Maggie Helwig

Maggie Helwig has published six books of poetry, two books of essays, a collection of short stories, and two novels–Where She Was Standing and Between Mountains. A human-rights activist as well as a writer, she has worked for the East Timor Alert Network in Toronto, the Women in Black Network, and War Resisters’ International. I'd like to read you a few things that have been said about Maggie's writing. “Between Mountains is a rigorous tour of conscience. Her political commitment adds unusual forcefulness to this eloquent combination of war report, courtroom drama, and love story. She's the most gifted writer in the country, when it comes to political issues. Where She Was Standing is a compelling, insightful, and deeply human book that is both politically and artistically mature.”

Maggie Helwig reads from her novel, Between Mountains (Knopf Canada, 2004).

 It was just before dawn when the trucks began to move. Behind the city the hills were barely visible, black masses in an indigo sky.

A stray dog darted for cover as headlights broke the darkness. Some distance away, a helicopter rose, hovered.

“The trucks turned to create roadblocks at key intersections. Men climbed down with machine-guns in their arms. At several points across the city this occurred.

A small brown-haired man was sitting at the window of his hotel room, a laptop balanced on his knees. He was drinking instant coffee from a plastic cup, awkwardly, holding it by the rim so that he wouldn’t burn his fingers. It was exceptionally bad coffee. When he heard the engines, he put the cup on the floor, pushed aside the sheer white curtain and saw two of the trucks, passing in front of the apartment block across the street. He watched until they turned a corner and were gone. Setting the laptop down beneath his chair, he picked up a digital camera and a laminated card on a metal chain and hung them around his neck.

That's the first four paragraphs of my novel. Steve [Heighton] and I snuck in here as novelists. The reason that I read that little bit is that that is where the book started, and illustrates why it is that I write fiction. The image of the trucks, which is a NATO arrest raid—they are making two arrests that night in the Serbian part of Bosnia, based on a real event—the image of the trucks comes from Carol Off's nonfiction book about the Balkans [The Lion, The Fox and the Eagle], which is a very fine book. I read the book, I saw that mental image, and my first thought is, who is seeing those trucks? Then my character was there. I didn't know if it was a man or a woman at first, but there was someone at that window looking at the trucks. They had a cup of coffee; it's the middle of the night. You start to explore why is this person there? who are they? That's what I do—I make up people. I get an incredible pleasure from making up people and from inhabiting and living within the subjectivities of people who are other than me and, in some cases, profoundly other than me.

One of the characters in this book is a war criminal. He ran prison camps during the Bosnian War. That is the direction in which my mind moves. Unlike Steve's situation, Bosnia has been extensively written about. There is a lot of wonderful nonfiction that has been written about Bosnia and the Bosnian War, and issues around that. I have written some, not the brilliant stuff, but I've written some journalism and essays. But my real instincts take me towards the postulating of hypothetical people, and coming to live inside them, and putting them in that situation. It's that postulation—if there is this person, and you put them in this situation, what occurs? Where do they go? What happens to them, what do they feel, what do they think? What is their subjectivity? My book will not tell you as much about Bosnia as Ed Vulliamy’s [Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War] or many other people who have written about it. But what it maybe can do is take you inside these subjectivities and the experience of exploring different consciousnesses in a way that is more accessible to fiction. You don't have to say that you think somebody felt that, you just say they did. Because you made them up, so they did. I think within that made-up-ness, you can get to some quite profound truths about people in extreme situations, in ways that real people in those situations have a lot of difficulty articulating sometimes. For me, it's an experience of broadening my own mind. I do it partly because it's something that I find so interesting, and that changes me so much.

Learning to live inside a war criminal is not actually a lot of fun. But there's a certain kind of value in dwelling imaginatively within that. That's why I write novels, is this compulsion to make people up, and to put them into relationship with each other and to see what happens, and watch them find their own directions, and explore the tensions and weak points and elided points in the story and to say, “But if this happened, what might happen? If these two people develop this particular kind of relationship, what might happen, what effects would that have on the world?” In this case, I tried to do this within a pretty strict framework of fact. I felt a real responsibility to get the factual and the detail material about Bosnia and the war crimes tribunal as right as possible.

