finally

The lead piece in the New York Times Book Review for March 28, 2021 offers an essay about a writer who profoundly influenced me. The fourth subject in a series about The Americans, writers past and present, Tillie Olsen (1912-2007) published her essay “Silences” in Harper’s in 1965 and later, with one of the early fellowships at Radcliffe, expanded it into a book. Silences, published in 1978, a collection of essays and profiles, examining the reasons that writers, especially female ones, don’t write.

I didn’t write my blog about her because I was caught up in memories ocoupled with a rueful contemplation of my own past (and present) silences.

I met Tillie at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity some time after Silences was published and enough time after for me to have read and reread it several times and to have marked it up with highlights and comments. When I learned that she was attending the writing program my first thought was of my copy of Silences back in Toronto. During my five or six weeks’ residency in Banff, I had to go back to Toronto to give a speech or reading or something and I brought the book back with me when I returned. I wanted Tilie to autograph it for me--not as brash as this may sound. By that time we had met and talked, enough that when I handed it to her with my request and she said no I was stunned.

“No,”she said. “Give me the book for a few days.”

When she gave it back to me, she had written a dialogue with my comments, every one of them, and there were a lot, each answered in detail and sometimes at length, written in her minuscule handwriting (a habit formed during the depression when paper and ink were hard to come by)! Later I gave that copy to my fonds at the University of Manitoba that houses my archives. The marginalia are valuable and have, in fact, been he subject of an essay published by a cohort in the Queens Quarterly. But I couldn’t bear to be without it so i bought another copy. Good thing too. It had been out of print but I was fortunate enough to buy a 25th Anniversary edition (2003).

More memories to come.