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To write, perhaps to please …

October 31, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

At about seven years old, I wrote my first “book,” on pages of a sketch pad stuck together with glue. It was filled with my questionable hand writing and my own unskilled illustrations. The story was about a little girl who had a much-loved pony. They were entered in a race in a county fair coming the following week. 

A terrible villain stole the girl’s pony but her high bravery saw to it that she got her pony back. Just in time, as it happened, the day before the fair.

She and her pony were in time to enter the race and they won!

My mother said it was “predictable.” I objected and asked her if she would have preferred they lose the race. She laughed at me and admitted no.

The girl and the pony deserved to win the race, my mother conceded, after the little girl’s struggle to save her pony from the kidnappers.

Hollywood has been filming copycat versions of my little glued book ever since.

There is a lot of talk about telling stories and a plethora of ways to hear them and watch them in this arts-rich community. A brand new film festival opened here in this year’s summer to tell Canadian-woven stories as very short films, as short as epics are long. 

It was a grand success, ending in promises for next year. 

Theatre Orangeville is our premier story teller, its new season on now with Tip of the Iceberg. The boards of that main stage are trod by so many fine actors, singers and performers who have played on stages around the world and on the most prestigious stages in this country. 

Even during Covid, Theatre Orangeville was showing other theatres how to keep on telling stories with one act plays and cabarets where the musicians had sheets of plastic hung between them, in keeping with strictly held provincial protocols. Other theatres, community theatres run for decades by volunteers, are alive and well in this broad area.

There are two thriving libraries in this town and book stores that have survived being closed for those couple of years but are still opening their doors in the mornings.

Very famous authors prove their love of writing stories by their eagerness to come here to Orangeville, for author’s afternoons and in the evenings, on stage to talk about writing, about the process of writing and the impulse to tell their wonderful stories.

They talk about how the characters in their books can take over and might lead the plot in a different direction from the original intention. How mysterious and exciting that is.

How, once they have released their last book, ideas and new characters begin to suggest themselves for the next one.

Sometimes, in this column, I write really harshly about who we are as humans: wicked to each other, destructive of our perfect planet and our own perfect bodies; we wreck ourselves and our beautiful planet with filth and war and we have always been like this. Never in our existence, I frequently aver, have we ever been any better than the wretches we are in the here and the now.

Well, well, never was all that more clearly demonstrated as the world news blasting from every device tells us, precisely all that I claim, than now.

Yet and yet, we are artists and maybe still, more than otherwise, our art, our musical performances, our stories irresistibly reflect beauty, love and optimism or at least gratitude. Naturally, most stories carry an element of fear, challenges, struggles – and most allow happy endings or even reconciliation. How could we bear them otherwise?

What writers rarely do is give us tales of only thieves and brigands; they rarely write where there is no light, no chance of optimism; no safety from harm.

For in literature are heroes, champions, people of goodness and bravery. We can not live without them. The duty of art is to ground us, albeit in gorgeous flights of fantasy, which is why we miss it so deeply when we are kept away from it; why artists and musicians united across the country during Covid to make music and voices and stories to sustain us.

Choirs made sure they rehearsed regardless of whether it was each member independently filming and contributing their share to the whole. At the end of the efforts, they witnessed themselves singing together. Online can never replace live entertainment but it is assuredly better than no music, dancing or speech.

Let there be hands -on art classes in schools and subsidies for art studios to teach further. Let every child know when that first and universal reach for a crayon to make that first baby mark – let that child know there is genius there and open our arms to embrace it.

On our own lives, we need to learn the stories our elders tell us and the stories in the dreams of our children.

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