This was an intensely researched book. I read shelves and shelves of books for it. I have been in the former Yugoslavia a number of times. I interviewed a lot of people. I went to the war crimes tribunal. It's a very, very researched book. I have my postulates, but I have to put the constraint of as much fact and as much accuracy against them to keep me from going, “Oh, this and that, this and that.” It's the balance between the postulate and the constraint that drives out some of the energy of the book for me, some of the energy I felt while writing it. I actually went and researched the weather on every day in this book. I went to the weather underground on Internet and checked what was the weather on that day, so that I couldn't get a pathetic fallacy like, “Oh, I'm so sad and it's raining outside.” You think you're beyond that, but you find yourself doing these things. I guess that's my preliminary explanation of why I make stuff up. It's a bit of a compulsion, probably. That's enough for now.

Photo Credit: http://www.maggiehelwig.com/index1.html

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Rosemary Sullivan: I guess I would say to the question, “Why make it up?” would be: “Why make it up, when the stories I find in the world are as powerful and as compelling as any one that I could invent?” I'm going to read to you from a book called Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (HarperCollins, 2006). It's the second chapter, and it's about the villa.

Villa Air-Bel was the residence of a group of artists and intellectuals waiting to escape France in 1940—some waited for up to two years—and also of the young Americans who decided to risk their lives to rescue them. The photograph poses so many questions. It's a photograph of a man and a woman up in a tree at Villa Air-Bel.

Wars build slowly, cumulatively, and often years before the history books date their beginnings. Who were the artists at the Villa Air-Bel, and how did they get caught in the deadly web? How did they not see the war coming and escape in time? Did they refuse to believe war could happen, or did they believe that if it did come, it could only touch others? Nameless, abstract others.

Long before the bombs fell and soldiers and civilians died, long before extermination camps did their work of horror, there was the war of nerves, the propaganda war being fought for people's minds. Despite the stories that are told in retrospect where everything is clear and predictable, it is never easy to decipher where the real enemy is or who will be the victim. In France in 1940, the illusion of normalcy was sustained for years. And then, in a moment, the world collapsed like a burnt husk. Millions of people were blindsided. Despite the ominous signs, they could not believe a war could happen. Not a second time.

And who were these young rescuers of the Villa Air-Bel? What convinces young people to risk their lives saving others? Is it a matter of temperament, or does this transformation happen gradually, by a series of spontaneous decisions, until there is no other choice, until the risk has already been taken? As in every war, there are victims and there are rescuers. And there are the murderers and the ones who stand by passively and watch.

‘Why did you not leave France in 1939?’ I once asked the artist Leonora Carrington, then a lover of the surrealist painter Max Ernst, who, though he had lived in France 17 years, had not become a French citizen. The French imprisoned him in September 1939 as an enemy alien. ‘We should hav left France after Max was arrested the first time,’ she said. ‘But we couldn't imagine a world other than Paris. You must remember what Paris was in those days before the war. Paris was wonderful. Paris was freedom.’

In France people soon learned how quickly everything could change. Suddenly destinies ceased to be a matter of personal control. The life and death of any individual became merely something to be haggled over in bureaucratic ministries: who was an alien, who should be imprisoned as an enemy alien, who should be deported to certain death. Not chance, not contingency, but someone else, a stranger, arbitrarily decided who lived and who died.

I want to ask what it feels like to move from freedom to occupation: to feel threatened, administered, restrained? Suddenly bits of bureaucratic paper control one's life and death. The words prohibited, investigated, imprisoned enter one's vocabulary, and everything is uncertain—life, home, children, lovers. All can be taken away or left behind.

Villa Air-Bel sat like a stone interrupting the stream in a handful of lives. It was their unexpected destiny. Multiple trajectories brought individuals who would otherwise never have encountered one another to a villa in the south of France. Over the course of many months they waited through the terrors and deprivations of war. And then they scattered in different directions, some unchanged, others changed forever. This book is their story.

