Reflections on The Novice Author at Eighty, Now Eighty -One

One year ago, I wrote about the novice author becoming eighty. That novice author is me. Now as I approach a year to the day, I am eighty-one on the cusp of launching my new novel “Out of Place”. I posed a question to myself back then, in the words of Mary Oliver: Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life ?* The poet’s quote moves me today to realize that somewhere within my unconscious as I wrote my novel, my characters, Martha and Anna were asking a life question of themselves, a question that played out into their lives- where is home when nothing is certain, where do I find place in the midst of bewilderment and the unexpected? 

I realize in retrospect, that even though their lives were set in another time, they were two women living in the midst of a world that was precarious and threatening. Two women finding their way home.  

In early 2020 I asked: What do I hope for in the truth of my life, as it unfolds in what I call “the unpredictable and wildness of unanticipated changes?”  When I wrote those words in January 2020, I knew nothing of a pandemic, I thought life would bring the usual chances for this expat living in Oregon to return to Canada every so often. I thought I’d continue to go back, see old friends, see my family.  To quote W. H. Auden, “I was wrong.” The pandemic said no.

Yet, in the midst of uncertainty arises the steadfastness of a creative spirit, my own and that of the collective. A year ago, as I was writing Out of Place, I had a story to tell, one that I set in the early part of the twentieth century, one that held the despair of that time: the Great War, the disasters of loss, the deadliness of conflict, and yes, a pandemic in which my grandmother cared for her family. I have kept a treasured letter over the years, one from my Grandfather to his daughter, my mother. It was written February 29th, 1920. 

She’d left the farm to go into Nurse’s training, a year after a terrible war that had left deep scars upon families, neighbours and friends. The 1918 pandemic was sweeping the world. A young woman, named Anna, in “Out of Place,” now embodies the spirit and mettle of my mother.   My grandfather writes with love and admiration for what my mother had set out to do with her life in an unsettled time.

“Though it would be great if you were through with training and could be more with us at home, I know you will find the next two years will pass quickly and though you meet with many sad and sorrowful cases, I am sure you will receive many a God Bless you from those you nurse and wait upon. Your mother is pretty well tuckered out with nursing the family. Your brother is recovering from the flu, and others around us are trying not to get it. Hoping this will find you in good health and though you will have trying times I hope you will also have a good share of brightness and pleasure. I am well and will conclude with love to you Hazel.  Your loving dad.”

Grandpa died in 1922.Thus I never was able to know him except through stories and letters like this one. Yet as I wrote my novel, I discovered his heart and who he might have been, and he too landed on the pages of “Out of Place” as Earl Sloan, a good and kind farmer. 

I’m sharing these thoughts with you, as I recognize how parts of myself and my past have breathed life into the story of “Out of Place.”    Here am I, early into my ninth decade grateful for the creative spirit who continues to feed my passion for story, and for memories kept in boxes and in mind.    

So, what does a wild and precious life mean in our twenties when we might have a sense of beginnings, of taking new paths? In our fifties, our seventies?  As we store up years, do we accumulate wisdom and hold room for the unpredictable and the wildness of unanticipated changes?  

Today, I look from my window out over a snowy valley of junipers that stretch to the horizon. I’m considering what my wild and precious life is offering to me as I enter a new decade. There’s rich soil in imagination, and in remembrance.   

I’m an author. I haven’t always been one, and thus, the word novice in my title. Teacher, professor, counsellor — all these roles have nourished me and brought me to this place in time. I want to write about the ordinary and the adventurous, to unravel the collective memories, the conscious and unconscious narratives of life’s journey. On this, my heroine’s journey, I’ve decided to create a path beyond the expected and the comfortable.  I pronounced my courageous, venturesome self in charge. Rather like my mother in 1918.  Life is and has been, a steadfast movement of growing into my truth, hearing my creative spirit speak to me loud and clear, about my one wild and precious life.   

To Be Continued….  

* Oliver, Mary. The Summer Day. In Devotions: Selected Works. NY. Random House

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Milree Latimer is a retired teacher/professor and expat Canadian living in Central Oregon with her husband Jerry and their three cats, Arthur, George and Justice. She is the author of a memoir and two novels, Those We Left Behind and Out of Place.

OUT OF PLACE

Where is home when nothing is certain? 1913. Martha, fifteen years old, is sent from an orphanage in Dublin to relatives she’s never met in Canada, to her cousin, Anna, a kindred spirit, to her aunt who loathes her. Here Martha uncovers a tragic family history. When WWI occurs, Anna, voyages to France to care for wounded and loses herself in shell shock. Martha leaves the emptiness of her adopted family and becomes a wartime farmerette. Her life is as a farmer, mother, a wife to Charlie coming home from war, broken. In 1938, Simon Lansky, a German Jewish professor asks for help in rescuing his daughters from a dreadful fate. Martha and Anna, hardened to war and its torments, travel to Europe to rescue the girls.

Will Simon survive the war and reunite with his daughters?

Will war define Martha and Anna, determine where they belong?

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Category: On Writing