Arleen Paré, the recent winner of one of Canada’s top literary awards, was a creative child. Yet the Victoria poet-novelist is also a self-described “late bloomer” — surprisingly, she started to write only in middle age.
Last November, Paré won the Governor General’s Literary Award for her poetry collection, Lake of Two Mountains. The achievement is especially impressive given Paré was then a virtual unknown on the national scene.
When the news broke, 68-year-old Paré (who used her $25,000 prize to buy a heat pump for her Mayne Island cottage) joked about her “Grandma Moses career.” It was only following decades in social work that Paré began writing seriously. She was then in her late 40s.
Her younger sister, Donna Sharkey, recalls her as an imaginative, inventive youngster during the years when her family visited their cottage at Lake of Two Mountains (Lac des Deux Montagnes), between the Ottawa River and the St. Lawrence River system. It was their summers there in the 1950s that inspired Paré’s poetry book.
At Lake of Two Mountains, the two girls once performed a play about Little Red Riding Hood for the neighbourhood. Sharkey was the Big Bad Wolf. Paré was not only Little Red Riding Hood but the playwright, director and costume mistress.
“That’s because she was better at it than anybody else,” Sharkey said. “She always had a great sense of style and colour. Her interests, in a general sense, were artistic interests.”
Sharkey also remembers Paré would lead neighborhood children in scooping clay from the lake’s edge to mould sculptures, which were painted after they dried.
Paré’s book, Lake of Two Mountains, is a “hymn to a beloved lake.” As well as offering poems recalling an idyllic childhood, Paré ambitiously contemplates the landscape going back to Pleistocene times, revisits the Oka crisis and imagines life within a Trappist monastery on the small island where the family cottage was located.
Interviewed at her Fairfield home, Paré was amiable, down-to-earth, quick with a smile. Her life, as she describes it, has been both conventional and unusual. Originally from Montreal, she was a doctor’s wife with two children. Yet in her 30s, Paré upended her world, coming out as a lesbian and eventually leaving her family — a transition she chronicles frankly in her 2012 novel Leaving Now, her favourite of her three books.
Despite her late start, all of Paré’s books achieve the sterling standard of someone with a lifetime of writing experience. Her first, Paper Trail (winner of the Victoria Butler Book Prize), was inspired by two decades working for the government as a social worker. Before Paré quit, fed up with bureaucracy, she was director of a government mental-health housing program in Vancouver, overseeing a multimillion-dollar budget and a sizable staff.
In Paper Trail, the heroine, Frances, finds the daily grind of corporate life literally pulls her to pieces. In Kafka-esque fashion, her fingers, earlobes and other body bits start dropping off. Frances calmly stores them in a Ziploc bag.
It’s grotesque — yet the poetic imagery is beautiful. Paré writes of “crab-scuttle dry leaves,” a “pewter-toned rush hour” and a “white frill of teeth.” It is this ability to find the perfect metaphor, the telling phrase that makes the mundane fresh, that distinguishes her writing.
This carries though in Lake of Two Mountains. Quite aside from the majesty and sweep of the 2014 work, the reader is struck by such exquisite lines as: “Water now stippling thin waterskin,” “muskrat-skull rock, mauved in places as if bled” and “island air curls on girls’ freckled cheeks feckless bare legs.”
Here is the first verse of Paré’s poem, Dad in the Lake:
Lewd, his close-fitting jersey-knit
Swimsuit, della robbia blue, drawstring
at his waist, dark hair coiled on his chest,
his sinewy thighs,
his knees, small onions, ivory-hued.
Lake of Two Mountains was published by Brick Books. Senior editor Barry Dempster praises the “gorgeous simplicity” of Paré’s writing, adding: “It felt like the landscape itself was speaking, a map come to life.”
Paré said she strived to dig deep within herself during the creation of Lake of Two Mountains.
“When I write, this is what I do. I get a predominant feeling, a tone, and try to milk that tone. What is this tone? How deep is that tone? I always go back for that sustenance, whether I’m on track with the emotion … If I’m writing along that tone, then it’s good,” she said.
Toward the end of her social work career, Paré — bored with the work-a-day routine of her job — took a master’s degree in adult education. She found she especially enjoyed writing her thesis on adult literacy.
“I remember driving home from my classes, thinking: ‘Poof! There goes that writing project!’ I thought: ‘Well, I’ll just start another one. I’ll start a novel.’”
And she did. Paré would arise early, writing for just 15 or 20 minutes before leaving for work. She joined a writing group; she told people she was writing a novel. When the other members of the writing group examined her short pieces, they declared them to be poems.
“I went: ‘Really?’” Pare said.
Until then she hadn’t been a poetry reader. Paré started to read it and also took community college poetry-writing courses.
“At this point I was beginning to think: ‘Well, I guess I really want to do this.’ ”
Her study of writing became more serious. In 2001 Paré took a year-long Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University. Students were instructed to write a longer work using an experimental (as opposed to conventional narrative) style. The result was the award-winning Paper Trail, which Paré completed in 2003.
It seems astounding a student writer could pen such a superbly written book — almost like a first-time marathon runner who places first right out of the gate. Quizzed on this, Paré said modestly: “Well, I believe many people can.”
