“From the age of fourteen months until I was thirty-two, I had epileptic seizures,” begins the essay by Gail Boyle. “I had no quality of life; I wasn’t given the chance to learn to read or write. Nobody thought I could. I never dreamed of coming home.”
Boyle, who lives in Nova Scotia, was one of six women who participated in a project that was part of Chatelaine’s year-long Make-a-Change initiative. The plan was ambitious: Pair literacy learners from across the country with mentors who would help them write a personal story. “We wanted to help women, who have struggled in ways most of us can only imagine, to find a venue to express themselves,” says Katie Dupuis, a Chatelaine editor who took the lead on the project. “Storytelling is powerful.
On the page, writers share a part of their lives.”
Dupuis contacted Frontier College, a national literacy organization, which agreed to select the students, all of whom were working on their reading and writing skills. And then she began recruiting novelists, journalists, professors and filmmakers to assist them. The first mentor she called was her own: University of Windsor professor and poet Susan Holbrook. “She’s the one who really pushed me in my writing,” says Dupuis, who took Holbrook’s creative-writing classes as an undergraduate student.
For the next four months, each pair communicated by phone and email, and met in coffee shops. The essays they have produced represent six different portraits of what it means to be a literacy student — and a woman and a single mother and a newcomer and an outsider — in Canada.
When some people think of literacy learners learners, they think that it’s their fault,” says Jennifer Day, a community coordinator at Frontier College in Vancouver. “That’s just not the case. There are all kinds of circumstances and experiences that lead them to where they are.”
That’s certainly true of our six students, and their essays echo these realities. Among them are Julia Malookaya, trained as a doctor in Russia, who might be the most overqualified nanny in Vancouver; Nadia Flores, a Mexican linguist who worked on farms in rural Ontario with other migrants; and Entesar Ansari, fluent in four languages and an Iraqi geography teacher until she fled the Middle East with her two young sons.
Then there’s Kiki Cater, a Toronto single mother, working to get through school to show her young son what she’s made of; Hitomi Shiraishi, a Japanese teacher working as a caregiver, and, perhaps most moving of all, Boyle, who thought she’d never read or write.
Crafting and shaping her story was nerve-racking, Boyle says. “I didn’t want my words to be changed. I wanted my story to still be mine.”
Malookaya adds: “When you write about your life, you relive lots of memories. Writing opened up some private things, things that were important to me. But I wasn’t sure they would be interesting to other people.”
The six mentors — Holbrook, screenwriter and humorist Anne Fenn, journalist Alison Gillmor, memoir writer Abigail Carter, novelist and teacher Gail Anderson-Dargatz, and writer and filmmaker Shandi Mitchell — were touched by the experience. They say they’ll stay in touch to see how their students progress. For Anderson-Dargatz, who worked with Shiraishi, this project has already proven useful: She’s working with the literacy group ABC Canada on a series of novels specifically targeted to adult literacy learners.
“My mother’s formal education ended after Grade 3,” she says. “But she learned on her own and went on to tutor adult literacy learners. They had come from other countries or struggled in school, and they’d lost confidence in their stories. I was a young adult when she started tutoring, and I was in awe.”
The students’ essays are both heartbreaking and hopeful. One talks about tasting fresh pineapple for the first time; another describes the fear of being an illegal worker. (They can all be read at Chatelaine.com/literacyproject.)
When Ansari arrived in Winnipeg in 2001 with her two young sons, it was only two years after her husband died from a brain tumour. “We arrived late at night and went right to bed,” she wrote. “When I woke up the next morning, I looked out the window and saw a small garden filled with gravestones.”
But they also speak about finding a sense of belonging. “The best part was that I could connect to the community of immigrants and illegal workers through this project,” says Flores. “I was the voice of so many of them: Their stories are my story.”
For Cater, who left school at 15, the project was a chance to reflect on the past. “When I was a teenager, my mom and I didn’t get along,” she says. “I was more into my friends than going to class. So I moved out and was faced with a choice: Go to school or pay the rent.” Cater has been working with Frontier College to qualify for her high-school diploma; this September, it arrived in the mail. “This is something I did for myself and for my son,” she says. “I realized that before I can better him, I have to better myself.”
