First Writings

I wrote my first short story in grade four. I no longer have a copy and don’t remember the title, but it was about a child of giants. The child was playing with a golden ball, throwing it up and catching it, when once it went so high that it stuck in the sky, and that’s how the moon came to be.

My school held public speaking events, and if you won in your class you went on to compete with others in the school and then in the district. For grade six and seven you were supposed to pick a story you liked and retell it in your own words. I made up my story. The teacher asked me about a particular expression I’d used (can’t remember what it was) and suggested I might have copied it verbatim from the original story. I said that no, I hadn’t – didn’t mention that I’d created the whole story myself.

In grade seven I organized a poetry club. Two or three other girls and I wrote and shared poetry at recess and noon hour. I think that all of the poetry rhymed. We hadn’t yet learned about free verse.

In high school we had a couple of good English teachers, one particularly who encouraged creative writing. I did a lot of writing then, though I haven’t kept any of it. I also had my first publication of a short piece about why I liked books published in a national church magazine for teens.

I thought that I would go to university and study to be a journalist. Since there was no journalism school in Saskatchewan at that time, I planned to get a degree in English and then go to Carleton University in Ottawa (though I would have loved to attend Columbia, in New York City). For various reasons, none of that happened, but I kept writing, mostly in journals. I ended up teaching school for several years.