So, after she had written in my copy of her book, Tillie Olsen and I had enough time together at the Banff Centre to talk. One day she said to me, “What are we going to do with you?”

I didn’t know. I think I was working on a new play at the time. While I was there, I”d had a reading of my play, A Place on Earth, which she had seen/heard. She suggested I apply for a fellowship with the Mary Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. It seemed like a good idea but I had to think of a project that I would like to do and that would appeal to them, whoever they were. And best of all, that would enable me to use the resources available to me at Harvard. That’s how I came up with Alice James (sister of Henry and William).

I had read excerpts from her diary in a wonderful book edited by Mary Jane Moffat, and when I found out that Alice’s correspondence with Henry and his with her (plus letters from her care-giver-companion, Katherine Loring, were in Harvard’s Houghton Library in Cambridge, that determined me, and I started the wheels moving. I don’t think I had much to do with the decision to offer me a fellowship. There had been only one or two Canadians ever accepted and I was not likely to be the next one. Wrong.

“Oh, you’re Tillie’s girl,” the receptionist said when I arrived to pick up my key at the main building in the compound where a number of houses accommodated the offices of the fellows. Tillie had been one of the early fellows and remained influential. I was accepted because of her influence—only time I have ever had influential help like that. Well, no—Pierre Berton and June Callwood had served as enthusiastic references for my Order of Canada, but it had taken an unknown (like me), Canadian writer Dona Massel, to submit my name.

My American son-in-law, Jonathan Hill, my daughter Kate’s husband, suggested that I live with them and their then two children. I couldn’t have done it without them. My fellowship was limited because I was a foreigner, so I didn’t get room and board. i paid my kids a pittance for my food and I wasn’t even very useful as a baby-sitter—just a couple of times in an emergency—because I was working every day, weekends inciuded.

.My fellowship rounded off with a required “Symposium” about halfway through my year. I was fortunate to have professional actors do the reading of the first draft of my play, “A Native of the James Family” so I had good feedback for my subsequent rewrites. A later rehearsed reading, presented by a local James Society (I think) at library in Boston, also with professional actors gathered by an actress whom had met at the beginning of my fellowship and who remained in touch because she was intrigued with Alice. Then yet another rewritten, final (?) draft had a staged reading (that means the actors are up on their feet but still dependent on a script in their hands) presented at the Atheneum Club in Cambridge.

I could go on with a further sad history of my play, but we’re long past Tillie Olsen. Not quite.

My friend and mentor, Canadian writer Richard Teleky, suggested to me at the onset, that since I was so fascinated with women’s diaries, I should write a book about them. That was in my mind when I arrived at the Bunting and I leapt at the chance to take a course in diaries with the writer Hope Davies (mother of the writer Lydia Davies). All such extracurricular studies were available free to fellows, but I had to submit an application and sample of my writing in order to gain admittance because attendance was limited.

Exit Tillie’s girl

Silences: not only of the book by Tillie Olsen but also of my own that the book helped me to to recognize.

Any reader must also recognize the circumstances that hinder—or prevent—one’s writing, or any creative enterprise by a woman. There have been men, too, but fewer,not so consistently, and for other reasons. Does Gray’s Elegy spring to mind?

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751.)

In this case the “sweetness” of an unknown labourer ha been stifled by tiredness and lack of opportunity. Olsen expanded this idea of tiredness and its causes in her book.

in his essay about Olsen, A,O, Scott writes: “The moral and existential danger of tiredness is a widespread modern malady, but an unusual literary subject.” He asks, “Is there a place in literature for unwritten work?” Wow !

I should have identified Scott before this. (Anthony Oliver Scott (born July 10, 1966) is an American journalist and cultural critic. He served as chief film critic for The New York Times. In 2020, Scott assumed the title of critic at large. He is the author of this fourth essay in a Times series, American Authors. He asks a political question: What do we owe the unvoiced? If anything. I long since discovered that art is very unforgiving. Unvoiced art is the easiest not to forigve, that is, to ignore.

In my early days of trying to write while juggling a household with four children and a demanding social life with the theatre, I used to say I was a writer when there were no measles or mumps or flu, no PD days (for teachers), no spring breaks or summer vacations, no opening nights or trips to them. When we had to attend an event in another city I rented a typewriter (in those days before portable computers ) from the hotel and stayed in the room writing until it was time to join the social life. In those days, my husband came first, the children second and my writing a poor third.

After Bill died, the writing came first because it was the only way I knew to make a living for the children and me. But it was a different kind of writing. Journalism was fast, with quick returns. Books, too—non-fiction books. I’d write an outline and a couple of chapters, get a contract and an advance and write a book. one a year, except one year I had to write three because one of my daughters got married and I had to come up with a wedding with as many trimmings as I could manage. I couldn’t do that with only one advance. I didn’t tell my publishers until it came to promotion time.

“You did what?” they said. But they were fairly easy to juggle because they were very different books. One was about women and money (Everywoman’s Money Book, with Lynn Macfarlane, Key Porter Books); one was a cookbook (Betty Jane Wylie’s Cheese Book, Oxford University Press—”Oxford Cooks”); and one was a biography of my challenged son (The Book of Matthew, (McLelland and Stuart). So they were reviewed in different sections of the papers. The books survived: the money book went into several print runs and two or three editions; Matthew had an American publication with suitable financial translation; and I still cook with my cheese book which picked up a request from yet another publisher for a cookbook for singles (Solo Chef, Doubleday).

I got very tired. I still am. After 30 years of independent living my challenged son and I are together again because of the pandemic, for our mutual safety. I can’t write as much now, with his presence and my responsibility. This morning I was up at five, to load the dishwasher and write here. It’s after seven now and I must make breakfast: Eggs McMuffin this morning. That means no Hollandaise sauce, just a melted cheese slice.

Tomorrow, maybe.