My Big Idea stems from an assignment from the University of Manitoba Alumni i Journal for a featured piece for a new column called “Sound Off”. I have filed it as a blog but it goes out now to a group of private, privileged readers, fellow alums like me. Here it is:
MY BIG IDEA
MY BIG IDEA is really a very small one, just one mind meeting another mind as they attempt to express an idea…and another and another and…..
WHO I AM
I am a ninety-year-old woman who started at the University of Manitoba when I was fifteen with no life experience and no idea of what I wanted to do, except hang around words because I loved them, still do. I have had produced or published drama (27plays, a couple of musicals and a CD album, a couple of films—drama is my first love); fiction (one story in an anthology), non-fiction: poetry, belles lettres, bios, cookbooks, self-help and financial planning. I still write. If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d be a teacher and I still teach, too: one-on-one, voluntarily. That’s my Big Idea, just reaching out, still going on.
WHY I GOT INTO THIS
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Iceland to Canada. They settled in Gimli, Manitoba, and raised a family, my mother among them. Icelanders are known for their high rate of literacy. It seemed only natural that I should attend university and go on to graduate studies. (It must be in the DNA.) For my Master’s Degree in English my major was in 20th century poetry and my minor in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. My mentor was Professor Chester Duncan (1913-2002), who was also a popular literary critic (on CBC) and a composer, writing music especially for the poetry of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), on whom I wrote my Master’s thesis.
I REMEMBER WHEN-
-I graduated, Professor Duncan said to me “I expect you to be public.” It was a statement of belief in me and also a command and I took it seriously. Now that I am old and obscure and a sometime victim of agism, I write and teach for free but I keep on keeping on, still pursuing my Big Idea.
As an aging woman, I have been a victim of ageism and, all my life, of male chauvinism--but who knew or dared to protest? I am considered to be retired and am no longer very public but I keep on perpetuating my BIG IDEA. Let me count (a couple of) the ways:
Maintaining my interest in my Icelandic background, I belong to the Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto, and I serve as a consultant to the regular (6 times a year) newsletter, the Falkinn, offering ideas as well as articles relating to our Icelandic roots. Representing the ICCT, I serve on the Board of the INLNA (Icelandic National League of North America) as the editor of the newsletter (four times a year). With the restrictions laid on by Covid19, the regional chapters, associations, clubs, and individual members have encountered difficulties in sustaining contacts, and I have tried to fill in the gaps, not virtually, of course, but verbally.
I have been keeping a blog for several years now, beginning nightly when I went on an “Around the World in Eighty Days” cruise. It wasn’t around the world, it was only the southern hemisphere, and it was more like a personal travel diary.
Lately, with more personal complications caused by the Covid restrictions, I have had difficulty maintaining the regularity of my blog and I discovered that it has become—or was always? —a personal letter to a few long-time friends, a private correspondence. So I have expanded, that is, repeated, my blog on larger platforms, though still private, i.e. to the newsletters to which I contribute. I have been filling in with my Icelandic-flavored articles/blogs and personal revelations through progress reports from my Inner World.
That’s my Big Idea, at once reduced and expanded.
More to come in the Alumni Journal….