You want to ask, “what is the personal story behind this segment? What is the genesis of the book, where did the idea come from?” The idea came from an interview with Leonora Carrington who I first met in 1995. I had lived and taught in France at the University of Dijon in Bordeaux in '74 and '75. I knew the history of France. I knew about the Vichy, when six to eight million people fled from Belgium down through France towards the south, towards Marseilles, the Pyrenees. Yet, talking to Leonora Carrington, a woman I came to know and love, to feel that this face, this woman I knew, was in that story, made the story real and something I wanted to tell. I'll give you two quotations from my conversation with Leonora.

I said to Leonora, "Why are totalitarian minds afraid of art?" She said, "Because it gets inside. It can terrify you or give you joy." Leonora Carrington said to me, "The Nazis opened up a forbidden door in the soul. I suppose if you have to stake out this little idea, this little bit of ground that says you are the superior race, and then you have to defend it, something horrible always happens, when you claim certainty, when you say that you know." When a woman tells you those kinds of moments, you feel that you have to record them. But behind that are further personal experiences that I think anybody who's writing creative nonfiction brings to their story.

Every writer I've written about, whether it's Elizabeth Smart or Gwendolyn MacEwen or Margaret Atwood, has ended up in my dreams, or nightmares. When I finished this book, it was the same. But behind this story is perhaps my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1979. I went there when I was living in London, lonely, and I wanted a different kind of experience. I'd met the BBC reporter, Kevin Ruane, who said he'd meet me in Moscow. I was in the hotel and he couldn't enter. I had to go out into the -30 degree snow. He took me to visit people who were dissidents, who had been arrested and sentenced, sometimes six years, to the gulags. In the gulag, one of the young men was a Christian dissident, and he told me how in 1968 they had gathered arms, were betrayed. When they were on the train going to Siberia, they heard of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and they staged a chess tournament to honour their fallen comrades.

When I came to write about Victor Serge in this book, I understood that communism was a system built upon the necessary betrayal of the other as the only way to advance your life. But I didn't trust myself. I asked my colleague and friend, Joseph Skvorecky, I said, “Joseph, I have to go somewhere else to see if it works the same elsewhere.” He said, “Go to Prague.” So in 1979 I went to Prague. He said, “Never use my name, just say you're from Toronto.” So I put money in a payphone, phoned the first number, said, “I'm from Toronto,” they said, “Come immediately.” The taxi I took, the guy didn't speak English, I didn't speak Czech. But he had Canadian hockey stickers all over his windshield, and spoke about this great place, Canada, where there was a great writer called Jack London. I remember seeing Joseph's books in samizdat pass from hand to hand. When I returned to Canada, the writer, Gordon Wright, a civil rights lawyer, stayed in our house. He had just attended the trial of Václav Havel. He repeated the jokes the families used at the trial to keep each other's humour up. That's when I discovered Czech lacked humour, almost as bad as Chilean black humour. When I discovered in writing this book that André Breton was the one who invented the term l’humour noir, I felt the connections.

But maybe the most important connection to this book was that my own husband is from Chile, Juan Opus. Juan was arrested in 1975 under the Pinochet dictatorship. He was arrested and imprisoned for doing a play that was considered defamatory of the military. When we returned to Chile in 1985, we went to his small town, Talca, a tiny, conservative belt in the south of Chile. It was under curfew. We went to a little café, and at midnight when the doors were locked, the young guitarists brought out their guitars and sang the forbidden songs of Victor Hara. We went then with them to their home, slinking through the streets that were being patrolled by the paddy wagons of the military, and people were being picked up. We had a wonderful evening from 3 til 5 in the morning. Then the young men and women started to bring out their treasures, which were invariably books wrapped in whatever material they had. They were Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, Oriana Fallaci books, that if they were found to be carrying, they would be imprisoned. They were censored, forbidden books. They turned to my husband, Juan, and said, “Look, we know what it's like to live in dictatorship, but it happened when we were 12. How did it happen? You're the first one who's come back to tell us. Tell us how it happened.” Juan stopped, there was a silence. He said, “Who do you think I am?” At that moment the room turned from absolute warmth to cold terror and ice, because they suddenly saw they had revealed these dangerous passions to someone they did not know. Juan immediately broke the ice and said, “That's what happened, we were innocent; we were asking for reformation. It was the fascists who said we were revolutionaries. After the coup d'état, we found out that the guy who was serving us in the cafeteria, the kid who was sitting beside us, the woman at the door, were working for the secret police, were working for the DINA [Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional]. That's what I have to tell you, we were innocent.”

