When my first writing instructor, Denise Roig, assigned us to write an article for a newspaper or magazine, I instantly lit on The Montreal Gazette. I was an avid reader of the newspaper’s travel section, being a keen traveller now spending most her time at home with two young children. The travel editor, Paul Waters, wrote a weekly column that I especially enjoyed. He often shared personal details about himself, his wife and their six children.

The previous summer, my husband and I had travelled with our sons to Alberta. We arrived in Calgary the last day of the Stampede and went to the rodeo and fairgrounds. We loved them. I’d had no idea an event this huge was happening out west and wondered if other Montrealers were equally in the dark.

For my course assignment, I wrote a travel piece about the Calgary Stampede, describing the rodeo and other fairgrounds activites we’d liked and mentioning the many more we’d missed because we hadn’t allocated enough time. I then drafted my query letter, which was a challenge, particularly the paragraph explaining why I should be the one to write this article when I had no writing credits or other qualifications. In the end, I suggested a story angle about a family visit to the Stampede.

Denise, my instructor, edited the article and added a note that she could see it in The Gazette. Her main comment about my query letter was to change the last paragraph so it wouldn’t sound like the article was already written. For non-fiction, you pitch and write later or you’ll never make money.

With some confidence, I mailed my query letter to Paul Waters and waited for a reply. Several months passed. I grew discouraged. One night I went out to a parent and school committee meeting and returned to find a sign on my front door. Congratulations! My husband told me that Paul Waters had called and wanted me to phone him back that evening.

I phoned right away. Paul said he was interested in the piece. What sold him was the family angle. “Most writers I hear from are yuppies,” he said. He suggested I add a few additional points that I’d already included in the piece. He’d pay $300, but had to ask me to write it ‘on spec.’ From taking the magazine writing course, I knew what that meant.

I touched up the article and sent it to him. A few weeks later it appeared on the travel section’s front page. This writing business would be a snap, I thought. My decision to become a writer was right.

Over the next couple of years, I pitched Paul three more travel pieces. Rather than send a query letter, I waited for an excuse to call him. Typically, this involved a glitch with the newspaper sending my payment cheque. “And by the way,” I’d add, “would you interested in an article about …”

Like the Stampede article, two of the others were the front page travel feature of the week. The fourth, a shorter one, was on the back travel page. It was about The Fundy Isles, where I spent my summer holidays as a child and visited regularly after that. My cousin who lives there said this was her favourite of my articles. ‘Europe with Children,’ the last one I wrote, was likely the best of the four. I found ‘Atlanta: Progress is her Middle Name” the hardest to write, as I struggled for a connecting theme. ‘The Calgary Stampede’ was special because it was my first. I had no idea when I wrote it that I’d move to Calgary a few years later.

I also had no clue that my writing road that had started out so well would become rocky.

Does the name Calgary mean clear running water or cabbage patch? For sure, both would be useful in pioneer days.

My first creative writing courses, taken through Concordia University Continuing Education in 1992, required students to submit final assignments. For Introductory Creative Writing, this was a portfolio of poems and/or short stories up to a specified number of pages.  Magazine Writing required a short story and a magazine or newspaper article, with a query letter.

During that fall term, I only came up with one complete short story, which I handed in for both courses. This felt like cheating, but I ultimately found it helpful to get comments from the two instructors. Gerry, the poet teacher of Intro, wasn’t impressed with my poems, but he liked the story. Denise,  the Magazine Writing teacher, read my scene of group dialogue to the class. I later sent the story to a literary magazine and received a hand-written rejection saying the story was well-written, but they weren’t able to publish it. I was crushed and never sent the story out again. I didn’t know then that any rejection beyond a form letter was a positive.

Denise’s fiction instruction focussed on imagery. She urged us to start with an image and write the story from there. I didn’t get what she was driving at.  That final story I gave her used an image of a ferris wheel, but imposed it on the story after I had the basic plot, characters and theme. Denise’s approach would have been to start with the wheel and let the story evolve from it. Despite the kind words of the literary magazine, my story probably wasn’t very good. 

Denise also advised us to write in the first person to practice getting into the narrator’s head, a writing concept I wasn’t aware of before taking the course. I was used to stories in distant third person. Once upon a time in a land far away … After a few assignments where I tried first person, I grasped what she meant and was soon able to transfer that skill to third person.

Today, when teaching courses, I sometimes feel like a point-of-view Nazi, harping on students to stay with a third person narrator and get deeper into his or her thinking and speech patterns, rather than shift all over, so readers will engage with the POV character.

For some beautiful music and writing, check out Shaun Hunter’s post about author/songwriter Rae Spoon. Calgary has its strengths, but it might not be the easiest place for those who are ‘different.’

Twenty-four years ago I decided to become a writer. In particular, I wanted to write a novel and had an idea for a semi-autobiographical story based on the experience that had inspired my desire to write. Around this time, my family bought its first computer. The way to write a book, I presumed, was to sit down and type.

I wrote the opening scene, and since I more-or-less knew how the story would evolve, I abandoned a linear approach in favour of writing later key scenes that were grabbing me now. I must have looked at a writing advice book or two because I recall reading that semi-autobiographical fiction rarely works. My book would be the exception, I felt, like Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, one of my favourite authors when I was a child.

While I enjoyed writing my dramatic scenes and even cried while composing one, I soon realized that I knew nothing about writing. I hadn’t written a fictional story since high school. A year after starting the book, I registered for two continuing education courses at Concordia University in Montreal, where I lived at the time. For convenience, I chose ones that were back-to-back on the same night: Magazine Writing taught by Denise Roig and Introductory Creative Writing by poet Gerry Shikatani.

Gerry, I was recently pleased to learn, is, among other things, the founding director of Lorca’s Granada: writers’ retreat & colloquia in Granada, Spain, a city I visited last year and am thinking of using as a story setting. Denise has published two critically acclaimed short story collections. My writing instruction began in good hands.

A few classes in, I had my first revelation: my novel-in-progress was crap. Semi-autobiographical fiction didn’t work, at least it didn’t for me. The facts — what really happened — were preventing my imagination from taking flight and I was also holding back on portraying my psedo-real characters with all their conflicts and warts. Non-fiction had the compensating benefits of being true, while semi-autobiographical fiction seemed to combine the weaknesses of fiction and non-fiction. In addition, my instructors were steering me in the direction of writing shorter pieces, which was good for learning. I abandoned my novel-in-progress and went with the flow of the courses.

The smoke that has blanketed Calgary for the past five days makes me long for the “glass air” and “limitless grassland wrapped in light as clear as cellophane” that poet P.K. Page loved about Calgary when she lived here in the 1920s.