Memoir

Graphic Memoir Insights on Aging, Long-Term Care, and Dying

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

I remember all too well my mother’s dying process. My father predeceased her by almost 20 years. Five years after he died, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She went 15 years later, outlasting her doctor’s predictions by five years. 

Cover of 'Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care' by Susan MacLeod, featuring an illustration of a person in a wheelchair and various humorous sketches around the edges.

By the mid-1980s it had become apparent that she’d no longer be able to live on her own. It was her choice to move into long-term care; she didn’t want to be a burden and nothing my sister or I said could change her mind. And, it would have been difficult. I had two young children with chronic illnesses; my sister was working full-time and working on her bachelor’s degree. So, at our mother’s insistence, we began investigating nursing homes. 

We were going on tours of different facilities for four to six months before she found the one she’d move into. It was a newer facility in a lovely part of Vancouver, and the residents had private rooms. The staff were kind and competent and obviously cared about her. If she ever felt unhappy with the choice she’d made, she didn’t share it with us. 

As I read Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care (Conundrum Press, 2021) by Susan MacLeod (class of 2021) in a single sitting, I was reminded that not every older person receives the loving care our mother did. Not all families are attentive or involved, as we were, and not all facilities take particularly good care of their residents. 

A cartoon illustration depicting a frustrated individual with glasses, expressing anger and confusion about their situation. The text includes phrases like 'Sometimes, when I was alone, I felt like losing it!' and comments on nursing home care labelled as 'enhanced.' There are also smaller figures representing laundry care, highlighting a humorous frustration.
A cartoonish drawing depicting a person pushing a wheelbarrow near a cliff with swirling patterns in the air, accompanied by the text '...the personal and systemic whirlpools of weirdness were just beginning.'
Cartoon illustration discussing healthcare system issues, featuring a distressed hospital worker and an elderly patient. Text highlights problems with hospital bed availability and the term 'bed blockers' for elderly patients who cannot return home.

Perhaps because it’s written as a graphic memoir, MacLeod is able to draw an unapologetically stark picture of the problems not only with long-term care but with the ageism that seems endemic to our culture. (Chapter 1 is called “I’ve Always Disliked Old People” and Chapter 2 is “I’ve Always Disliked Death.) She’s also unflinchingly honest about the flaws in her family of origin, including her own merciless bullying of her younger brother when they were children and her realization that just because she’s ready to be forgiven doesn’t mean he’s ready to forgive her.

Yet Mac Leod periodically lightens the tone of what could be an unrelentingly depressing topic with self-deprecating humour. For example, about once per chapter, we see a motif of a banner framing a cartoon tile that says, “Susan Seeks an Expert” or “Solution Susan Strikes.” My personal favourite: SYSTEMS THAT MAKE HUMANS INHUMANE. This comes up several times in the book and reminds me very much of the problems my sister and I have had with the care home our older brother is now living in. 

With such a visual medium, it’s impossible to insert an excerpt of text and make it make sense, so instead I’ve included some of MacLeod’s full-page drawings to give a sense of her story and her skills as an artist/author. 

Dying for Attention is such an easy read yet at the same time such honest and compelling reading that I think it should be available to anyone who’s considering a nursing home for an older loved one. At the very least, it should be required reading in programs for care aides. 

Reviews of other books on family and loss:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable — A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel

Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go, by Kelly S. Thompson

Exploring Japanese Canadian Identity and History

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

As a little girl, I had a pink and turquoise satin kimono. I can’t remember why I had it or where it came from; it likely had something to do with the dance classes I took for several years, and it was likely a gross misrepresentation of what it was meant to be. But until I was much older, it was all I knew of Japanese culture. 

Cover of the book 'The Nail That Sticks Out' featuring the title in bold letters, authors' names, and an image of a girl in traditional attire.

I was likely not alone in that. Yet the Japanese Canadian community has a rich history in Canada, a history that includes far more than the tragic and shameful chapter in Canadian history of the internment of all Japanese Canadian citizens during World War II and the confiscation of their property, for which they only received redress in 1988. 

In The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community (Dundurn Press, 2024), Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann (class of 2021) combines family history and details of traditional Japanese culture with personal memoir. The result is a compelling account of a community that has endured through racism and hardship but must, Hartmann argues, be defined as far more than that.

There is a touching account of her grandfather, who painted beautiful watercolours but never considered his art good enough for more than scraps of newsprint and saved none of his paintings. There is the story of the cousin who, fearing academic disappointment, gave up all her dance classes—except traditional odori dance because she’d seen it give her grandmother so much joy. 

