by Susan Juby
Only the viewer can say if I succeeded.
With love and respect,
Normandy Pale
I would like to thank the following people for helping me to finally tell the truth: Ms. Fowler, Dusk Weintraub-Lee, Neil Sutton, Mr. Rowan Sutton, Aimee Danes, Mrs. Blaire Dekker, Zinnia McFarland, Lisette DeVries, Brian Forbes, Prema Hardwick, Tyler Jones, Randy Thomas, Officer Edward Jones, Principal Manhas, and everyone at Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design.
As for everyone else? Good effort.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My undying thanks to:
My agent, Hilary McMahon, for everything and then some;
Honored test readers Andrew Gray, Bill Juby, Stephanie Dubinsky, and in the early stages, Jamie Sigmundson and Tai Deacon, for smart, funny, helpful feedback;
My colleague, Marni Stanley, for generously sharing her expertise and vast library of graphic novels;
Former student and current illustrator Trevor Cooper, for his astonishing artistic talent and general excellence;
Mat Snowie, for helping me make “promotional” videos and being a delightful mix of calm, creative, and competent;
My students at Vancouver Island University, who are more hilarious and interesting than your average;
VIU First Nations Studies professors Keith Smith, Laura Cranmer, and elder Ray Peters, for advice and suggestions;
All the fabulous folks at Penguin Canada, particularly my beloved Lynne Missen and Nicole Winstanley;
Everyone at Viking Children’s Books, especially Ken Wright, Kim Ryan, Denise Cronin, Kate Renner, Janet Pascal, Abigail Powers, Susan Jeffers Cassel, Cara Petrus—
And super special mention to Sharyn November, only the best champion a writer could ask for. Her magnificent hair is the perfect accessory for such a startling and original mind;
My husband, James, and our puppy, Rodeo. I’m glad only one of you steals socks and barks, or this book would never have been completed;
And myself, for making these acknowledgments the most Academy Awards–ish ever.
SUSAN JUBY is the author of many novels for teenagers and adults. She is best known for Alice, I Think, the first of the Alice MacLeod trilogy, which was made into a successful television series. She is also the author of a memoir, Nice Recovery, and the adult comic novel Home to Woefield and its sequel, Republic of Dirt: Return to Woefield.
She is currently working on another book set at the Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design.
Susan Juby lives with her husband and their dog in Nanaimo, B.C., Canada, the setting of many of her books (including this one). Her website is www.susanjuby.com, and she Tweets at @thejuby.
TREVOR COOPER is a graduate of Vancouver Island University’s visual art program and a former student in Susan Juby’s writing classes. He lives in Nanaimo, where he draws pictures in a studio in the attic above his parents’ house.
His website is www.trevcoop.com.
1. That would be you, Ms. Fowler!
2. Such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.
3.
4. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” first published in Harper’s Magazine as “Shipping Out” (1996). Interesting fact: at first you think the essay’s going to be about how wonderful it is to go on a luxurious cruise, but it turns out to be about death. Highly recommended for depressive readers as well as those who like bitter humor, lists, and footnotes.
5. Ms. Fowler, may I compliment you on how patient you are with the nonreaders in our class?
6. I can’t wait to write my acknowledgments for this project! It’s going to be like writing an Academy Awards speech for an award that I gave to myself!
7. More about her later.
8. Just to show I’ve been paying attention in class, creative nonfiction refers to stories that employ the techniques of fiction, such as being interesting and fun to read, as opposed to fiction that has a few true bits. Notable contemporary practitioners include Jon Krakauer, Annie Dillard, and John Vaillant. Problematic practitioners include James Frey and Greg Mortenson.
9. Front matter is things like tables of contents, author’s notes, prologues, prefaces, and copyright pages.
10. Please tick your top choice for epigraph. I can’t decide.
11. I wasn’t sure whether this should be called a prologue or a preface. As far as I can tell, a preface is more common in nonfiction. Feel free to advise. Would it sound like sucking up to say that I’m really enjoying this creative writing project so far?
12. For the gentle reader who has no knowledge of the subject, a truth commission (also known as a truth and reconciliation commission) is established to help a country’s citizens find out the truth about abuses of human rights (such as genocide and torture and false imprisonment) and make recommendations—that’s the “reconciliation”—about how to go forward. Think apartheid. Think Canadian residential schools for First Nations peoples. Dusk, Neil, and I were working on a completely different scale, obviously, but we didn’t give much thought to reconciling ourselves or anyone else to the truths we found. Why is this a problem? Consider, if you will, the Oxford Dictionary definition of reconciliation: 1. The restoration of friendly relations; 2. The action of making one view or belief compatible with another. I think we can agree that we may have screwed up by leaving that part out.