So that's the deep story. It was that feeling of menace that I wanted behind the book. But I also wanted to tell you that I did write this as an allegory for the present. I'll just give you two quick quotes. I want us to remember that it happens in the Second World War in Chile. The book goes only to 1942 because it's not about war, it's about the building towards war, and refugees, and those who rescue them.

This is a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “They cannot imagine that the things they lived for could disappear. They cannot believe that something essential could disappear, that a whole spiritual realm is threatened. They do not believe in major historical upheavals that obliterate all traces of previous generations and entirely transform continents. They do not believe that seems to them unjust is possible.”

And then Samuel Beckett: “There's no escape from yesterday, because yesterday has deformed us or been deformed by us.”

Thank you.

Photo Credit: University of Toronto/ Juan Opitz

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A question from the audience asks whether and why the authors place themselves in their books.

Harold Rhenisch: I like to put myself in my nonfiction books because when I'm dealing with such tenuous material just on the edge of consciousness, I need something that I can say, this is real, a kind of Descartian position. So I put myself in there. That transformation happens over the five years or ten years it takes to write one of these books. I tend to write these books by drawing many threads together that eventually come together to form a whole. The work that's done on myself as a character happens over the course of that time. Unless I transform myself completely as a person, I cannot find the threads that will bring the thing together and complete the book. That's how it works for me.

Rosemary Sullivan: I actually don't think there's a great deal of difference between the process of the person who writes fiction and the person who writes nonfiction, as we call it—it's a stupid negative—or the person who writes documentary. I will tell you that there's always a moment when I'm writing a big book of nonfiction, like my biography of Elizabeth Smart or Gwendolyn MacEwen, that I have a dream in which the writer appears and gives me permission to do the story. When Elizabeth appeared at the bottom of the bed, she said, "You'd better get it right." And Gwendolyn came into the kitchen of my mythical house and offered me a cigarette. I ran through some war-torn city of Europe with a baby I knew, with the book about Margaret Atwood, rather dry and desiccated, but I got it to the station and it was still alive. I love nonfiction. I love to be working with something that I can say, “My God, imagine this happened in a real life and I don't have to make anything up.” For me, it's almost more powerful than fiction, because it carries the authority of that is what can happen to human beings. But then maybe also I don't have the talent for fiction. With this book, as I told you, there were many layers of the personal. But I have to say, you can't write a book about rescuers who saved refugees at great personal risk and cost without saying to yourself, what the hell would you have done? Would you have had the nerve to stay in a villa with war in Vichy, France, with the Vichy police circling, the Gestapo behind, any moment you could be arrested. You had a certain sense of safety because you thought maybe your nationality as American or Canadian would save you. But nothing saves you when the going gets really tough. So of course I asked, would I have stayed? And I hope the answer is yes, but I won't know until I'm tested.

Curtis Gillespie: How does that affect how you write the book?

Rosemary Sullivan: I can't imagine people writing books where they don't like the people. I came to love these people. I came to love Victor Serge, this wonderful fanatic socialist. The communists failed him, and yet he kept believing in democracy and the ideas of collective responsibility. One of the things I do, I always write the FBI, it's such fun to get letters from the FBI, as a biographer. They sent me 350 pages on Victor Serge, who I call “the Solzhenitsyn of the 1930s”. Victor Serge, they had accumulated a record in him from the moment they discovered him in 1939 until his death in Mexico in 1947. This man had spent five years in Siberian exile protesting Stalinism, had been saved by an international congress of writers, and brought to France as a refugee. The state department would never let him into the United States, because he had once been a communist. So how do you write about these people? Because you fall in love with them.