There are also the notes of persistent and systemic racism: the lack of Asian representation in theatre and film paired with underpayment of Asian actors when they do appear. The thoughtless souls who pop up everywhere with the ridiculous question every biracial person hears far too often: “What are you?” (To which Hartmann flippantly replies, “I’m still human, the last time I checked.”)

But even that history is slowly being erased, Hartmann writes:

From Camille’s [her daughter’s] perspective, most Torontonians “don’t know JCs exist, let alone the historical context” of the relocation after the war and how JCs became resettled … “Our trauma is only amplified. Only internment is ever talked about … “

In many ways this reality is reflected in the larger community. Despite Japanese planting roots in Canada more than a hundred years ago, JC history is slowly being erased. Each generation adds their own perspective on identity and culture. Camille’s generation—the gosei, or fifth generation—are almost entirely biracial. To the untrained eye, kids like Camille or their cousin Samantha easily pass for white. Just as my sister and I loosely resemble our parents, there are glimpses of us within our kids too. Our ethnicity may appear ambiguous, yet we share a rich cultural inheritance. 

Canada’s only Japantown in Vancouver is long gone. But here, in places like Markham’s J-Town and the downtown Toronto strip called Little Tokyo a string of savvy entrepreneurs have stepped in to serve up Japanese-infused shopping experiences Do consumers ever ponder the roots of our community as they stand in line with their matcha lattes and mochi ice cream, hoping to get their pork belly ramen or stamped cheesecake before they sell out? Unlike these stores, which offer the latest trends and tastes of modern-day Japan, other long-established cultural and religious institutions scattered throughout the Greater Toronto Area reflect the perseverance of JCs who were determined to rebuild their lives after the war.

Will anyone remember their struggles or history decades from now? With so few Japanese in Canada, will anyone care? When searching for information, I discovered a dark void, a dearth of evidence, and little mention of our Japanese congregation or the people who dedicated their lives to it. A lost legacy in a disappearing community. 

I sincerely hope not. 

Essential Feminist Reads for International Women’s Month

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and the month of March is International Women’s Month. With a nod to both, with this post I acknowledge several books from the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program that further the cause of justice and equality for women. 

Cover of the book 'Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America' by Sheima Benembarek, featuring ripe figs and a 'Staff Pick' label.

It’s hard to pick just a few books. The program is dominated by women, all of whom I’d describe as feminist, and many of their stories are about women’s lives, whether their own or others. But if I’m going to stick strictly to books with a decidedly feminist theme, I’d choose these five:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America by Sheima Benembarek. This book was eye-opening for me. It honestly never occurred to me that a blue-haired, niqab-wearing, orthodox Muslim woman might be polyamorous. It doesn’t surprise me that a child from a Muslim family might be just as likely as a child from any other family to be transgender. But I have to admit some surprise—the good kind—in reading about a same-sex couple, both comedians, one a Palestinian-born Muslim the other a Jew from Montreal who perform individually and as a pair who starred in a Crave comedy special called Marriage of Convenience. The title of the book, Halal Sex, comes from a term for sex practiced within a heterosexual Muslim marriage. But Benembarek put a decidedly feminist twist on it by redefining it as “all consensual sex between adults.” 

Book cover featuring the title 'Every Boy I Ever Kissed' by Nellwyn Lampert, with a graphic design showing a woman in a red dress and hands embracing her.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir by Nellwyn Lampert. I started calling myself a feminist at the age of 13. I was in way too much of a hurry to lose my virginity, which I did at 14. I had no idea of the connection between the two. But there is a connection, a pretty important one. And that connection is a major part of what Lampert wrestles with in this coming-of-age memoir. As the cover blurb says, “for Nellwyn Lampert, losing her virginity would turn out to be anything but simple. Her chosen partners struggled with porn-induced erectile dysfunction and other crises of masculinity. And in the bedroom, nothing went according to plan.” So, in that regard, our experiences were entirely different. But in terms of “the realities of sexual liberation, female empowerment, and masculinity,” the issues are not that different at all than the ones I was too young to realize I was doing with more than 50 years ago that sexual freedom and gender freedom are two very different concepts. 

Cover of the book 'Highway of Tears' by Jessica McDiarmid, featuring an illustrated mask and a striking orange background. The subtitle highlights themes of racism and justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid. It’s a grim fact that Indigenous women make up only about 4% of the female population in Canada but accounted for 16% of all female homicides between 1980 and 2012. And a disturbing number of those women are abducted, raped, and murdered along a strip of highway in northern BC called the Highway of Tears. From the back cover: “Journalist Jessica McDiarmid investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected.” As difficult as this book was to read, it was just as difficult to put down. I can’t imagine a better lens through which to examine the intersection of racism and misogyny than through the horrific impacts of colonization by patriarchal white, European culture on Indigenous women and girls. 

