their words and images that made me see ordinary things in new ways. Though I’d begun my studies with an eye to becoming a writer, I soon discarded this plan. I wasn’t good enough; words didn’t flow from me with ease. And I couldn’t think of anything to write about, anything that people would be interested in reading.

By the time I’d earned my degree, I was tired of dissecting books and short stories, of breaking down sentences, of trying to think about what writers were trying to say beneath their thin veils of words. I entered Ryerson where I honed my research and writing skills, and completed a two-year journalism degree. Journalism gave me the structure I was looking for, the built-in readership, and most importantly, the ideas. It was a perfect match—editors fed me topics and I produced stories. I wrote and people read my words. I became a quasi-expert on real estate, health issues, parenting, and interior design. The more I wrote, the more ideas I began to generate. Soon, my writing improved along with my confidence.

I went back and read some of the books I’d studied at Waterloo, books by Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje that had frightened me into complacency, and read them again. I was still frightened by their insight and genius, but somehow I appreciated their work more, and I was comfortable with them sitting high on the Canadian pedestal of literature.

At night and on weekends, when I wasn’t consumed by kids and their activities, I began to write creatively. The house grew messy but I plodded on with my words, until I had a first draft. It was a disaster, an historical fiction novel that went off in tangents with forgettable characters. Yet I had enjoyed the process, sitting down alone and living inside my head. I revised the draft of Rachel’s Secret, changed the point of view to balance the narrative, and wrote it again, and again. Then I enrolled in the University of Toronto’s creative writing program, where I learned three important facts about getting published in Canada:
1. It’s next to impossible to break into the small circle of agents and publishers.
2. Even if my manuscript was good, it would likely take at least three years to be published.
3. I would make more as a freelance journalist.

Discouraged, but not broken, thanks to a thick skin developed as a freelancer, and encouragement from author Joy Fielding, who taught one of the writing courses I took, I continued writing and editing, taking courses, and seeking feedback. I read every day, wrote every morning, and shoved thoughts of failure out of my mind. The newspaper and magazine world was crumbling anyway, due to an incredibly stupid idea to provide news for free on the Internet, so my freelance career was on shaky ground. What did I have to lose?

After a few unsettling rejections, I revised Rachel’s Secret once more and sent it out again. Then, I started writing another book, The Third Twin, and work-shopped bits and pieces of it in my writing classes. Readers were immediately drawn to the characters, they were intrigued by the plot, and by my images. My writing had improved. This was a small consolation in light of the fact that I still didn’t have an agent or a publisher for Rachel’s Secret.

I was in the grocery store when I received the news on my Blackberry. Second Story Press wanted to publish my manuscript. My heart stopped for a second; I was dizzy and held onto my shopping cart to keep from falling over. I read the e-mail again and again. Everything around me blurred into a thick, nonsensical haze.
A day later, an agent contacted me by e-mail, wanting to represent me and my manuscript. This time I was at the pharmacy without a cart. Unable to comprehend that not one but two different people believed in me and my story, I fell back against the shelves of toothpaste, knocking a few tubes of Crest onto the ground. A young woman bent down to pick them up, and asked me if I was all right. I nodded but could not speak. Not yet, I didn’t want to break the spell.

When the news had finally sunk in, after the contracts had been signed and I was waiting on yet another set of revisions from the publisher, I realized that luck had only a small part in my getting published, that perseverance and a willingness to accept criticism were key to my success.

Looking back at the young, immature girl I was when I graduated from university, I see that I needed time and experience to grow into the writer I am today. I also see that writing is a journey I’ll be on for the rest of my life, that there will be more criticism, and even more disappointments along the way. That the day my book hits the stores, will be an ordinary day for most people. But I’m going to celebrate, just a little, then I’ll go back to my computer and keep writing.
–Shelly Sanders’ first book, Rachel’s Secret, will be published by Second Story Press in the spring, 2012. It’s about a 1903 pogrom in Russia that led to the widespread emigration of Jews to the United States, China, and Canada.

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Tags: Joy Fielding, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje

Posted By Shelly Sanders on October 17, 2011

From Sierra Leone to New York City
How a child soldier grew up fighting, and then learned how to be a boy

