RONA MAYNARD KNOWS HOW to tell a dog tale that is really a tale about personal growth. She is the author of a memoir titled My Mother’s Daughter, and the former editor of Chatelaine, Canada’s premier magazine for women, for which she wrote memorable, intimate editorials. Her new book is Starter Dog: My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World, published by ECW Press, and while there is a dog on the cover, between the covers lies a fine lesson in how to write about personal growth. Listen in and read along.
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Marion: Welcome, Rona.
Rona: Hi, Marion. I’m delighted to be here.
Marion: Well, I’m delighted to have you. I said many other things to many of us because you and I have known each other for quite a while, but only online. I’ve been reading your stuff and loving your stuff for so long that I feel that we’re friends or we’re cyber readers or something. We have a lot in common, I discovered, and we’ve compared those notes over the years. We both come from writing families. We both have powerhouse writer sisters. The lives of our mothers both were interrupted by brain disease. Both of us have written a memoir about it, and I’ve always felt like there was a real bond here, so it’s a joy to have a conversation with you.
I want to ask about those origins because I think with that in common, I feel real comfortable asking you a little bit about family and setting up your writing life for people if we can. I think that a lot of people have this idea that if you come from a family of writers, you are all set. I’m not sure either one of us would agree with that, though we’d acknowledge the preference for growing up with literate storytelling people. I’d love to know what you might say about growing up with writers and what its influences are.
Rona: I grew up in a hot house for words, for the arts, really. My parents set enormous store by achievement, particularly in the arts. If I had been a gifted athlete, they would not have cared. Would’ve meant nothing to them. Cheerleader? Oh, perish the thought. But I had to win writing contests. I had to be published, and my sister too. Every dinner table was a course in the word. My mother had a PhD in English from Radcliffe. She got her doctorate in John Milton, and she would weave swaths of the English canon into every conversation. She would quote Milton to me. I’m probably the only kid around, or I must have been the only kid around who got compared to Milton’s Satan when she got mouthy. I got that volley, that, “Myself am hell,” speech from Paradise Lost, “Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell.” She quoted that to me.
Marion: Wow. Yeah, there you have it.
Rona: But it wasn’t good, really, you know?
Marion: Yeah.
Rona: On the one hand, I developed this great reverence for language and a sense of rhythm and the ability to be captivated by words and swept away to another world. But you don’t really need writers in the family to do that. You do not need all your homework red-penciled by a professional writer to do that.
Marion: Yes.
Rona: I was just taught to worry too much about writing and to fear that if I didn’t hold up my end, if I wasn’t getting published, if I wasn’t winning awards, then I wasn’t somehow a full-fledged member of the family. I wasn’t carrying the banner for the family. I actually envied people who came to words and writing by themselves.
Marion: I can understand that. I can absolutely understand that. When it came to winning awards, which you did, you did so in a way that’s so intimate and so generous. When you were the editor of Chatelaine, as I said, the premier Canadian magazine for women, you were really well-known for these lovely intimate, revelatory editorials you wrote. You published one in 1997 where you talked about your own mental health. You have written subsequently, I’ve read this quote by you, “By outing myself, I was taking the padlock off my tongue.” Let’s talk about that padlock and taking it off. The result, as I touched on, was you really became an award-winning person. You won a National Champion of Mental Health award from the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health. You did win those awards, but I wonder if it’s an unexpected place and what you mean by that padlock, because that’s different than just writing, I think. You’re making a distinction there.
Rona: Oh, yes. Taking the padlock off my tongue means speaking the unacceptable truth. This is saying what matters to me. This is telling the world where I have been, what I saw there, what I felt and what I learned from the experience. Whereas writing can be just an exercise in measuring up. For me, much of my life was exactly that. I did not want to be a writer. I wanted to be done with writing. That’s why I went into magazines, so I could boss writers around. I was a very tough editor. People learned a lot from me, but they really suffered. I had to come back to writing by degrees.
If you are a writer, if you’ve got that in your cells, if you’ve got it coursing through your blood, it will not leave you. You can either be a writer who writes, or you can be a writer who doesn’t write. I know the particular struggle of the writer who doesn’t write, who tries very hard to do other things that don’t have anything to do with writing. At Chatelaine, I remember I went to an magazine industry cocktail party one day and the publisher of a competing magazine said, “Rona, you’re a wonderful writer and it’s so good for my business that you’re not writing more.”