Book cover of 'F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism' by Lauren McKeon featuring bold black text and a pink graffiti-style accent.

F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism by Lauren McKeon. It’s always surprised me that when I say I’ve been calling myself a feminist since I was 13 but I haven’t always felt that feminism welcomed me, what many people seem to hear is that I don’t think feminism is necessary or relevant. In fact, I’m saying exactly the opposite—that feminism remains as relevant today as ever and that’s why it’s so important to ensure that ALL sorts of women feel a sense of belonging within the movement. That was my read on McKeon’s book. She recognizes that too many women have moved in the wrong direction instead of understanding that feminism is for every woman—that, indeed, until we are all free, none of us are free. Why has this happened? That, as McKeon points out, is a question for feminists to answer. And as women’s rights are being eroded daily, it’s becoming increasingly urgent that we answer it and ensure that all women feel that the arms of feminism welcome them. 

Book cover for 'Conspiracy of Hope' by Renée Pellerin, featuring stylized illustrations of a woman's chest with highlighted areas, and subtitle 'The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening'.

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening by Renée Pellerin. No woman in the western world isn’t familiar with the unique joy (she said sarcastically) of having her breasts pulled and twisted and squished between cold metal plates for their regular mammogram. In this book, Pellerin, an award-winning producer with the CBC, does a deep dive into the evidence supporting and opposing regular mammography screening. And her conclusion is that the evidence weighs strongly in favour of less screening. It’s supported by vested interests, false positives can lead to invasive overtreatment, false negatives can give women a false sense of security, its effectiveness differs significantly for different age groups, and regular exposure to radiation can, in a small number of cases, increase risk of cancer. It’s an eye-opening book that every woman should read and consider carefully before assuming that doctor’s orders should never be questioned. 

Happy International Women’s Month and enjoy the reading!

Finding Joy in Simple Pleasures: A Path to Healing

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

On May 29, 2016, I tried to end my life. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried, but it was the closest I came to succeeding. My reasons are not the point here. The point is that, during my long, slow climb back to mental health, I learned that I needed to stop living my life in the past and the future. If I was going to stay alive, I needed to live my life one moment at a time. 

Cover of the book 'A Cure for Heartache' by Mary Jane Grant, featuring an open window view of a cityscape with greenery, an open notebook and a cup of tea on a table, accompanied by cookies.

That is the key message of Mary Jane Grant’s (class of 2016) A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time (hard cover, Hodder, 2019, sold in paperback as Happier Here and Now: The Restorative Power of Life’s Simple Pleasures). Struggling with grief after a sudden divorce, Grant moved to England where she slowly learned to live her life moment by moment, soaking in the joys of each minute, and learning that life can’t be lived in the past or the future. It can only be lived here and now. 

The therapist I found to help me through that period of my life is trained in a well-researched and fully secular practice of meditation called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). One of the techniques she taught me for pulling myself out of depression and anxiety, though not meditation, is a simple practice, of going through the five senses, one at a time, and noticing five things I see, five things I feel, five things I hear, taste, and smell. It’s meant to break the cycle of rumination over past experiences one finds depressing and anxiety over future experiences.

It’s meant to bring the person back to the physical world around them in each moment. 

This is what I thought about as I read Grant’s book, as she explained her process of minding her senses, learning to wander, learning to let go, loving what you do, and learning to appreciate and to connect. Here’s how Grant describes her experience of getting reacquainted with her five senses:

I entered the reading room. Morning light streamed through tall windows. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with books, and a dozen or more freestanding shelves took up the remaining space. To the left of the entrance door were counters with computer stations. Above, a bulletin board was covered in notices, local advertisements and sign-up sheets for local classes and lectures. A couple of round wooden tables filled the rest of the space. People sat here and there, reading books and newspapers. I went to an empty table, quietly unpacked my things, sat down and closed my eyes.   

Book cover of 'Happier Here & Now' by Mary Jane Grant, featuring a hand holding a colorful bouquet of flowers, with the title and subtitle prominently displayed.

I could hear the occasional rustling of a newspaper and the soft hum of the heating system. 

I took a deep breath through my nose. I detected a faint floral hint from the hand lotion I’d applied before leaving my room. Lately, I’d switched my allegiance from lavender to rose. Maybe it was the influence of England. After all, what was more English than a rose? 