Curtis Gillespie: That puts me in mind of a comment by Lillian Ross, the great New York writer, who said that she only writes about people she likes. If she doesn't like them, she doesn't write about them.

Maggie Helwig: I have to jump in here and say that one of the things that was most important for me in this book was to be able to live within the mind of someone that I profoundly dislike. The more I work as a writer, the more I think that is an important moral act for a writer as well, is to write about, with some comprehension, people that you really dislike, whether it's because they've done horrible things or they're just kind of creepy people. I think there's a real important moral act in being able to do that as well.

A question from the audience asks whether writing assists in healing.

Maggie Helwig: I don't know about healing; I don't know if it's made me a better person. It may have made me a worse person, but it certainly expanded the directions in which I can think and, I hope, sort of expanded the boundaries of human sympathy, without necessarily excusing horrible, inhuman actions. What kind of effect it has on me as a person, I'm inclined to think writing is quite bad for one as a human being.

Curtis Gillespie: On that happy note, I want to give Morningstar just a quick moment to comment on the self-examination and self-analysis you go through with the self as the narrator.

Morningstar Mercredi: Thank you. I live in a country that is in denial of its own history; consequently, I can only provide the perspective that I as a woman have experienced. It's been a challenge to write about my experiences ever so delicately. I didn't write the book Morningstar: A Warrior's Spirit with the objective of wanting to cause pain. I knew it would be controversial. What I had hoped to accomplish was to shed some humanity, some compassion, some integrity on an otherwise horrific reality that I as an aboriginal woman have endured in Canada. It's neither here nor there anymore anyway; I mean, I'm here. People ask about being a writer. Well certainly, economically it bites. What was most challenging was to write about my late stepfather, who was the main pedophile in my household. There were several. So to write about the whole issue of being a child who was sexually exploited and sexually abused, and then write about women who are being murdered and have gone missing by virtue of the colour of their skin, it being not acknowledged, as well as children being raped by virtue of colour of their skin not being acknowledged, it wasn't a pleasant experience. But then again, I didn't want it to be. It shouldn't be. It should disturb everyone, and it's a damn shame for me that I had to write a book for that to happen. To have to write about my late stepfather, who was the epitome of one pedophile and predator, however he was one of thousands of men and women who are four generations of aboriginal Métis and Inuit people in Canada since 1800s were institutionalized and incarcerated in residential schools, let's talk about intergenerational impact. Oh, wait a minute: that's not pleasant, maybe we shouldn't talk about it. To quote the Winnipeg Free Press—and I want to say thank you to the person who gave me the review and just trashed me—this writer said, “Get over it already.” Oh yes, certainly, let's get over child sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, the homicide and murdering of women, I don't care what colour your skin is. Let's get over family violence, let's get over Canadian history. Well hell, how can you get over it when you don't even talk about it? Denial is a really disturbing state for any country to live in. I don't need, unfortunately, to look beyond this continent or my own country.

A question from the audience asks: “When we are told not to speak about something, what happened when you did? Was there a breakthrough that happened?”

Harold Rhenisch: Just very briefly, just to back up a little, I published this book, it's about my father, not always complimentary. My father was a very political man and was a hero to many people. He also wasn't a very good father, in a lot of ways. But when the book came out, the people who worshipped my father politically got together. They were a bunch of Portuguese refugees and whatnot living in the interior of British Columbia. They decided that the best thing to do was to take Harold behind the barn and shoot him. That's how you handle these kinds of problems. Fortunately, they didn't follow through. When my uncle sent me material for this book about my grandfather, it came with a strict rule: do not publish it until my stepmother dies and until my sister dies. So after my step grandmother died, I published part of the story as part of a novel, disguising it so much that I could get away with it. But my aunt is going to live for a long time, so I eventually let a lot of time pass. Then I sent the manuscript to Germany and said, what do you think? They said, it's okay, time has passed and we've worked through these things. So time heals things, I have found, but it's hard.