Marion: Oh, my. Those are those moments in life that we never forget. You have this great quote on your website that states, quote, “Every day is the wellspring of a story with the power to connect us. If I tell mine with candor, you’ll discover that it’s your story too.” When and how did you make that connection? Because as you just said, you can be a writer who doesn’t write or a writer who does write, but once you know that, that there’s connection available between us, I think it tips us far more into being a writer who wants to write. What do you think?
Rona: Well, I had a long career as a freelance magazine journalist, which meant cranking out copy to place between the ads. I was a writer for hire, but I was a very good one, and I did a lot of stories of a kind that you don’t see much anymore, where I would sit in somebody’s kitchen or in their den and I would listen to the story of their life. I was so moved by some of the stories that I heard. People would say to me, “Oh, gee, Rona, nobody’s going to be interested in this.” I was practically in tears and I would say, “I am interested. This is very meaningful to me, because I recognize a little of myself in what you were saying.” Now, it was sad because some of the best material ended up on the cutting room floor. But I have found, time and again, that people have told me things.
Sometimes it’s in my work as a journalist, and sometimes it’s because I’m sitting next to somebody on a plane and a story comes out and I just sit there listening and asking gentle questions. Tell me more. I show that I am interested. They are like little short stories. These people are not writers, but when they know that they have the attention, the full attention, of somebody who is honoring their experience, then they will place it in your hands and say, “Here it is. Here is my gift.” They don’t know it’s a gift, but it is. I started to ask myself, “Well, why not me??” The question crept up on me over a period of many years. My mother wrote two memoirs. My sister has written some memoirs, and I kept thinking, “That’s the family business. I don’t want to go there.” But I came to realize that my experience had meaning just like these other people’s experience, no more and no less. Unlike them, I am a writer and I could do something with it so I decided that I would wrestle with the angel.
Marion: Yes, and you do. I think it’s this, am I a writer? Am I not a writer? How am I a writer? What kind of writer am I? that we meet you at the beginning of this wonderful, and it is just a wonderful book, that is Starter Dog: My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World. But you’re still not sure, even after you’ve published this memoir dealing with your mother’s brain injury. No, it’s organic brain disease. Sorry.
Rona: It was a brain tumor. Fatal brain tumor, yes.
Marion: Brain tumor. That’s right. Thank you. Even after that, even after all of these feature pieces, even after being this great editor, even exposing yourself with those beautiful editorials, there’s still that feeling life is quite where it’s supposed to be. Your husband talks you into rescuing a dog, and enter your muse, who we’re going to get to in full in a minute. But let’s talk about first about setting this up as a project. You’ve got this dog. You begin to share Facebook posts on the people you meet and the places you go in downtown Toronto. I remember those posts. I remember them wonderfully. When did you start thinking you should write this down, and what did you think it was going to be? It’s a really important thing to the writers listening here to understand how and when we make this transaction with ourselves. Sometimes we just go in one toe at a time. Sometimes we say, “I’m going to write a book about this.” Talk to me about those first experiences with writing about being with a dog.
Rona: Well, in the beginning I didn’t know what I was writing. I was just keeping a record, a public record, of my days. I had had a blog for a while and I treated the blog as real writing. But with my daily life, I just wanted to put a vignette out there. Vignettes come very easily to me, and it’s partly because I had to write 650-word editorials so I was always looking for these little beautiful moments that I could expand upon. I found there were so many with a dog. I enjoyed the instant reaction, too. This is the wonderful thing about writing on Facebook. I’m surprised more people don’t do it, frankly.
There are a few other writers, a very few, who do it. But if you have a community of friends, family, and fans on Facebook, they are following you and they are chiming in. They’re asking questions. They’re laughing. They’re posting little hearts. That showed me that I was connecting with somebody, with a group of people, that I had this little virtual team, if you will, who were waiting to see what I was going to say next. Eventually, actually it wasn’t too far into the process, a friend named Kim Pittaway, who succeeded me as editor of Chatelaine briefly, said, “You really should do a book, Rona.”
You don’t argue with Kim. Kim is an outstanding writer herself and teacher of writing, and when she says something should be a book, Kim’s right. I took her seriously. I started hearing feedback from other people who thought I had a book and wanted to help me get this book off the ground. It was very moving, really. In the early stages I thought, “Boy, this is going to be a slam dunk because I’ve now got all these beautiful little pieces and I’ll just bridge them together and I will have a book.” Boy, was I ever wrong.
Marion: Oh, it’s good you didn’t know that.
Rona: It was maddening, absolutely maddening to try to pull a book out of that.