I settled into place, connected my laptop, opened the internet and started my search. My first question was simple: why, when I immersed myself in the present, did I feel so much better? By pulling my attention to the five senses, I gave myself no choice but to focus on what was happening in the moment. I was not stuck in the past or worried about the future. Yesterday, I had learned first-hand that the senses held the key that opened the gate to my present experience. They admitted me to the garden of earthly delights—sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical feelings—right here, right now. By being in the body, I could calm the mind and soothe the spirit. It felt neither self-indulgent nor hedonistic. It felt beautifully, blissfully ordinary. 

When I was recovering after my suicide attempt, I read Full Catastrophe Living, a 650-page volume by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world-renowned mindfulness researcher and originator/teacher of MBSR. I took the MBSR course twice, and underwent a one-year program called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. 

If I ever encounter someone going through a rough time, I might tell them, instead, to buy Grant’s 200-page A Cure for Heartache and read it slowly, mindfully, savouring each syllable, and then maybe go back and read it again. Because everything I learned in that difficult time is what I learned all over again from this meaningful little book. 

For more on heartbreak and healing, read:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, by Laura Pratt

For more lyric essays, read:

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas, by Gloria Blizzard

I Don’t Do Disability and other lies I’ve told myself, by Adelle Purdham

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More, by Karen Stiller

Black Cake, Turtle Soup: A Journey Through Racism for Any Month of the Year

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Years ago, I attended a one-day workshop on racism. At one point, the workshop leader asked one person in the group to sit on the hotseat to learn about the experience of racism from a first-person perspective by talking about a time they’d experienced an “ism.” I volunteered.

Book cover for 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard with a colorful wave pattern background.

I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape. 

Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism. 

Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity. 

Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”

Sitting at Northwood on Bloor Street West over a mocktail and beer, Gillian asks, “Did you notice suddenly becoming invisible to men around age forty?” 

Me: “Nope.”

“Yeah, but you are beautiful.”

“So are you.”

“But I noted it and it was sudden.” Gillian is smart, gorgeous, accomplished, white, a writer, and one of my mentors during my MFA. 

Good for her, I thought, as mostly I found myself far too visible. Still. A constant imposition or a weight lay upon me. Except, that is, when I wanted medical or legal care or psychological or academic care for me or my child—then I became eminently less visible, categorically unseen, a giant perplexity for someone who looked at me blankly, or with sexually laced assumptions or suspicion. 

This is not unlike my trip to a walk-in medical clinic for extreme rib pain that had me hobbled. After an hour wait, I was sent to an examining room. The doctor entered. I sat twisted in pain and pointing at my chest. His face turned to scorn, the absence of concern. “Get out,” he said. “Just, just go,” he said, waving me and my pain away. 

It happens to women of all ages and races, this shifting state of value and visibility. Gillian noted herself as suddenly unseen at a certain age. My Blackness, however, ensures that eyes remain on me. This disappears, however, when I am due for a promotion or in need of care. Then I am fucking invisible.

I did not respond in real time at the clinic. My thoughts were blunted by pain, shock, and confusion. This medical assault surprised and shocked me, and yet it did not surprise me at all. The doctor assumed I was there for opiates. …

The doctor got paid by our state for that visit. For my pain-infused walk to and presence in that clinic, I got nothing. The next day, after another pain-filled night, I took more time off from my job and visited a naturopath who was also a chiropractor. I paid for this visit myself. Upon a physical examination that took approximately two minutes, he determined I had a dislocated rib. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “This is a body response. Have you been under extreme stress?” 

“You have no idea,” I responded. 

That was exactly the lesson I learned at that workshop all those years ago: I can try my best to understand every day. And I do try. Every day. It’s literally the least I can do. But no matter what I do or how hard I try, I will never really have any idea. 

That’s the reality that all of us need to integrate into our lives and reflect on every day for the rest of our lives. Adding this excellent book to the library of books and movies I continue to accumulate—not just in the years since that workshop, not just in the months after George Floyd’s murder, not just during Black History Month, but every month of every year I continue to be alive—is one small way to continue trying. 

It’s not enough, of course. I doubt anything will be enough in my lifetime. But to paraphrase a very wise woman I once knew: How do you start fighting racism? You just start.

Other books that deal with racism:

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly Conlin

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert

One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Recovered a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish

No Such Thing: A Memoir of ‘Mild’ TBI and How You Can Help

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Almost every week for more than a year, I’ve been using this space to review and champion books by graduates of the prestigious Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Book cover of 'No Such Thing' by Lynne Melcombe, featuring a blue background and white text.
To read excerpts, click on the image.

I’ve been mostly absent for a couple of months, first because I was on a much-needed vacation, and since then because I’ve been devoting my time to a book project of my own.

I undertook the MFA program so I could learn to write, not just any book, but this book.

This book recounts my experience of and research related to a “mild” TBI (concussion) that I had over 20 years ago and from which I’ve never fully recovered.