13. Serving oddballs in grades ten through twelve since 2007.
14. A direct quote from Ms. Dubinsky, who teaches Women and Art: A Wild History at G. P. Academy.
15. Ms. Fowler, I just got your feedback on my first submission. The timing couldn’t be better! You suggested I stop beating around the bush about my personal history and lo! This submission just happens to be about my personal history, specifically as it pertains to my sister. It’s like we’re reading each other’s minds!
Also you are probably drawing some conclusions about me, Dusk, and Neil, conclusions that may be shared by other readers. After all, in addition to your extensive collection of “how to write and feel good about it” books by Anne Lamott and Co., you are a highly trained guidance professional with your own copy of the DSM-V. You have probably diagnosed Dusk as an angry depressive, me as a neurotic, and Neil as a young man overcompensating for self-esteem issues with excessive focus on hot girls, sun tanning, early 1970s films and fashion, and poor boundaries. You wouldn’t be wrong. But there’s more to us than that, as I think this story will prove. Anyway, carry on! (Aren’t you glad you’re only a part-time guidance counselor? Could you imagine listening to stuff like this full-time?)
16. According to what we learned in class, backstory, flashbacks, digressions, and on-the-page musing are all welcome in creative nonfiction. I plan to take full advantage of that fact.
17. If you don’t know what exposition is, you have not been paying attention in your creative writing class! If you have been away due to a legitimate case of mono or mumps, exposition gives important background information about characters and setting and what happened before the story starts. Exposition can be useful. It can also stall a story deader than my truck on a hill.
18. Yes, the connection to the Chronicles of Narnia is intentional.
19. At least, I don’t think she does.
20. P.S. Thank you for your editorial feedback on my last chapter. It was very encouraging! In other news, I saw you and Mr. Wells talking at the entrance to the Guidance Office. I’m going to tell myself that the fact that you had a copy of my last chapter in your hand is a coincidence. He’s not supposed to read this until you’ve approved the first draft. Still, he got all blushy when I walked up, so that’s interesting. Okay. Carry on.
21. I hope you approve of the cliff-hanger at the end of Chapter Two. It wasn’t intentional. I was just tired out and couldn’t
continue. Maybe the cliff-hanger was invented by an exhausted writer.
22. As noted, there are other reasons her stories are painful, but there’s no need to harp on that.
23. Now I forge into that difficult territory in which I write about one of your colleagues and refer constantly to the class handout on libel and slander and how not to get sued for your work of creative nonfiction.
24. I think I’m overusing footnotes. I’ll try to cut back. As for the correct placement of superscripts, let’s worry about that later. I like little numbers popping up at random in the beginning or middle of a sentence! It keeps things lively. Action-packed, you might say!
25. Character markers being those smallish details that tell a bigger story about a person. Examples might include the school a person attends—Ivy League versus community college, art school versus technical; or the vehicle a person drives—Lexus versus Firefly; clothes—Hermès scarves versus ponchos. See? I pay attention in class!
26. For some reason, “among her” sounds great here, but I know it’s wrong. I’m going to keep it in place, with a line through it, so you see that your editorial feedback is getting through (and is probably having a negative impact on my sense of imaginative freedom).
27.
28. It is too bad the school sounds like a funeral home, but you can’t have everything.
29. You know: ostriches are famous for putting their heads in the sand to avoid unpleasant realities. Maybe the connection with me isn’t obvious at this point in the story, but I feel I must mention it in case I can get credit for noticing thematic connections, which are extremely important in works of creative nonfiction.
30. It’s funny how when you start a story you might not be sure what you want to say or how to say it, but the more you write, the clearer it becomes. I would not have expected that, had I not embarked on this project. Before I continue, I wanted to say that I noticed yesterday that you were wearing not just lipstick, but also, forgive me for pointing it out, a new scent. In English, I noticed that Mr. Wells also wore a new scent. He didn’t overshoot the mark into Axe Body Spray territory, but he definitely smelled of something effortful. Coincidence? Ha! Won’t it be funny and charmingly awkward when you two confab over this chapter at the end of term! I know you told me not to make comments about you and Mr. Wells in the text, but footnotes aren’t really the text, as you’ve pointed out when you say that they have a way of “pulling you out of the text.” Anyway, it’s like you always tell us in class: a writer must be brave and honest. Politeness is the death of good prose. God, I kill myself sometimes. Anyway, let me transition seamlessly back to the primary narrative . . .