Marion: Yeah, I love the advice to try to write on Facebook. I think that’s brilliant. I think that testing our material on the public is what you’re saying. There is an author I interviewed a year or so ago, Rebecca Taussig, who started her whole project on Instagram and writes still on Instagram, and then she got a book contract. Write where you can. Write from where you are. Along the way, these vignettes allow you to discover the topics that you’re going to cover, of course. I think that what you do here is really worthy of some examination. We’re looking at you change. This is a hard thing to do, to report on yourself, especially change. Because you don’t want to be boastful and you’ve got to set it up in the beginning of the book of what you can’t do so we can see what you can do.
You did it by showing us that you walk away with a different sense of self. You learn to walk in a new way. You learn to sleep in a new way. You learn to shout when shouting was something that you would not do. You write that a dog is more than a canine animal. A dog is everywhere you go together, every living creature you meet along the way and every human you become with your canine. Absolutely. Let’s talk about reporting on ourselves. How did you zero in and choose those things, the sleeping, the walking, the shouting? Yes, they’re true, but another person with this even same dog would write a different book. How did you zero in on the changes in you as the way you cover the territory of this book?
Rona: Well, I’m drawn to conflict. I find that writing about joy, and I do a lot of that in this book, is a very squishy thing, you know?
Marion: Yeah.
Rona: It’s like trying to pin clouds to the page. This is my frustration with a lot of beautiful writing about joy, that I can’t sink my cleats into the soil of anything. I looked for these moments when I was having trouble, when I felt that I was challenged. By the way, I didn’t always do this in a conscious way. I think I was guided by that inner struggler who’s always going to be putting the cleats against the rock-face. I was having trouble sleeping, and I thought that Casey, the rescue dog, was going to help me sleep. I had this whole plan of how I was going to put my head on his chest and he was going to get me all relaxed.
And then I would go into the bed and I would sleep, but he would not be allowed to go there because part of the deal that I had with my husband was, no dog in the bed. So, you see, there’s some difficulty there and there’s some humor there, and I love humor. The books that win my heart tend to be the ones that can be funny about very serious things. That’s what I try to do as a writer. I saw that I was being a little bit ridiculous. The same with trying to train Casey. I had been an executive. I had told people what to do and they did it. If they wanted to work at that magazine, they didn’t have a choice. Here was this rambunctious, goofy dog who didn’t pay me any mind, and the only way to get him to listen was to be different. But I didn’t want to do that because it meant raising my voice. My father was an alcoholic, and shouting in our home always meant that something bad was going to happen.
Marion: Yeah. This is the beautiful thing about memoir, is the call and response, where we learn that I couldn’t do this until I did this. You made beautiful choices in this book that truly prove your evolution, and one of them has to do with marriage itself. I can teach this till I’m cross-eyed, how to make a point, but I’m just going to tell all my students to read your book so they can watch how you set up this idea that you come to, that you refer to as the idea of us.
Rona: Oh, yes. Usness.
Marion: Usness. It’s my new favorite phrase. You let us in that, in the very beginning of the book, you show us that your husband is the one who brings ideas to the marriage and you usually shoot them down. That’s how this dog conversation went, right on brand for the two of you. You set this up, that fun wasn’t on your must-have list, and we see that it’s missing from your life and that surprises are not your thing. Neither one of you had ever walked a dog. You choose quite precisely with a jeweler’s eye what to reveal, and then you bring in this idea of usness and this creation of the state known as us.
Walk me through this as a writing lesson just a little bit. It’s a huge piece of the story, the usness, and you had to set it up the way you did fast and furiously. He has an idea, I shoot it down. But how does this get chosen too, in terms of making a point? Did the idea of usness occur to you and you said, “All right, then I’d have to go back in the beginning of the book and say, ‘I’m not good. When he has an idea, I shoot it down.'” Or did it come to you as you were writing? It’s a big piece of this book, the three of you and the usness?
Rona: Well, it’s a long-standing theme in this marriage, and my husband has talked about it, that I’m always shooting things down. If it wasn’t for him, I would do nothing. I would not go anywhere. I would not see anyone. I’m so good at living inside my thoughts that there are lots of steps I am never going to take. I’m just too cerebral for my own good. But usness comes from a recognition of who we are as separate individuals. I think it is a miracle that we have lasted more than 52 years. Choosing my husband was the best choice I ever made, and I did not know what a brilliant choice it was when I made it. I didn’t want to marry him. It was his idea. But you have me and the other, and how are we going to fit together?