My experience taught me that there is “no such thing” as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. That’s why I’ve called my book No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery.

Most people recover from concussions in a few days—weeks at most.

But up to 30% of people don’t. Some go on having symptoms for months, even years. 

I’ve never fully recovered from my injury. I felt a need to write a book about it for a few reasons.

  • Brain injury is very isolating. The injury itself—pain, brain fog, memory loss—can make it hard to communicate. 
  • Many people—doctors, lawyers, co-workers, friends, family—don’t believe you. That makes the pain and isolation worse. 
  • The stigma against people who pursue legal measures based on ongoing misperceptions about brain injury add stress and emotional trauma that complicate a person’s ability to recover.
  • There wasn’t much to support people going through this experience twenty years ago. Anyone going through it now deserves better.

At the time of my injury, I often felt like I was going crazy.

Doctors kept telling me I should be better. Lawyers put my life under a microscope. Family, friends, and coworkers acted—and sometimes said—I was just looking for attention and I needed to get over it.

But as years went by and social media exploded, I began hearing other people’s stories of not-so-mild traumatic brain injury. I began keeping abreast of current research that supported what they were going through.

Gradually, I stopped questioning my own perceptions.

When I wrote my book, I was writing the book I needed at the time. 

I wrote it for the people who need it now, for those who love them, and for those who want to better understand this underestimated injury.

I finished my book a couple of years ago and, full of hope, I started looking for a publisher.

Every one of them responded the same way: timely topic, great story, well written, but I lacked enough of an audience to justify their investment in publishing it.

One of the things I learned in the MFA program was the necessity of building an audience while writing my book.

But while I was writing, I was coping with a divorce, navigating health issues, and rebuilding a freelance writing and editing business.

I was also managing the symptoms of my injury every day.

I lacked the ability to do it all.

At first, when I realized that no “real” publishers wanted my book, I felt like I’d failed.  

But I also realized that if I gave up and left my book sitting in a virtual drawer, that would feel like failure too.

So, I turned to Iguana Books.

Iguana Books is a hybrid publisher.

A hybrid publisher retains the quality controls conventional publishers rely on but with a requirement that authors cover production costs, as they would in self-publishing. 

Iguana takes hybrid publishing a step further by asking their authors to crowdfund production costs. This ensures costs are covered and allows authors to test the market and build an audience for their book.

Iguana recommended Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform designed specifically for creators.

As I started building my Kickstarter campaign, an interesting thing happened.

I stopped feeling like I’d failed.

I realized that no matter how I publish my book, it will succeed based on same things as any other book—my research, my writing, and my promotional efforts.

That realization has renewed my confidence in my abilities, injected my efforts with energy, and restored my faith in the book I’ve written.

That’s where you come in.

I need your support to raise the $9,000 required to fund the production process—copy editing, layout, distribution. And I’m asking you to pledge whatever you can to help me get there. 

Please go to my Kickstarter campaign page and learn more about why I feel my book is timely, important, and necessary.

Then consider backing my project with a pledge in any amount you can manage.

What’s in it for you?

If you pledge $10 or more, you’ll receive a reward tailored to the size of your contribution—an e-book, a signed paperback with No Such Thing bookmarks, or a book club special for buying in bulk.

If you pledge less than $10—even only $1—I’ll give you a shout-out on social media and add your name to the acknowledgements in my book. 

If I don’t reach my $9,000 goal by March 15, my campaign will end and Kickstarter won’t collect any pledges. 

You have nothing to lose. 

What should you do next?

Well, you can click away to another page, if you want.

Or you can go to my campaign page, read more about my book, and consider making a pledge.

If you think my project is worth backing, click the button for a reminder when my campaign goes live on February 16. Then, if you still feel so inclined, pledge whatever you feel is right. 

If you change your mind before my campaign ends, you can change or withdraw your pledge. No questions, no obligations.

All I ask is that you think about it.

With gratitude,
Lynne

Visiting Africa: A Personal Memoir and Reflection

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t wanted to visit Africa. I love African music, traditional and modern. I love the colourful fabrics. I would love to see the animals I’ve admired on TV and in photos as up close and personal as safely possible. I’d like to witness the power of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and walk the desert sands of Namibia, and I’d be honoured and humbled to visit Robben Island, the brutal prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years of his life. 

A person walking along a sandy beach with a fishing spear, against a backdrop of blue sky and ocean, with the title 'Visiting Africa: A Memoir' prominently displayed.

