From Educator to Author: The Path Between Teaching and Becoming an Author

I was in grade five when I wrote my first short story. It was for a language arts assignment and I was beside myself with excitement at the idea of being an author. I remember that it began with a young woman waking up to a knock on the door to what she thought was her sister’s date. This somehow became a Wonderland-style adventure down the rabbit hole to a terrifying world where new threats awaited the young protagonist at every turn. If I’m not mistaken, I titled it The Crystal Cavern and ended it as though it had all been a dream, only to find out it had been real all along! The old double-twist. The librarian at Lake Melville School, in the small central Labrador town of Northwest River asked if she could put it in the school library and I proudly agreed. I sometimes wonder if it’s still there somewhere, but considering it was back in the mid-eighties, I’m going to guess that little paper story has disappeared into the ether.

It’s no surprise that my first story was in the horror genre; it was something I loved from a young age. My mother was a great storyteller, though I never fully understood the logic of making up scary stories to tell your young children at bedtime. Looking back it was no surprise that she spent the rest of those nights chasing us back to bed, though we would never admit to our fears, as the threat of losing those terrifying tales was far worse than the late-night shivers they induced. I’m sure those formative years were the beginning of my love for horror, if not the beginning of a lifetime of insomnia.

The best of her stories were the ghost stories. Told with such conviction that even the most skeptical of listeners might be swayed to believe, I wonder still if she had actually experienced the things she claimed or if she skillfully crafted each tale to either entertain us (and/or herself) or to terrify us into good behaviour, a tactic which often backfired. She once told us that she and her siblings had been told to avoid the top floor in an elderly relation’s home and that when they defied that rule, they saw an old lady they didn’t know rocking silently in a rocking chair. When she worked up the courage to ask her mother about it, she was told that the woman they had seen was a ghost. When we lived in Labrador City, my mother told me that the rowhouse we lived in was haunted because it had been built over a drained swamp where several people had met their demise. She told me that one night she awoke to find me standing at the end of her bed, silently staring at her; I was about five or six at the time and I had long dark hair and a fair complexion. When she asked what I wanted, the little girl she had assumed was me simply disappeared. 

Whether I believed the ghost stories my mother told me or not, then or now, didn’t matter. What mattered was the seed planted in my mind which would one day grow and flourish into my own story, my first novel: The Ghosts of Lille. I wasn’t planning to write a ghost story, in fact, over recent years I had delved into a lot less horror than I had in my youth, as my career was focused on literature when I became a high school English teacher. I deliberately moved away from the horror genre, focusing more on literary classics like Orwell’s 1984, Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, or Melville’s Moby Dick for my reading. I learned the essentials of teaching English literature through classic literary works like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and contemporary pieces like Metis author Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. In learning and teaching these complex stories and characters, I gained a better understanding of story structures and the craft of writing. That is not to say that I ever left my love of scary stories, especially ghost stories, behind.

When I teach my students about myths, I span the spectrum of story types, from urban legends and cryptic creatures, to Indigenous mythology, where I share stories from my own culture, as I, like my mother and grandmother, am a Nunatsiavut Inuit woman. There are plenty of scary stories from that oral history, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time. Most adolescents love talking about scary stories and monsters, so I always dedicate time to talking about the stories we share to invoke fear. I tell them that though I am open to all types of horror stories, the ones that scare me the most are the ghost stories. Partly I’m sure that is because of my mother’s convincing influence, but also because I think of all the monsters out there, ghosts have always seemed to me, a scientific skeptic, the most plausible to exist. 

It should come as no surprise then that my first novel, which was published just recently in December of 2023, is a ghost story. Focused on a young family whose safety is threatened when they inherit a haunted house, the story explores themes around trust and relationships and the struggles people face when they refuse to or are unable to lean on others. It is also a historical fiction, focused on Canada’s deadliest landslide to date: the Frank Slide, which resulted in somewhere between seventy and ninety deaths over a hundred years ago. Many of those lost are still buried in the shadow of Turtle Mountain, which came crashing down on the mining town of Frank in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta.  The title, The Ghosts of Lille, refers to a ghost town that was dismantled after only a few years in existence when the coal value was determined to be poor, scattering the various buildings and houses of the town, moved in many cases by horses, to other small towns in the Pass. Many residents of the area now live in those tiny old houses, and that was the inspiration for the story.

Writing and publishing a novel has been an experience like no other. From a false fifty-page start to the gleeful final words, it was a bucket list item that took time and commitment like no other. Finding the time to write as a full-time English teacher was probably the toughest part of the experience, but it was through my students and their learning strategies that I developed many of my most effective approaches. So even though teaching for almost twenty years has made the realization of becoming a writer a difficult goal to attain, it was also probably the foundation, along with my mother’s scary bedtime stories, on which I built my future career as a full-time author and artist. As a teacher, of course, I have learned to teach, but more importantly, I learned the importance of continuing to learn. It was that learning that brought me to be who I am now: a girl from Labrador who became an English teacher, only to learn to be a writer.  

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