Over time, through a series of struggles and compromises, you reach an appreciation for the moments when you truly are comfortable together and it was as if you were made to walk through this world side by side. It isn’t always like that. There will be months or even years when it isn’t like that. Michelle Obama recently said she couldn’t stand Barack for 10 years, and I know exactly what she’s talking about, but you form in a long marriage a respect for what us is. I have taken that concept of us, that tender thing known as us, into the world where I can see the us of a friendship and the us of a collegial relationship and the us that I am as half of Rona and Casey.
Marion: Lovely.
Rona: We give up a little of ourselves to be with the other, and we’re willing to do that because we cannot imagine living without that other presence in our lives. I have said to my husband, “I hope I’m the first to go.” I’ve reached the age where I think about these things. I’m 73 and I went through much of my life always wanting to live for as long as possible. Now that I’ve lost many friends, I know how it hurts every time an us is broken in half and there’s only an I left remaining.
Marion: That’s the beauty of this, and that’s what you do so well. You make us think about us. You put us in this huge sensory state of understanding the tactile, the romantic, the physical, all of the aspects of usness. Ultimately we learn that you understand that because your senses have been awakened by this dog, and that’s what makes this book just unfold. You actually write, quote, “With my senses awakened by a dog, I imagine our walks going on and on, wonder after wonder, to have and to hold. I can no sooner keep them than catch a shooting star, so I clear a space in the day to celebrate the brightest as they fly, a song of praise that it won’t end until I do. I’ve fallen hard for this world.” You say that there’s a celebration of life. If you’re human, only happens after death.
But for a dog, it happens every day, everywhere. I’m just giving nothing away of the plot because we know the dog doesn’t die because you say so right in the opener. But what I’m suggesting by reading that quote aloud is that this book is carried along by the writing, the smart lovely sentence you crafted to get back to your quote about candor, about what it does. You created usness with us, showing your usness with the dog, but ultimately we celebrate your senses being awakened. Speak to the writers listening about the importance of not merely reporting on your life, but as we say in my family, writing the hell out of it to make a book work.
Rona: It’s not what happened. It’s not about the events. It’s about the meaning of those events and how they chime with other things that you have felt and observed and read and seen in art. There’s a lot of poetry and art in this book. Well, actually, there’s not as much art as there was. I took some of it out. But I am excited by the resonance between what I feel and what the greatest minds and spirits have felt. I’m walking along and Casey pees on the grass and I think, “Splendor in the grass, glory in the flower.”
I’ve got my phone with me. I’m always looking things up because I don’t know what they are. I thought that was the King James Bible. It sounded very KJV to me. But it’s Wordsworth. There’s nothing that I have felt that hasn’t been felt and expressed before by geniuses. I did have to ask myself while I was writing this book, “Well, who am I to write on this theme of time and change and what endures when Matthew Arnold said, ‘Though much has taken, much abides'”? That’s Ulysses. I grew up with that poem. My mother used to quote it to me. He was Tennyson, and I’m only Rona Maynard. Well, you are part of a continuum. Every writer is part of a continuum.
Every writer is a thread in a tapestry, and very few of us are geniuses. But, isn’t it a comfort to know that our finest thoughts and words, truly the best of us, are not ours alone? You think in your early life as a creator that it is all about being original. As you go along in your work, you discover that none of it is. You could feel pitiable because of that. You could say, “Oh, why can’t I come up with something that’s totally new?” Or you can say, “Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it human to have these perceptions?” I think it is particularly wonderful and particularly consoling at a time when it seems like things are falling apart and the center isn’t holding, like now.
Marion: Yeah. Oh, I don’t think I could have possibly said it better. Thank you for that. That was very generous and I appreciate it. I always say, to get back to what you said initially to that question, I always say to the writers I work with, “Memoir is not about what you did. Memoir is about what you did with it.” This is such a beautiful narration of that ethic, at least for me. As we wrap this up, speaking about narrating, you narrated the audiobook for this lovely story. I would just love to know what happens in your head when you read this story aloud to yourself.
Rona: I was smiling.
Marion: I hope so.
Rona: I really enjoyed my own story and I thought it was very funny. Which funny is, by the way, one of the words most often used to describe this book, although you have not used it today. I think it’s pretty funny.
Marion: It is.
Rona: But not in a lightweight fashion.
Marion: No, no. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Well, thank you, Rona. This has been a joy. I love this book and I’m going to put it in the hands of everybody I can think of, so thank you and I hope you sell a million of them.
Rona: Thank you, Marion.
Marion: The writer is Rona Maynard. Starter Dog: My Path to Joy, Belonging, and Loving This World. Her new book is just out from ECW Press. Buy it wherever books are sold. See more on her at ronamaynard dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go, and if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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