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First of all, robust congratulations to LWOT editors, both past and present, on this milestone. Endurance is rare in Canadian publishing; quality rarer. Enduring quality is a mantle belonging to LWOT alone.
I was delighted to be asked to give my memories about Lies With Occasional Truth, since I, like many Canadian writers, can thank it for inspiring me. But my inspiration came before I even opened a page of the magazine.
On the particular night that I began my career as a writer, it was 1990, I was 13, and the TV guide advertised that La Lectrice was playing on CBC Late Night. As was my custom when French movies were playing, I went to bed early, listened for my parents to go to bed, then got up to view. In addition to wonderful cinematography and fascinating cultural differences, French films also had the benefit that I could leave the sound off and follow the story through the subtitles.
Now, those who have seen La Lectrice would likely not be surprised that this was the night my career as a writer began. The scene in which a bespectacled Miou-Miou sits astride her lover, reading aloud to him, would cause any 13-year-old boy to trade his Nintendo for an Underwood. But it did not happen that way for me. At the exact moment I expected a 'mature audiences' warning would appear on-screen, I instead found myself looking at the open sequence of Front Page Challenge, and by the dated set and clothes, a much earlier version than I had ever watched before. And I would have turned the TV off immediately were it not for Betty Kennedy looking so young, lithe, even nubile. So I watched. I even turned up the sound, despite my fears of waking my parents; though to be caught watching FPC was hardly a punishable offense, no matter how late.
It became clear early on that the guest was a feminist, and that, to the snickers of Gordon Sinclair and Pierre Burton, the story was, in some way, about sex. It did not take long for them to identify Marian Engel, and the news story in question was the controversy surrounding the publication in LWOT of a short story describing the sexual relations of a librarian and a bear. Of course, this was the short story that Engel would, a decade later, later evolve into her wonderful GG-winning novel, Bear.
But something stirred in me watching Kennedy squirm, her cheeks flush, eyes averted, at Pierre Burton's increasingly lewd and flirtatious queries about the 'research' that Engel had done. Until at last Kennedy exploded into a tirade, the likes of which I had never heard before. In the shouting match ensued, Engel defended the work on the basis that the LWOT contest that the story was in response to had specifically required the use of the phrase 'cartiliginous sheath' somewhere in the story. The argument moved from this specific story to a general discussion about the merits of LWOT and the role that it occupied within the Canadian intellectual landscape at the time. And as the two came to blows, I felt a passion for literature greater than anything La Lectrice would stir in me.
After the camera switched away from the fight to Fred Davis's attempts to fill the remaining five minutes of the show, I had to lean in close and press my ear right up against the speaker to hear the names that were called. But hear them I did. Salacious labels like 'minx', 'trollop', 'slattern'.
The next day I did not go out for recess as I normally did, but instead stayed at my desk, took out a piece of paper, and began to write what I remembered of the fight. Eventually, I began to flesh out a greater story, and I moved the setting from the CBC studios to a remote island in the Canadian wilderness. The story, which at three double-spaced pages, was by far the longest thing I had written, told of the conflict between Marian and Betty, their relationship with a bow-tie wearing bear named Pierre, and occasional appearances in Betty's memory of her former lover, a curmudgeonly type named Allan. (Fotheringham had not been in the orginal episode of course, but I hadn't really seen many episodes with Gordon Sinclair).
Obviously, this was a very amateurish effort. But I eventually tracked down a collection of LWOT issues (not at the school library but at the public library), and my writing improved by leaps and bounds. I was particularly interested in similar experiments, such as Howard O'Hagan's early satires of the Betty Crocker radio show.
But LWOT also served as an outlet for me, as I submitted a new FPC fan fiction almost every week. Sadly, none of them were published, and only one of them, a piece involving Toby Robins and Eleanor Roosevelt, even received a terse, brief response. Sometimes, I would paste my stories into the pages of the magazine and scribble my name into the list of contributors, until this was reported and I was banned from the public library, and later, other libraries.
I continued working on FPC fan fiction for almost a decade, even launching an FPC fan fiction website that was taken down after a couple weeks when a cease-and-desist letter arrived from Kennedy (now a senator) and her lawyers. This combined with my various library bannings caused me to give up writing FPC fan fiction, and for several years I did not submit any work to LWOT.
However, it was a personal triumph for me when, just last year (17 years after my first submission), I finally got my first story published on LWOT, and that same year, published my first novel, Correction Road, which contains a very tasteful fictionalized transcript from a FPC episode, a subtle nod to the formative role that these two Canadian institutions have played in my writing career. And it is of unceasing delight for me to be in some small way linked to so many of my idols who have appeared in your publication.
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