So, when I saw that an alum of the UKing’s MFA program in creative nonfiction writing had published a book called Visiting Africa: A Memoir (Demeter Press, 2021), I jumped at the chance to read it. And I wasn’t disappointed. As a former PhD student with an interest in the slave trade, historic and modern, Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin (class of 2019) is well acquainted with his subject matter. Told in the first person and with raw honesty about his feelings as a privileged middle-class white man, this memoir is thoroughly engaging, and I’d recommend it to anyone. 

After an introduction that takes the reader from the author’s early life and the start of his interest in Africa through his public-school years, the book is written in two parts. In the first part, he describes his journey as a graduate student studying the forced migration of Africans while wrestling with personal feelings of inauthenticity and inadequacy. In the second part, he has set aside his efforts to learn about Africa from books and has embarked on a two-month journey as much into himself as through several countries in the south of the continent. His goal: to see and hear and feel the place he has worked so hard at learning about without ever really being there or immersing himself in the cultures. 

Part 2 opens with these words:

It’s May 2018, I am thirty-three years old, and I am on my way to Africa. Four years have passed since I left WITS [University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg]. Four years have passed since I left South Africa, and the African continent, without doing so many of the things I had wanted. When people asked me whether I have been to Africa, I would always pause before answering “Yes, I have.” I had walked the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, of course, and my passport still contained my South African study visa. I had proof of a visit. Yet I wavered in responding in the affirmative because I knew the libraries and classrooms of Johannesburg and Cape Town better than those cities’ actual sites and sounds. Despite my living in Johannesburg, I spent so much time safely ensconced in my dorm room or in a library or in a classroom that Johannesburg, the real and dynamic city, seemed a thousand kilometres away. I had spent so much time reading and studying about migration in Southern Africa that I associated the word “Africa” with only words on the page, with a problem that needed fixing. I had come to experience South Africa, yet I remained as divorced from it as I had been in Toronto, Montreal, and Busan.

This trip would be different though. I have two months to explore Southern Africa—to put faces and sounds and smells to the worlds I had spent years reading and analyzing. Finally, I can step outside the book, the classroom, and the school. I can walk amid the people and their histories. I can visit their worlds. 

Through his eyes, O’Reilly-Conlin invites his readers to visit, too—to see the old slave forts and understand the suicides of captured Africans less as acts of despair than of defiance; to wander down the wrong street of a city and feel one’s own body go limp when the author is mugged; to enter a busy marketplace and hear dozens of languages representing as many proud and rich cultures; to look at sunlight streaming through bullet holes in the roof of a Rwandan church where a genocide deeply rooted in colonialism claimed forty thousand lives in minutes; to viscerally comprehend the persistent consequences of the transatlantic slave trade centuries after it ended. 

If you wish to understand racism better, confront your own privilege more deeply, or simply explore the history and current reality of life on the African continent, add this book to your reading list. 

If you enjoy travel memoirs, read the following books by MFA grads:

How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Shaw

For more on race and racism:

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonnie Reichert

Walking the Camino: A Healing Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

Several years ago, I coached a client through a few drafts of a memoir. About twenty years earlier, he and his wife, always up for travel and adventure, had tried long-distance hiking. It had been disastrous: they’d done no training, they were wearing new ill-fitting boots, and their six-year-old son was with them. They abandoned their hike about halfway through. 

Book cover of 'Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is' by Maryanna Gabriel, featuring a path leading into the horizon with silhouettes of hikers.

A few years later, both approaching milestone birthdays, they were mulling over how to celebrate and decided to give hiking another try, this time doing lots of research and physical training, and leaving their children with family. It went so well and was so fulfilling that they made it an annual tradition. 

At first, they did a few hikes in England, a hiking-friendly country. Then they decided to tackle something bigger: El Camino de Santiago, a trail for religious pilgrims that starts in the French Pyrenees and makes its way across northern Spain and Portugal to its terminus in Galicia, on the Atlantic Coast. Around 800 kilometres long, it takes thirty to forty days to complete; they broke it into three segments, which they completed over three years.

I’ve been intrigued with the idea of hiking the Camino ever since. So, Maryanna Gabriel’s (class of 2022) book, Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is (Pottersfield Press, 2023) immediately leapt out at me. A bit adrift after the unexpected death of her mother, Gabriel was seeking a way to deal with her grief and reconnect with her inner self. She attended a talk about walking the Camino, where a stranger with whom she exchanged a few brief words leaned in and said, “Walk the Camino. You’ll know why.” 

Her travel memoir, Walking the Camino, is exactly what the title promises: a chronicle of Gabriel’s experience, from that moment at the talk, through months of preparation, and from the beginning of the famed spiritual route in the Pyrenees Mountains to its end at the Atlantic Ocean. Just a few days into the hike, she writes about a moment when she’s resting with some fellow travellers, talking about the ineffable quality of the Camino.