Review by Shelly Sanders
A LONG WAY GONE
By Ishmael Beah
229 pp. Douglas & McIntyre, $14.00
My son is almost twelve and, apart from preferring books to television, he’s a normal kid who likes Lego, funny videos on You Tube, and moving up the belted ladder at karate. He’s a red belt, and asked me the other day if he could join the weapons class soon. Without hesitation, I said no, that weapons were not for kids, that he would never need to learn how to use them. Not in Canada. He promptly reminded me about child soldiers in other parts of the world. He’d learned about them through Free the Children, an advocacy group helping third-world children.
My son was right. There are hundreds of thousands of child soldiers in Africa, the Middle East, and even parts of Europe. Human Rights Watch says that some are as young as eight years old, and girls are not immune to this situation. It’s hard to imagine children shooting other children, but in his raw memoir—A Long Way Gone—Ishmael Beah paints such vivid images with his words that this brutal other world becomes real and heart-breaking. For me, it was even more difficult reading this story, for when it begins, Beah is just twelve years old, the age my son will be in less than a month.
Beah lets the reader know immediately that he is a survivor, starting off in New York City, where he lives and attended school after fleeing Sierra Leone. But this assurance of his own eventual safety does not lessen the horror as he takes readers on his years-long journey from his home in Mogbwemo to freedom in Guinea. “A bullet hit a tree directly above my head and fell on the ground next to me,” he writes, about a time he managed to escape rebel fighters. “I halted and held my breath. From where I lay, I saw the red bullets flying through the forest and into the night. I could hear my heart beat, and I had started breathing heavily, so I covered my nose to control it.”
The sense of loss Beah feels is constant throughout the book, as he wonders about his parents and his brothers, where they are and if they are even alive. At times, Beah wonders why he is the only member of his family to survive, and it is easy to see how lost he was, how easy it would have been to give up. “How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?” says Saidu, a boy travelling with Beah. “Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you.”
For three years, Beah fought to stay alive, eventually joining the army to fight against the rebels. He became numb to blood and death, saw his situation as a means of survival. He became wild, almost feral, living amongst others like himself. All of this changed when he was fifteen and turned over to UNICEF to be rehabilitated back into a boy. But it was hard to shake off the angry man he had become. “He pulled the knife out, and we continued kicking the boy until he stopped moving,” writes Beah, of the fight that broke out among the boys pulled away from the violence. “I wasn’t sure whether he was unconscious or dead. I didn’t care. No one screamed or cried during the fight. After all, we had been doing such things for years and were still on drugs.”
It took almost a year for Beah to be ready for the outside world again. He was sixteen and lived with an uncle he’d never met before in Freetown. When violence broke out again, he fled to Guinea and then to New York, and in 2007, the year this book was published, Beah was named UNICEF’s first Advocate for Children Affected by War.
Surely it has become clear to Beah why he survived, for he has brought a face to the many unknown armed children around the world.
For me, this book reinforces my view that children should not have weapons. My son will not be successful in changing my mind. He will, however, be given this book to read.
—Shelly Sanders’ first book—Rachel’s Secret—will be published by Second Story Press in the spring, 2012. It’s about a 1903 pogrom in Russia that led to the exodus of Jews to China, the United States, and Canada.

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Tags: child soldiers, Ishmael Beah

Posted By Shelly Sanders on October 16, 2011

There is hope for the English language, in spite of the new media filled with acronyms, misspelled words, and slang. This was the underlying message from Sali Tagliamonte, professor of linguistics, at the University of Toronto, during a lecture for parents of first-year students at Trinity College yesterday.

From the moment she began her talk, describing her own four kids who type with lightening speed and have private conversations over their phones and computers, I felt a certain kinship with Tagliamonte. My two daughters have refused to “be friends” with me on Facebook, and I constantly feel as if their friends are interrupting my conversations with them, as they type away on their phones with dextrous fingers.

“We don’t have access to their world,” explained Tagliamonte, referring to teens’ text talk, Facebook messages, and, more specifically, their Internet language, a hybrid form that she says is a mix of both oral and written language.

E-mail, the oldest computer-mediated communication (CMC) set the stage for this new and mysterious language in the 1970’s, and still tends to be most like traditional English with the lowest frequency of acronyms and short forms. It’s also eschewed by young people, who now see it as an “old person way to communicate.”

Internet Messaging, which emerged in 2006, features short, chunked sentences and in her research, Tagliamonte has found that it is, like E-mail, already old.
The most popular form of CMC for young people today, is texting on phones, which offers one-to-one capabilities. It also reflects diverse new language patterns that Tagliamonte says are changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Among these changes is the increased use of intensifiers such as so, really, and pretty. (He is so awesome, this is so boring.) Short forms and acronyms—gr8, u, ttyl, lol, np, haha—are also sprinkled throughout conversations studied by Tagliamonte, who found that the vast majority of acronyms used are variations of laughter.

Tagliamonte also discovered that that actual rate of use of acronyms was quite small, and she reminded parents that children have grown up surrounded by acronyms developed by our generation—DVD, TV, CIBC. She also found in essays, that students who used acronyms liberally in text conversations, wrote quite well with full sentences and correct spelling.

Still, she pointed out that our language has changed significantly from Shakespeare’s time, when ‘shall’ was commonly used, and it will continue to evolve, with the word choices we make defining our different generations.
In essays, the phrase, ‘going to’, is the norm, she explained. “But in Internet Messaging, this becomes, ‘gonna’, and in SMS texting, it’s, ‘Imma’.

“There is a structural continuum of forms and patterns,” says Tagliamonte. “And there is stability in grammar in spite of the new media.”

As a writer, avid reader, and a mother of three, I was relieved by Tagliamonte’s findings. Yes, students have created a new language, but they still respect and adhere to the basic tenets of English. This means, hopefully, they’ll continue to read the classics, and will continue to write so that we “older people” can understand what they mean, at least part of the time.

But I still can’t get into their social conversations; their world is still a mystery to me, and I don’t see that changing. Ever. All I can do is ban their phones from meals, and maybe invent a few middle-age acronyms to keep them in the dark.

MAA (Middle-age Acronyms)
1. KOS (kid over shoulder)
2. OMAB (oh my aching back)
3. DA (doctor’s appointment)
4. VT (very tired)
5. TAN (taking a nap)
–Shelly Sanders
Sanders’ first book—Rachel’s Secret—will be published by Second Story Press in the spring, 2012. Sanders is also a freelance writer with articles in Maclean’s, Reader’s Digest, the Toronto Star, and Canadian Living.

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Tags: acronyms, Sali Tagliamonte, student language