Fact or Fiction?

A friend and I talked about what we were reading the other day. She said she had no time for fiction. “None of it’s true, it’s a waste of time.”

Considering we’d both majored in literature back in university, I was rather stunned with her summation. “But fiction is a form of art.”  

        "Who has time for art in today’s world?”

I do, I thought to myself. I need art now more than ever. “Don’t you think art is a way to make sense of today’s world?” I asked. 

“I have no patience for art,” she replied. “It’s been replaced by technology. Why look at a painting when you can see a photograph?” 

I shot back, “But art isn’t there to mimic reality, it’s used to interpret reality. It’s not enough to have just the facts.”

She frowned. “It’s not? Tell me why.” 

“We need to know whose truth we’re reading. Who took the photo? Who researched the story? Facts might seem honest, but like numbers, they can be manipulated.” 

She raised her eyebrows at that jab. “Are you saying everything is fiction?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know … but I know that everything has more than one angle to it, more than one perspective.”  

“Of course,” she scoffed. “We need to trust our sources. You can’t believe everything you read.”

“In fiction, when you enter other people’s heads,” I offer, "you know that's what you're doing."

“Right,” said my friend. “I’d rather focus on figuring out my own brain.”

“Fiction can help with that,” I suggest.

“So can facts.”

Our talk ends as we agree to disagree. I’ll continue reading and writing fiction because I know that I’m not able to tell the truth … I can only interpret what I experience … and compare it to other’s perspectives.

Of course, I read non-fiction. I love it … especially memoirs with their limited, but authentic point of view. They become an important part of my research. Historical fiction weaves fact and fiction together. Those two strands grow into a braid of three perspectives … the facts, the story, and the reader. 

I’ve always considered truth to be a showing, not a telling, revealed between the cracks of a storyline.  How did Leonard Cohen put it? “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” 

For other thoughts on this fact vs. fiction topic:

https://annejanzer.com/stories-fiction-facts-truth/

https://stephaniestorey.com/blog/historical-fiction-history-or-fiction

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/aug/06/lying-historical-fiction

https://jennybhattwriter.com/hfcn-04-reading-historical-fiction/

https://www.cbc.ca/books/cheryl-parisien-wrote-her-historical-fiction-book-the-unweaving-as-a-way-to-embrace-her-m%C3%A9tis-heritage-1.7383541

 “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”    E.L. Doctorow

And isn't connection what we crave as humans … to understand and, in turn, to be understood?  

Hello

Every day is a special day for somebody or something.  Did you know that today is World Hello Day?  New to me but I like the concept. Supposedly it’s to highlight peace through conversation rather than through violence. Rather relevant to our current turbulent times. 

Hiking in the Bavarian mountains with
a Grüß Gott echoing in my ears

How to celebrate? It’s suggested we say hello to at least ten people today. Sounds simple enough. Through the course of a day, I often have a string of errands to run and a variety of people with whom to interact. Usually saying hello seems natural but there are times it feels forced … especially if it’s not intended as a preamble to further interaction. Strangers on our Manitoba streets aren’t prepared for random ‘hellos.’

I got used to strange hellos when I worked in Europe a long time ago. Walking about in between shifts as a serving person in a Bavarian mountain town, I’d be greeted with a ‘grüß Gott’.  It literally means ‘greet God’ and its intended to say, ‘if you happen to see God before I do, then say hello for me, ie. put a good word in for me.’ 

So hello, bonjour, Guten Tag, hola, ciao, waciye, and Grüß Gott.  Maybe world peace needs us all just to say hello to each other. To not be invisible to each other, but to see each other as fellow travellers and then keep going along our merry way.  Wouldn't we all feel a little better with a cheery hello directed at us? Have a nice day! 

Finding Sonder in Historical Saskatchewan

Closer to Far Away, Kristin Butcher’s newest middle grade novel (she’s published dozens) is set a hundred years ago in small town Saskatchewan. Lucy, the 13-year-old protagonist, struggles to accept the sudden death of her mother and copes by trying to be a replacement mother to her 5-year-old brother, a housemaid for her workaholic banker-father, and a busy-body nosing about her older brother’s unsavory new connections. 

It’s a stiff-upper-lip family and everyone seems isolated in their pain.  The death of the mother is the elephant in the room that they carefully side-step in different ways. Lucy resents any help from either the hired maid, Mrs. Jenkins, or her Aunt Faye. I couldn’t help but think of the Sound of Music where the orphaned children react with hostility towards the young novice nun, Maria, sent from the convent. In a poignant scene Aunt Faye says, “Life is all about change, Lucy.” (p.215) and I found myself shedding a few tears along with Lucy who finally releases the grief inside her. 

Kristin Butcher is a master storyteller with a warm and engaging style.  Like with her previous novels, most recently The Seer Trilogy, I sink into her fictional worlds knowing that I can trust the author to offer up both a page-turning plot and realistic characters. 

In Closer to Far Away, immersed in early 20th century life in rural Saskatchewan, during the alcohol-prohibition era, I witnessed a family’s grieving process. A truly sonder experience. What is sonder? It’s when you can feel empathy, compassion and self-realization all at the same time. And that’s what good fiction is all about. 

Owning our Stories

Brené Brown
from Wikipedia 

"True belonging doesn't require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are."

I came across this insight from Brené Brown and it resonated with me and the themes of my recent novel, Waltraut.                 

