Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs
I Wasn't Always Like This
- Publisher
- Signature Editions
- Initial publish date
- Nov 2014
- Category
- Personal Memoirs, Women
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781927426517
- Publish Date
- Oct 2014
- List Price
- $18.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781927426524
- Publish Date
- Nov 2014
- List Price
- $9.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Some people claim they'd like to walk away from their lives -- Shelley A. Leedahl had the nerve to do it. Was it selfishness, or self-preservation?
Drawing upon childhood memories, hikes, road trips, foreign travel, her self-imposed exile to a prairie village, fortuitous meetings with strangers, and her compulsion for starting over, again and again, Leedahl has crafted a provocative and candid collection of essays that explore the implicit complexities and contradictions when personal and professional lives both complement and clash. Can a writer be a good mother when her calling requires her to be away -- sometimes countries away -- from her school-aged children? And why are some people more themselves with strangers in foreign lands than with their own kith and kin? Along the way, parental dilemmas, relationship breakdowns, new love, and emotional chaos make their presence felt in this engaging work. The interior life of a writer dedicated to her craft is revealed for what it is -- joyous and forlorn, singular and relatable.
About the author
Multi-genre writer Shelley A. Leedahl assuredly shifts her creative focus between critically acclaimed books of poetry, short fiction, novels, and children's literature. With I Wasn't Always Like This the seasoned writer now adds creative non-fiction to her literary repertoire. Her numerous titles include Wretched Beast, Listen, Honey, Orchestra of the Lost Steps, The Bone Talker (with illustrator Bill Slavin), The House of the Easily Amused and A Few Words for January. Leedahl's work has appeared in anthologies ranging from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2013 to Great Canadian Murder and Mystery Stories, Slice Me Some Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Creative Nonfiction, Country Roads: Memoirs from Rural Canada, and Outside of Ordinary: Women's Travel Stories. Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Leedahl now makes her home in Ladysmith, BC. Aside from literary writing, she also works as a freelancer, editor, and writing instructor.
Excerpt: I Wasn't Always Like This (by (author) Shelley A. Leedahl)
It's been variously said -- and famously so by Virginia Woolf -- that every woman writer needs a room of her own.
I had a room.
It was not enough.
* * *
In our inner-city neighbourhood there's at least one artist, student, professional, senior, and addict on every block. As a writer of literary books -- and other things that actually pay, including articles for the Western Producer and short humorous pieces for CBC Radio Saskatchewan -- I fit in. But the city also turns me inside out: the noise, the crime, the busyness. When Frank and Margaret -- the elderly Mennonite couple who lived next to us for a decade -- moved on, the house was purchased as a revenue property and the troubles began.
Always, it's been young men. Drinking. Drugs. Dangerous driving. Coming and going through the devil's hours of the night. I haven't slept properly in my own home for years. Aside from the pair who really trashed the basement suite -- and blared gangster rap day and night, left hypodermics in my flowerbed, and skipped from province to province fleeing arrest warrants -- I likely don't have any reason to fear the convoy of punks who park in our spot, deliberately cross our front lawn, shatter beer bottles, and whoop, yell, and knock on our windows via the shared sidewalk between our houses (where they occasionally relieve themselves). They haven't threatened me or anyone in my family, but I sense the potential for violence (there was the beer-swigging trio who chucked machetes around the yard after they hacked down Frank and Margaret's beloved crabapple tree).
I fear for my teenagers, who often traverse the corridor at night, my husband, who recently confronted a half dozen of the neighbouring miscreants, and I fear for my own body, mind, and spirit.
Something terrible is imminent.
* * *
I am a 39-year-old woman, in love with my husband and having fun with my teenagers, and I have spontaneously just bought myself a house away from them all. Today, the day after I signed the deposit cheque and lined up a lawyer, I am four hours west and north of the city that's been making me crazy, raw nerve by raw nerve.
* * *
I could weep for all that's ahead of me. Solitude, and my own furniture. My own yard. The requisite planting around the house; the flowerbeds appear to have been neglected for years. A wood stove. Rooms that require scrap rugs. And paint.
