Tag Archives: #writersguild

Do you need a sensitivity reader?

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A friend who read a draft of my new novel, Winter’s Rage, suggested I ask someone experienced in transgender issues to read the manuscript. It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed this. While one of my characters in the novel has sex change surgery, I considered it a minor point in the story. But I knew instantly this was sound advice, given current awareness of LGBTQ+ concerns. 


My friend offered to look for a sensitivity reader if I couldn’t find one on my own. As it happened, several years earlier another friend had told me his sister had recently transitioned. I contacted my friend and asked if he could put me in touch with her. He gladly gave me her email address, although he didn’t think she read mystery novels or fiction in general. 


His sister replied right away. She thanked me for making this effort with my book because she was constantly annoyed by people’s thoughtless and cruel remarks and misused pronouns. I gave her the choice of reading the full manuscript of Winter’s Rage or the relevant sections. When she chose the latter, I emailed her five pages with all the pertinent scenes. She came back with comments I wouldn’t have thought of myself. In addition to these being useful for the book, I found it interesting to hear her perspectives. 


On the positive side, she liked that I’d had my protagonist observe my trans person’s physique as not typical for her gender. My reader finds her height can be a problem–she’s 6’3″ in high heels–but she knows other transgender women who have it harder, with barrel shaped chests and very masculine facial features. She found it realistic that my trans character would be depressed and alcohol dependent before discovering who she was. It also sadly rang true for her that my character would experience abuse on social media and from unsympathetic relatives.    
But she questioned my trans character’s close friend saying that she’d miss her as a man. My sensitivity reader had heard that type of remark too often. 


“Tough shit,” she told the obtuse friend. “This isn’t about you.” 


I’d also had my trans character say she’d miss her former self. My sensitivity reader said most trans people she knows can’t wait to shed their old selves. “We love them for getting us this far, but their job is done, and we’re excited to move forward.” I had thought, in that situation, I’d feel nostalgia for a large part of my life I was leaving behind, but bowed to her experience and tweaked my trans character’s sentiments. In addition, my reader thought I’d made the process of changing ID and other documents too simple. I added an explanation that didn’t impact the plot.   

  
My sensitivity reader found no fault with my use of pronouns, but later, during the proof read of the manuscript, it struck me that I might have used ‘he’ incorrectly in one instance. I asked my proof reader for her opinion. She replied that, in her view, ‘he’ was correct in the context. It can be tricky to get it totally right. We also shouldn’t assume all transgender people think alike any more than all women think alike. There might be some who disagree with my decision to leave ‘he’ in that sentence.  


By definition, we fiction writers create characters and situations that go beyond our personal experience. The more feedback we get from readers who fill the gaps in our knowledge, the more true-to-life our stories will be. When we don’t belong to a misunderstood and oppressed group, we’re often unaware of its particular issues. A first step in deciding whether or not to seek out a sensitivity reader is knowing when you need one. 

Canada’s WWII Internment Camps

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Last week I watched The Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s podcast with Adriana Davies about her new book From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta’s Italian History. Her discussion of Italian interment during WWII reminded me of my friend’s father’s story about his internment at two camps in eastern Canada.

Joachim “Jim” was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1922. At age 16, he was sent to England through the Kindertransport program that rescued Jewish children from Hitler’s Nazi regime. Initially, Jim worked on an English farm. When war broke out, German youths living in the countryside were declared enemy aliens. The UK boarded them onto boats with German POWs and shipped them to internment camps in Canada or Australia.

Jim landed in a New Brunswick camp, where his main job was cutting wood. He didn’t mind the work and could borrow books from the McGill University lending library. An older internee taught him math. He found the camp food great thanks to an Austrian cook who had been a famous chef in Vienna. The internees who bothered him most were wealthy Austrians who were right-wing but hated upstart Hitler for taking over their country.

Even though he was generally happy at the camp, one day Jim and a friend decided to escape to the United States. After the others had left their woodcutting site, the two youths headed south. The snow and cold made them turn back. When they returned to the camp, the guard just looked at them angrily and said they needed haircuts. They learned they’d been walking in the wrong direction, toward the Bay of Fundy.

Jim’s math studies inspired his desire to attend McGill University. After two years in New Brunswick, he was transferred to the internment camp on St. Helen’s island near Montreal. St. Helen’s Island later became part of the Expo 67 site and is now a city park. Many of the internees at this camp were Italians. Some were fascists. He thinks they were POWs sent from Europe. Jim’s main memory of his short stay was a birthday celebration for Benito Mussolini, the fascist prime minister of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He recalled a cake with the lettering ‘Viva El Duce.’ Jim ate the piece with the ‘V.’

Jim left the camp when a Jewish family in Montreal sponsored his studies at McGill. At the university he met his wife, also a Jewish refugee. They married and had three sons. Jim became a McGill math professor. He died in 2014, a year after he told me his story.

Author Adriana Davies was born in Italy and grew up in Edmonton. In 2010 she received the Order of Canada for her work promoting and preserving Alberta’s cultural heritage. In her WGA online interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I4_6xvvxYM she talks about the large number of people who left Italy in the early twentieth century. Many came to Alberta to work in the coal mines. They maintained links to the old country and sent money back to their families.

When Mussolini came to power, he realized the Italians living in Allied countries might be helpful to his cause. He recruited the granddaughter of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italy’s unification, to drum up support. She went to Alberta, ostensibly to set up agricultural programs, and was lionized by the Edmonton and Calgary press. Fascist cells formed in both cities. This created tensions in the Italian community, between fascists and anti-fascists. Neighbours spied on each other. As war loomed, the RCMP couldn’t always tell who was on which side when they rounded up Italians for internment camps.

Adriana asked, Could the Italian fascists in Alberta have helped Mussolini’s war effort? Possibly, she said, by sabotaging the coal mines or railroads.

I found Adriana’s and Jim’s stories refreshing perspectives on history; a change from the simple view of good and bad. You can watch the podcast with Adriana on the WGA Youtube channel. Writers’ Guild of Alberta – YouTube On the channel, you’ll also find a podcast with me hosting an interview with N.L. Blandford, author of The Perilous Road to Her, a thriller novel dealing with a current issue — human trafficking.