Remarkably, Lake of Two Mountains was also a student assignment. It is the graduate project for a master’s degree in creative writing Paré started in 2010 at the University of Victoria. Her grad supervisor was Lorna Crozier, the nationally known Canadian poet.
At first, says Crozier, Paré imagined the project as a collection of nostalgic poems about her childhood summers at Lake of Two Mountains. Encouraged by her supervisor, she expanded the project’s horizons.
Crozier said one of Paré’s strengths is an ability to expertly shift from poetry to prose and back again — no easy feat. As for Paré being a successful late bloomer, she says it should come as no surprise.
“It makes so much sense, doesn’t it, that people come to an art form with a wealth of living. That they have, indeed, something to say,” Crozier said.
“She raised a family. She had children. She now has a partner who’s a woman [Chris Fox, who teaches English literature at Royal Roads University]. She had a very important and significant job in the caring profession.
“These are stories she is compelled to tell. And it’s not just: ‘I have a terrible roommate in residence in my first year. And my boyfriend broke my heart and I got drunk on Saturday night.’”
Paré echoed this sentiment.
“At 25, what would I have written?” she said. “Maybe I’d be embarrassed by those poems now.”
One life experience that was difficult to write about was coming out and leaving her family. Paré said Leaving Now was created over a decade. After becoming pregnant at age 21, she married Dr. Peter Paré, a medical doctor who later became a professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia.
Paré describes in Leaving Now about first becoming infatuated with a woman she noticed dancing at a club. Her profound realization of her true sexual preference is described as “tectonic plates slipping underneath my ribs the impact geological my bony cage unhinging I almost heard the whoosh sub-whoosh beneath the earth’s crust cracking.”
In a poetic yet clear-eyed manner, Pare’s autobiographical novel describes such events as telling her two sons about her decision to live as a lesbian and the effect it had on her husband, friends and family.
She first left their Vancouver house in 1980, spending alternating weeks there with her sons for several years. In 1983, Paré departed the family home for good, when her children (now in their 40s) were 13 and 15.
“I wrote [Leaving Now] because I wanted to get rid of that guilt. And I’d been told: ‘If you’re going to write, it’s good to write about something that really bugs you.’ And that was bugging me, dragging that guilt around,” Paré said.
Her longtime friend Yaana Dancer said she first met Paré in 1980 in Vancouver when “we were both in the throes of coming out.”
“It was very courageous of her to write [Leaving Now]. I did know her at that time and I thought she was much harder on herself in the book than I perceived her as in real life,” Dancer said.
Crozier said when Paré won the Governor General’s award, everyone “was thrilled” — something that’s not always the case in the insular literary community.
“Some people are great writers but not very nice people,” Crozier said. “She’s very warm, generous and funny.”
All friends interviewed agree with this appraisal. Pat Hurdle said she used to visit Paré at Lake of Two Mountains when they were best friends as little girls. Later, she lost touch — only to reunite with Paré in Victoria after 50 years of no contact. The pair now visit regularly; Hurdle said Paré is very much the same as she was as a child.
“She’s very imaginative. Playful. Got a sense of humour. She has a way with words, obviously, but she always did.”
Donna Sharkey was also effusive in her praise, saying her sister is “one of the wisest women I know, and one of the kindest, most compassionate women I know.”
Sharkey, who lives in Ottawa, became a university professor, specializing in international education. She said the two sisters always got along well. However, theirs was a “family of secrets” — some things were not discussed openly.
Sharkey believes this was partly because their father, a salesman for the Avmor sanitation supply company, was a Catholic, while their mother was a Protestant. A mixed marriage. Relatives on both sides advocated for each side of the faith “and that just led to so much not being told.”
Paré recalls one family secret. When she was about 12, her family abruptly stopped going to the cottage at Lake of Two Mountains. She didn’t ask why, but always suspected there had been “some kind of rift” in the family, which jointly owned the property.
In recent years, the sisters — sifting through municipal records — discovered their mother had sold her share to her eldest brother for one dollar. To this day, they don’t know what happened.
Sharkey believes Paré’s writing style is, in part, a reaction to the early years of clouded communication within their family.
“Her writing is so clear, so honest, so to the core. I’ve never even spoken to her about this. But there has to be something there that makes you decide you’re not going to have any curvy language, that you’re going to be really clear.”
Paré has several new projects on the go. One is a compilation of poems written over the years. The other is a poetry book about Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, two Canadian sculptors who lived openly as a same-sex couple.
Asked what drives her as a writer, Paré said it’s about the incandescent joy of finding the perfect word or phrase.
“I guess, if you’re a musician, it’s like striking the exact right note, everything coming together. Perfect. Bingo!” said Paré. And then, with girlish delight, she smiled and slapped her palms together.
Note: On Wednesday, Arleen Paré will do a reading with Patrick Lane at the Vancouver Public Library, 350 West Georgia St., from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. She will also have a reading at the Vancouver Island Regional Public Library (Nanaimo North Branch, 6250 Hammond Bay Rd.) on Saturday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.