Maggie Helwig: I don't know if I have any story that really fits that. Certainly there were people who expressed concern that I as a white Canadian was writing about East Timor, about Bosnia. It was not East Timorese or Bosnians who had the concern—interestingly enough, it was other white Canadians. Nobody told me I couldn't, they just said, do you think this is a good idea? I found my East Timorese and my Bosnian friends have been very supportive, on the whole. I don't really have an appropriate story.

Steven Heighton: When my grandmother died about 15 years ago, they found among her papers some old parchments which were written in gorgeous 18 th-century copper plate, records of slaves who were held on a Jamaican plantation by a great-great-uncle. This was a disturbing discovery, of course. My father finally gave me these papers, because I said, “I want to write about this.” He actually urged me not to. He said, “This is an awful and disgraceful thing.” But this kind of gets back to what Morningstar was talking about, about countries or families or people being in denial. It's something I do want to write about, but I'm not sure what form the thing will take—fiction or poetry or nonfiction. But it is something I want to explore, rather than just burying those old sheets of parchment, which list the names of slaves and describe how many hours a day they're still capable of working, like maybe 12 or 14, if they're young and healthy. A kind of horrific document, but I don't want to just hide it away. And there are many such documents all over the place. It's interesting, because there's this distant familial connection to it.

Rosemary Sullivan: I've written three books of poetry, and the first was called The Space a Name Makes. Clumsy title, but it was exactly what the book was about—the idea that you have to live into your name. I told all the family stories, but always felt safe because it was poetry, and nobody would read poetry. Then my mother read the book. We had an Irish Catholic family, in every sense of that word. When I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it should've been Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, because that was my family. All she said was, “Why did you call Aunt Mary a turtle?” But I wanted to say something to Morningstar's comment. I've often thought that what we need in Canada is a truth and reconciliation committee to acknowledge our past, because that's the only thing that could confront and perhaps purge, or at least reconcile, that history from where it's been isolated in denial. To follow the South African model, and have a truth and reconciliation committee.

Morningstar Mercredi: I just want to also say that I have a son, he's 25 years old, he's beautiful, and he’s my heart. I will never deny my son the truth of his family. But we have made an agreement that he won't read the book—there's just too much there. In fact, if anybody does read the books, I've been very gracious to the reader and have not provided all the details. Bear that in mind should you read it. I want to say that Canada is a beautiful country and I'm quite proud to be Dene. We have so much to celebrate, it's just phenomenal, it's mind-boggling; the history we share is absolutely outstanding in every capacity. I'm of Scottish, Irish, French, Chipewyan, Anishinabe, Mi'kmaq, Cree and Dene background. I opened Canada. So I think we all have a wonderful opportunity, whether we're Celtic or otherwise, to celebrate the uniqueness of this country. Certainly though, for myself as a writer and storyteller, there are many stories to tell. This truth and reconciliation, the compassion and humanity and understanding of one another as human beings, is a good place to begin. We have so many things to celebrate. Healing, what is it? I don't know. Is there such a thing as truth? I don't know. I'm just a storyteller; I have lots of stories to tell.

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Editor’s note: Since 2006, Athabasca University’s Master of Arts—Integrated Studies has offered a creative nonfiction course (MAIS 617) as well as the opportunity for students to complete their final projects in the genre (MAIS 701). In January 2008, the Centre for Language and Literature will launch English 384, its inaugural creative nonfiction course with an emphasis on the writing of the genre.

Gordon Morash is an Edmonton-based writer and editor. As an Athabasca University Visiting Graduate Professor, he teaches MAIS 617: Creative Nonfiction.

 

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An Aurora Update

Sadly Gordon Morash passed away August 28, 2009.

Updated March 2018

 

 

Aurora Online

 

Citation Format

Gordon Morash (2007) Truth and Lies: Telling Tales in Creative Nonfiction, Aurora Online