I lifted my head at a pause. Something unusual was happening. I was trying to understand a rushing sensation from a great depth. I examined Bjørn intently.

“May I have your permission to pray,” he asked. His blue eyes twinkled.

It was getting late, customers had departed, and the owner had disappeared. We were alone. Kris and I glanced at each other and nodded.

Intonations of sound emerged. Rumbles that seemed ancient and long forgotten. Vowels tumbled, then halted, and gathered momentum. Bjørn tossed back his head and boomed in a crescendo of resounding benediction, a cascading river that encircled us then rolled upwards into the starlight. The sound was unlike any language I had ever heard, Latin but not Latin, Hebrew but not Hebrew, Spanish but not Spanish, but seemed to contain elements of these languages. The effect was musical and the intent benevolent. It uplifted the heart and I was filled with the wonder of it. Of babies, and cinnamon toast, dragonflies on mountain lakes, of angels blowing their horns, of kisses and custard and roses, a flower dappled in sunlight and pollen and dewdrops, the laughter of children, a first candy cane, of cookies and fire crackle, the crunch of snow, the crinkle of presents, of soft knitted socks, and the snuggle of Sunday mornings. A profound peace coursed through me, as though I had been enormously blessed. Was it from this world or beyond?

The reverberations slowly died away. Had Bjørn been speaking in tongues? I roused myself. I had to ask.

“Does this happen often?”

He mumbled and looked at me shyly from beneath shaggy brows. “Sometimes.”

Beautiful, visual, lyrical writing.

Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s done the Camino comes back with similar stories of wonder and awe and peace. The writer I spoke of earlier was at a complete loss to express his feelings as he and his wife drew close to and finally reached the end point, the finish line they’d been striving toward for three years. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever walk the Camino. It seems huge, daunting. But if the kind of experience Gabriel and my writing client describe awaits along the route or at the end, maybe, just maybe, I should do it. 

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is was the 2022 winner of the Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Other winners of this award from among the graduates of the MFA program include:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart

The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by Andrew MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. Review coming soon.

Other books of inner exploration through travel:

How to Clean a Fish: and Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Scott

Exploring Psychic Phenomena: Science Meets Belief

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

As a teenager, I believed in psychic phenomena. My father, not a frivolous man, greatly admired the clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. My best friend had tarot cards. We all talked with wonder and awe about the amazing “coincidences” we or someone we knew had experienced at some point.

Book cover of 'The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son's Exploration of His Mother's Gift' by Christian Smith, featuring a family photo and design elements.

As I grew older and became increasingly skeptical, I still loved movies like Ghost and Practical Magic (although I actually liked the book by Alice Hoffman better.)I still watch reruns of the TV series Medium, based on the real life of Allison DuBois, a self-described medium and profiler. DuBois claims to have provided crime-solving tips to law enforcement agencies—tips those agencies have described as “unhelpful,” if they didn’t simply deny ever working with her.

So, when it came time to read Christian Smith’s (class of 2017) The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift (Random House, 2020), I was intrigued. What would a PhD-level scientist have to say about his mother, who once spoke to audiences of thousands about her abilities? And how would the fractured relationship they had for twenty years, in no small part because of her work as a psychic, play into his scientific exploration of her gift?

Here’s a taste of insight from the book’s introduction: 

Up until now, scientific studies on the paranormal have been challenged by inconclusive data and imperfect methods, making it tough to convince critics on both sides of the argument. In truth, many of the studies used flawed experimental methods that lacked proper controls. However, the same could be said of early genetic research done before the completion of the genome project, which revolutionized modern-day biology. The tools to study psychic abilities are still in their infancy. 

Does this mean we should disregard all data lacking rigorous methodology and controls? I would argue that anecdotal evidence does have an important role to play. If it didn’t, the famous scientist Alexander Fleming would have thrown out the mould contamination that stopped bacteria from growing in his petri dish, undoubtedly delaying the discovery of penicillin. Personal experiences are fuel for scientific discovery. A starting point.

I remember once saying to someone I know, a pre-med student at the time, that science has become the god of the twenty-first century. He immediately became very offended, assuming I was saying science is no more provable than any belief in a god. He was so annoyed that there was no point in trying to explain that I was speaking metaphorically, not literally. Many years ago, people turned to religion for answers to everything; if they questioned anything, they risked accusations of blasphemy and even heresy. Now they turn to science for all the answers and if they question science—well, they won’t be burned at the stake, but they’ll often be looked upon as uneducated idiots. 

