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