It's a trip down memory lane for Edye Hanen as we walk through Davies Orchard after a visit to the Undercurrent office. She points out the various cottages and connects them with names and stories, woven together by the sense of community that used to prevail when Edye lived there. At the cottage closest to the wintering pond, Edye pauses - this is where she lived for 15 years until 1999. She looks toward the bay and recalls her daughter walking to the water's edge with all of her six cats following her - and returning home in the same manner.
"The cat door is still here," Edye says, remembering a particularly cold winter when a goose had been trying to enter the home through there, seeking warmth, while another one froze to death on the lawn. In the winter of 1990, the power had been out for days and the poorly insulated wall of the cottage had been covered with frost - on the inside.
"The orchard has been a huge part of my writing," says Edye. She edited the Undercurrent for many years and, after retiring from the job in 2007, has dedicated her days to a different kind of writing. This year, Edye has won two prestigious awards: the second place from the Canadian Authors Association for her story The Escape, and the first place from the Federation of BC Writers for The Hard Box. Edye has also been shortlisted for a non-fiction story titled The Chrystal Set by the CBC's Close Encounters with Science writing challenge.
Her two award-winning fiction stories are included in an anthology titled National Voices, published by the Canadian Authors Association's Vancouver branch.
This recognition serves as an encouragement for Edye - a sort of confirmation that her stories are worth telling and appeal to a larger audience. "My reason for doing this is that I believe that women should be telling their stories, over and over again," she says.
The heart of her writing is autobiographical, Edye explains, but lately she has redefined the material as fiction. "I'm now avoiding the idea of calling it creative non-fiction," she said. "The stories originate from my own personal experiences but they are fictionalized. Very few of them tell it exactly how it happened." Edye gives the example of reading Alice Munro and being convinced that the stories are about the author's personal life, yet they read like fiction. "It's truth laced with fiction," Edye laughs, saying that she is becoming more and more comfortable with pushing her writing into the direction of fiction.
"At least three of my stories are set in the orchard," she said. "One of them is called Saturday Night and talks about a party that was going on. I lived there for so long and it was such an amazing time." She adds that the orchard also provides the backdrop for her novel. At the centre of Edye's desire to write is the realization that women's lives undergo a profound change through motherhood, the raising of children and trying to find a balance in their working life. "By telling my story, I'm telling every woman's story," Edye says.
It was a difficult time for Edye who was living as a single mother of two teenagers in a cottage that was not winterized and had to cope with freezing temperatures and winter storms. "We had to get up every few hours to put a log on the fire to stay warm," she says. But it was one of the best times in her life as well and it certainly provided a fertile ground for cultivating stories. "Most of us in the orchard were women. And most of us were struggling," Edye recalls. "We were barely scraping by and now I'm amazed how each of us has grown and bloomed."
Edye remembers a neighbour going into the woods with a sheet to collect twigs and fallen logs for firewood. Another one placed the phone outside on the stairs so that friends would answer it when it rang. Those were formative years but they were far from idyllic.
The experiences have found their way into Edye's writing. She has completed a novel, titled The Weight of Words, and 15 fiction stories that all stand on their own but Edye envisions publishing them as a collection. Since two of them have won awards, she hopes that the recognition will generate some interest from publishers.
Edye has also published a number of travel stories at Mexconnect (http://www.mexconnect.com), an online travel magazine specializing in material about Mexico. It currently features her story about a skating rink in Mexico City front and centre. "It isn't a straightforward travel piece about where to stay and what to eat," Edye explains. "I like to get to the story under the story." Every year, she spends a part of the winter in Mexico with a base in San Miguel del Allende from where she explores other areas. "Some of the places are quite unusual and I like to tell the stories about that," she says.
Edye is pleased to share the pages of National Voices with Patrick Taylor, a writer who used to live on Bowen Island but moved to Saltspring.
"He came to see me in the Undercurrent office and asked whether I would like to be introduced to his editor," Edye says, adding that this editor had a huge influence on her writing. "It was because of her that I was able to finish my novel. She helped me shape it, sending me stack and stacks of notes. I was able to really connect with her." By the time the novel was completed, Edye felt she had a better handle on the craft of writing. "At some point, it just clicked and I understood that every story must answer a question. And it's up to me to know what the question is, even if it is something we may not even be conscious of. In the earlier days, I know that I wrote well, but the understanding how structure works didn't come until later," she says. "Now, I know how to structure a story and how to make it work."
Part of Edye's learning process has been to read works by her favourite writers and analyze them. She has also taken a number of workshops and classes and says, "[Writing] is really a lifetime apprenticeship."
National Voices includes work from Edye as well as Bowen Island poet Bernice Lever. It features 150 pages of poetry, fiction and non-fiction pieces and costs $20. On Bowen, it is available from Edye or Bernice.
