Making Connections through Story

On Friday, I accepted an invitation to read selections from Growing Up Ivy to a group of men and women who could themselves have been characters in the book. My audience was the Book Club at a nearby retirement residence.

I was fully prepared to have one or two of them get up and wander off while I was reading. In fact, I'd been warned that this could happen. It didn't. Everyone listened with great interest, and when it was over, several of the group contributed memories of their own about life in the Great Depression.

A couple of residents recalled a man who used to sharpen knives around the countryside. He used to travel from place to place in a horse-drawn caravan, similar to the one Ivy spent the summer months in, with her father.

One woman, who had lived as a child next to a golf course, identified with Charlie collecting golf balls and  re-selling them at the golf course. Someone else recalled getting paid to shovel manure from the street after the delivery horse had gone by.

Many in the audience told me that they used to go everywhere on their bicycles. And soon we were all laughing with one gentleman's tale of learning to ride a bike, how he forgot to look ahead rather than down at the road, and ended up ploughing into a woman crossing the street. The poor soul had cursed him out soundly in Yiddish.

It was a very pleasant afternoon, and I was delighted that these elderly people felt a connection to Ivy's story.  That, after all, is why we write.

Fiction Set in the Past

My latest novel for young readers, Growing Up Ivy, is labelled Historical Fiction by the publisher. But is it? Canadian author Joan Thomas, writing in Quill & Quire (July/August, 2010), suggests that a story like mine, (and her own two, by her own admission) is instead, "fiction set in the past."

According toThomas's article, Avrom Fleishman outlined, in the 1970s, certain criteria for historical fiction: that the story be set at least two generations prior to the writing of the book, and that it be about real people in history.

Ivy's story, set in the 1930s, would not make the cut by either count. Ivy Chalmers never lived, except in my imagination and, I hope, on the pages of the book. To tell her story, nonetheless, involved considerable research about life in Ontario during the Great Depression. But I think I like calling it "fiction set in the past." It's a term both of us can live with; Ivy and I.