P.S. Thanks also for your comments on the last chapter. I know it had too much backstory but I appreciate that you think it’s necessary and that it works. I promise to focus on action as much as possible from now on.
31. The word property should give you some idea about how the relationship between writers and film companies works. Yes, I am repeating something I heard my sister’s agent say.
32. Since you are a dedicated creative writing teacher/guidance counselor, I won’t tell you exactly how much money Keira’s been offered. (Salt: stop looking at that wound!) Just know that it’s an obscene amount.
33. Poignant background detail: my parents both wanted to be artists and go to art school. My dad wanted to make models for architects, and my mom wanted to do some sort of graphic design. But right after high school, while they were working to save money, they got pregnant with Keira and they didn’t have much family support and so they had to give up their dreams. They’ve mentioned about thirty thousand times how much they would have loved to attend a school like Green Pastures. It goes without saying that they are familiar with living vicariously through their kids. Mostly Keira.
34. It is.
35. Dad was president until the unfortunate incident (his extramarital affair) with the checkout girl. Whose uncle happened to be the secretary. The nice gay couple, Georges and Claude, are the only ones who still speak to him.
36. Because if there’s anything creative writing teachers love, it’s specific, concrete visual details.
37. By “Earth mother” I mean the mother who exists in the Earth realm of my sister’s comics, not a hemp-trouser-wearing, quinoa-eating, downward-dog-doing mom.
38. And because she had to give up her dreams to raise two kids.
39. Sad, specific, concrete detail: I kept all of them.
40. It goes without saying that my mom’s parents hadn’t exactly been supportive of her teenage dreams, and my dad’s mom couldn’t afford to help him, either.
41. If you really want to know, the Chronicle spells out a version of the whole sordid affair in unsparing detail. And no, the story about the underpants was not true.
42. School motto: Sustainability and Creativity in All Things. Of course, Green Pastures being Green Pastures, our school motto is always written in multiple languages, including Island Hul’q’umin’um’ (the living language of the Snuneymuxw traditional territories, of which Nanaimo is a part), French, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin, and Braille.
43. Parisian French. French-Canadian. Either/or. (I have never been to Quebec or to France. I’m just impressed by Frenchness in all forms.)
44. Like this here work of creative nonfiction.
45. You work in an art-focused high school, so I’m sure you understand the significance of this. It’s a bit like saying you’d run over God in a Christian high school.
46. For those of us who never get invited to vision board parties, not even late, such events involve cutting out magazine images that represent your hopes and dreams and gluing them to a piece of cardboard. You use the resulting collage of lifestyle and product images to focus your aspirations.
47. It is a nice change from some of the more classically technical approaches.
48. This happened in 2010.
49. Which reminds me, I saw you and Mr. Wells talking in the parking lot after the riot. You laugh nicely together.
50. I use photographs as my guide. Think of Chuck Close’s portrait tapestries. That’s the effect I’m aiming for.
51. Meaning the body forms a fibrous shell around a foreign body, such as a breast implant. According to my online research, if this shell hardens, it can become quite painful—another reason I’m not going to spend the two hundred thirty dollars I have in my savings account on that particular upgrade.
52. I don’t know if he looked pained because he was worried about the state of Number Two or because he realized how far Aimee’s confession put him into the friend zone.
53. I guess I don’t need to tell you that, Ms. Fowler.
54. According to Wikipedia, this phrase was coined by Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Random House, 1937) and is often applied to the city of her childhood, Oakland, California. She also said “Rose is a rose is a rose.” I find that quote less compelling. Perhaps due to its repetitiveness.
55. In prison, they call that sort of thing “going gay for the stay.” Or so I hear.
56. The screech of metaphors crashing into each other was overwhelming. That probably added to my pain.
57. You, Ms. Fowler, may have noticed that I’m a big fan of warming up, or, as you have sometimes called it: repeating myself. Which reminds me, you looked really nice in that blue dress you had on yesterday. Mr. Wells was totally staring at you when you walked by. How is me being a fan of warming up connected to you and Mr. Wells? I think you know. First it’s scent. Next it’s blue dresses. I smell long walks on a warm beach in someone’s future!
58. Known for a time as the Queen Charlotte Islands. Haida Gwaii is on my list of places to visit at the first opportunity due to its culture and natural beauty.
59. I figure the starfish is probably a
psychologically revealing choice on Lisette’s part. Wikipedia says that because some starfish can digest food outside the body, they hunt prey much larger than their mouths, including clams and oysters, arthropods, small fish, and mollusks. Starfish may also supplement their diets with algae or organic detritus.