Waltraut sees herself as a victim … of bullying in school due to prejudice against immigrants, at church because of her ‘outsider’ father, and within her own family because of parental expectations. 

Her solution is to escape into books and her heroine becomes Nancy Drew. But Nancy Drew can’t solve Waltraut’s problems. It’s not until, as Brown says, she ‘owns’ her stories and accepts herself, that she moves forward. 

I hope Waltraut's story will help vulnerable young readers ‘own’ their stories so that they too can determine the direction of their lives. Our lives are story. Maybe we can’t choose the inciting incident or the page-turning plot points, but as imperfect first-person narrators, we get to choose the ending. Waltraut did. 

  “Owning our story and loving ourselves throughout that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.” Brené Brown.

Nancy Drew modelled courage so maybe she really did help Waltraut find herself.

― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. The link leads to a YouTube conversation about the book. 

Happy Halloween?

It’s been 5 years since I visited Russia's Kaliningrad region and finally I’m getting around to framing a few of those memories. Both Tainted Amber and Crow Stone are 

Top left: Baltic Coast at former Rauschen,
now Svetlogorsk 
Bottom left: linden-lined road in rural Kaliningrad
Right: house in former Kreuzburg, now Slavskoye

set in the Kaliningrad Oblast.  Grateful that I got to visit the area before the pandemic and the Ukraine invasion. 

I follow a few Instagrammers who live in the Kaliningrad Oblast and they often post beautiful images of the former East Prussia. The Oblast is like a time warp … German ruins, battle memorials ... amidst Russian tourism.  

It’s stunning to realize that the average Russian seems oblivious to the current war, seems oblivious to the political crisis that their leader has created. How do Kaliningraders … wedged between EU countries and Ukraine ... even manage?  Perhaps they’re not as oblivious as they seem … perhaps they’re terrified to speak their fears.

The stylish, picture-perfect world of modern Russia shown on social media juxtaposed against the ruins of the last world war is bizarre. Terrible battles are happening so close by. The cries from Ukraine and from their own political prisoners must haunt those beautiful  ruins.  

While the remaining Third Reich structures crumble into rustic art, the horror of war, of revenge and misuse of power haunts our grim present.  Happy Halloween?

Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams by Shari Green

Set in Leipzig, during the fall of 1989, Shari Green's beautiful YA story is told in verse. The novel shares 16-year-old Helena’s point of view during the tumultuous dying months of the DDR. While her closest friend escapes to the freedom of the west, Helena knows that Leipzig is her home and that she’ll never choose to leave. Rather than run away, she would rather risk prison by following her idealistic father’s lead to protest for her freedom. An aspiring conductor, Helena falls in love with another music student who like her friend, also wants to escape to the west. Helena must make some gut-wrenching decisions when the Stasi threatens her family. I can't help but compare her choices to what's happening in Ukraine. Stay for your country or leave for your family. Not easy.

     

Nikolai church Leipzig
Wikipedia

The musicality of the author’s words, the rhythm, timing, cadence … all flow so effortlessly into the plot of a love story set in the weeks leading up to the peaceful collapse of the DDR. I was struck by the beauty and depth of this novel … like a musical score. Infused with rich historical detail, this is a poignant story where even a church, Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche, comes alive as a character representing  the power of prayer, hope and of song. 

A couple of my favourite lines, “… dreams are slippery things when I’m losing my grip, it does my heart good to know someone else believes I should hold on.” (page 83/4). 

“I am the conductor and it’s up to me to shape the discontent parts of my life.”  (page 197)

Another beautiful line, of many, near the end, “Around me, energy flits like fireflies, glinting on the faces of passersby.” (page 226)

Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams is shortlisted for the 2024 Governor General’s Award. 

Wild Children

My mom had it tough as the Second World War wound down on the eastern front. I explore the failed winter exodus from East Prussia in Crow Stone … my YA release from Ronsdale Press, from back in 2022. Of the three sisters, fictionalized in the novel with the names of Katya, Sofie and Marthe, only Katya (inspired by my mom) is taken into the Soviet Union as a forced labourer. She went through some difficult times in the open pit mines of the Urals near Chelyabinsk. 

But what happened to her two younger sisters? I understood little about their experiences. Things were just too terrible to remember, they’d tell me. Let the past be forgotten, they’d say.  I knew rape and starvation were common under the Soviet occupation. I knew they weren’t allowed to leave the former East Prussia, renamed Kaliningrad, until 1948. I knew that others in my immigrant church community had similar experiences … but no one would talk about it.

So now I’m reading The Wolf Children of the Eastern Front, Alone and Forgotten, by Sonya Winterberg with Kerstin Lieff. It’s a heart-wrenching testimony of the horrors that lost children experienced in those stark years after the war. Unlike the dates in history books … the end of war doesn’t end the suffering. 

As a curious side note, the introduction to this book is by John Kay, the lead singer of the Canadian rock band called Steppenwolf. Born in Tilsit, East Prussia (now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad) in 1944, he narrowly escaped a similar fate that 20,000 young East Prussian children experienced. John Kay (born Joachim Fritz Krauledat) ended up in Canada in 1958 and went on to create memorable hits like “Born to be Wild.”  

Many children scavenged like wild animals in the desolate, bombed-out East Prussian countryside. My two aunts, fostering a lost toddler, and my teenaged cousins no doubt would have crossed paths with the orphans as they foraged for food trying to avoid Soviet revenge near the Lithuanian border.