Lögberg-Heimskringla - 22.04.2005, Page 2

2 * Lögberg-Heimskringla » Friday 22 April 2005
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THE ‘UNLIKELY' PROSPECT OF A WRITER FROM RURAL SASKATCHEWAN
PHOTO: DAVID JÓN FULLER
Joan Eyolfson Cadham is a writer living in Foam Lake, SK.
ly realized that if I was going
David Jón Fuller
Foam Lake, SK
Somethingsarebestleamed
in a one-room schoolhouse. For
Joan Eyolfson Cadham, that
was a love of language.
“It was a fortuitous combi-
nation of a one-room country
school, with kids from grade
one to grade eight, and nine and
10 taking correspondence, and
an absolutely magical teacher
name Marion Ford.”
Ford realized Joan could
already read and made sure she
had books that were at her level.
“She also read to us after
lunch every day. What I remem-
ber her reading to the grade
eights and nines and tens is
classic poetry. And she told me
later, after I moved back here
[from Quebec], that she looked
at me across the room and she
said, ‘Your pencil would be on
the floor on one side, your note-
book would be on the floor on
the other side, yöu’d have your
chin on your hands and it never
occurred to me to tell you to get
back to work, because I figured
you were working really, really
hard.’”
“It was that cadence of
words that were well put to-
gether and read by somebody
that read beautifully and with
passion, and I think that taught
me how sentences should flow
and how they should sound.”
In the process, she absorbed
many words she didn’t know
— and was too embarrased to
ask about. “I leamed there was
a Iot of stuff you didn’t ask
adults about, so I carried words
around in my head for up to ten
years before I found out what
they meant.”
Though she now lives on
her income as a freelance writ-
er, Joan says it wasn’t always
easy to think of herself writing
professionally. In the 1940s and
50s, she says, “girls were sup-
posed to be teachers, or nurses,
or clerks, and writers came
from London, England, and
Los Angeles, and New York,
and Toronto.”
Nevertheless, she rebelled
against becoming a teacher,
even threatening to join the Air
Force.
She enrolled in joumalism
at Ryerson Polytechnic in To-
ronto. “Funny thing is though,
the sense that a writer can’t
come from rural Saskatchewan
was burnt right into me, and I
worked briefly at United Church
Publishing House, and fled into
an unsuccessful marriage. It
was almost like the self-fulfill-
ing prophecy: you couldn’t be a
writer and come from rural Sas-
katchewan, so I wasn’t going
to be one. And I raised kids, I
taught nursery school, and then
I spent 26 years [working] wilh
emotionally disturbed kids.”'
Those 26 years in Montreal
eventually burned her out, and a
second marriage came and went
before she met her late husband
Jack, who was restoring a boat.
When she started helping him,
she had a revelation. “I discov-
ered that there was something
absolutey soul-saving about
sanding old wooden boats,” she
says. “I was working with emo-
tionally disturbed kids. And I
had a house full of teens and
preteens, and I could go down
to the boat and I could work on
it, and if I sanded it all day, it
wouldn’t unsand itself while
I was at home. Somewhere in
sanding an old wooden boat,
right along the shores of Lake
St. Louis, I started writing. I
couldn’t stop. I had to carry a
notebook with me. And I íinal-
to work that hard, that’s what 1
was going to do.”
She retumed to Foam Lake
and has written for many pub-
lications, including the Foam
Lake Review, CBC Radio, and
is the author of two books, Bent
But Not Broken and Red Right
Returning, both published by
Shoreline Press.
Currently, she is contribut-
ing her writing and editing to
The Wynyard Stoiy, a history
book which is to be published
this year.
Despite the uncertain in-
come, Joan has no regrets about
her career. “It’s fun and I get to
meet the most fascinating peo-
ple on the face of the earth.”
Does she have any words
of advice for aspiring writers?
“Do it!” she says. “Don’t
let anybody tell you, ‘Dearie,
there’s no money in it, you
should get yourself a real job.’”
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