I don’t hold with that. Science is an ongoing quest for discovery, so it’s inevitable that as it moves forward, some things “proven” to be true yesterday will be proven untrue tomorrow. Unquestioning trust quickly becomes dogma. And as Smith points out in the above-quoted passage, anecdotal evidence is often the unacknowledged starting place for scientific discovery. A neurologist I saw regularly for twenty years once said to me that dismissing all anecdotal evidence simply because it’s anecdotal is, itself, unscientific.

In the epigraph, Smith quotes a very famous scientist: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” The scientist was Albert Einstein. 

The Scientist and the Psychic is an intriguing balance of scientific evidence and psychic phenomena, interwoven with a poignant account of personal healing between a man and his mother. It’s as well researched as one would expect from a deeply educated scientist, and as compassionate as one would hope from a human being who, at a certain age, realized that familial love and forgiveness are profoundly important too. 

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.  

Other books about science:

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening, by Reneé Pellerin

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey

“It Wasn’t Child Abuse or Neglect; It Was Just My Family”

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

For several years in my twenties, I worked with what were then called “emotionally disturbed” children. I worked in group homes with young children and teens, did one-to-one contracts, and eventually worked in a receiving home for street kids. 

I dealt with kids whose behaviours were off the charts, like the girl who told me she was going to slice my guts open and leave me bleeding beside my five-month fetus on the street. I heard stories that made my neck hair stand on end, like the girl whose father pimped out her older half-sister to support himself and the two younger children. 

But mostly I worked with kids who were struggling to deal with the realities of life with parents who, often because of their own childhood experiences, weren’t anywhere close to knowing what good parenting looked like. 

In The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed (The Ginger Press, 2024), author Gwen Lamont describes the latter kind of abuse, the gnawing daily neglect that characterized her childhood. 

There was the poverty because Dad always thought the next big scam would solve their financial problems; the money that disappeared in a fog of gambling and alcohol and second-hand smoke; the frequent moves that kept the children from establishing friendships with other children or relationships with adults who might have helped. 

There was the non-stop bickering between a mother and father who’d long since stopped liking each other but couldn’t imagine anything different; the children’s teeth, rotting from a total lack of dental hygiene; and a decision her father made to get her teeth fixed when she was in grade 9, which ultimately led to her not finishing grade 9 or any more of  high school.

As traumatizing as all of this must have been, Lamont says, she never really thought of it as child abuse and still feels taken aback by references to her “trauma.” This was just her family, her life; she didn’t know anything else. 

Here’s an excerpt of what Lamont’s family life was like:

I had seen teacups, spatulas, and a can or two fly through the air but this day it was a kitchen chair I watched hit the wall with such a force it left a hole. As if the chair throwing hadn’t made her point, Mom followed it with one of her tirades. 

“I’m not moving again, John Godfrey Morrison. I don’t give a shit what you do. I’m not going. You’ll have to go without me and the girls.” He wouldn’t go without us, would he?  “I’m sick to death of your schemes that never amount to a hill of beans. I’m not going and that’s final.”

Dad sat silent, grinding his jaw with such violence I could hear it clear across the room. Red blotches crept up his face. The whistling started soft and slow, then grew faster and louder. 

“I don’t care if you never speak to me again and you can whistle forever, you goddamn son-of-a-bitch. I AM NOT MOVING! Just when I find a job I love, and just when the girls are settled, you want to move to the goddamn middle of nowhere? And your mother, Jack, what about her money?”

Dad whistled.

“And just remember it was you who had to have this house, Jack Morrison. You! Not me! You talked me into this house and now you have the nerve to want to move us again.” She crossed her arms across her heart. “You jerk. What the hell are you running from this time?” 

Dad whistled louder. My stomach knotted.

It’s hard to pick just one passage to quote because the tension in the book rises relentlessly. There’s never a break. And that, it would seem, is what Lamont’s childhood was like. A relentless struggle, no winners, no losers, no end in sight. 

It did finally end. For years, she buried her past beyond memory while she went on to earn a BA, BSW, and MSW, work as a social worker in child protection and intimate partner violence. It was really only in writing this book and eventually earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College that Lamont began to face the impacts her childhood had on her.

The contents of The View from Coffin Ridge make it a difficult read, but the story is told with such skill that it was hard to put down. I find I’m writing those words about many of the books I’m reviewing, but that doesn’t make it less true. These stories embody what it means to be human and are of singularly high quality. And I’m reminded how grateful I am to have been part of this program.

Other books from the class of 2019:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral

On Borrowed Time: Shaking Complacency in North America’s Seismic Zones, by Gregor Craigie

Some Kind of Hero, by Kirk Johnson. Review coming soon.

The Performance Equation, by Kevin Kelloway. Review coming soon.

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin. Review coming soon.

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboy, Jennifer Thornhill Verma