20 July 2021
Over and Over and Over Again
19 July 2021
The Changing Landscape
by Steve Liskow
Fifteen years ago, I could send my stories to about thirty potential markets. A few were literary, some were supernatural or sci-fi, a couple were romance. Most of my work was crime/mystery, but I had those other options.
Many of those markets are gone now. The landscape changes more quickly than we can keep track of it, especially since the pandemic, but keep track of it we must.
I currently have at least one submission at each of the mystery markets that still takes stories year-round. I have stories ready to send to the markets that open sporadically, too. I used to write a novel and three or four short stories a year, but, in the last year, I have produced twenty-three short stories and no new ideas for a novel. The changing market is a factor, and I've started paying attention to the territory more than the map.
Fifteen years ago, if I got an idea for a short story--which didn't happen often--I wrote it and looked for a place to send it because there were so many potential markets. Now, I look at the markets and submission calls first and use those submission calls as writing prompts.
Yes, I'm looking for novella markets, too, even though I only write one novella a year, and that's for a contest I have won twice. Are there more anthologies now, or am I simply paying more attention?
In the last year, I have sold twelve stories, five still due to be published. Ten of those twelve sales are to anthologies.
Anthologies often have a specific theme, the idea that I use as a prompt. Last year, one story appeared in Heartbreaks and Half-Truths, about love gone bad.
Another was in Mickey Finn: 21st-Century Noir. A third ws in The Killer Wore Cranberry, a collection of humorous murder stories involving Thanksgiving. There is at least one Christmas anthology looking for material, and one of my unsold stories was rejected by another holiday collection.
I've always been able to write fairly quickly to a prompt. It's no different from the years of essay tests in high school and college, expecially grad school.
But there's another reason I'm paying more attention to anthologies now, too. Time for a brief history lesson.
When the Mystery Writers of America added short stories as an Edgar Award category in 1951, the award went to the best collection of short stories for the year. In 1955, an individual story won for the first time, Stanley Ellin's "The House Party," which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Before the mid-1970s, "mainstream" magazines often printed the Edgar-winner. The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and McCall's all featured a winning story, some of them several times. So did Argosy, Esquire, and Story. Between 1976 and 1998, Playboy published four of the Award-winners, three of them written by Lawrence Block.
After about 1975, the winners seldom appeared in mainstream publications and tended to show up in magazines that catered to the mystery reader. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine printed the earliest individual story to win, and has published 21 winners since then. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine has published three.
The terrain took another shift at the turn of the century. Since 2000, Ellery Queen has published three Edgar winners, but all the others come from an anthology or a collection of stories by one author (Laurie Lynn Drummond in 2005 and Stephen King in 2016). For mystery writers, this is both good news and bad news.
It's bad news because anthologies usually don't pay much. Generally, the author gets a royalty share divided by the number of writers in the collection. Last year, I made $3.08 from one anthology. Most anthologies don't sell many copies, either, so when you divvy up the take, there's not much to go around.
One glaring exception is the Mystery Writers of America anthology Vengeance, published in 2012. I received a roylty check last December, and that story– nominated for an Edgar but losing to Karin Slaughter's story in the same collection– has made me more money than all except two other stories, and they both won contests. My story appeared between the covers with stories by Alafair Burke, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, and other big names. It's the best exposure I've had since Border's Books went under. The local store displayed mysteries alphabetically, so my novels were on the same shelf with Dennis Lehane, Elmore Leonard, and Laura Lippman. Man, I miss that store…
Exposure matters. Yeah, it's hard to pay the bills with exposure, but it beats being a complete unknown.
Some new anthology calls lean toward my music background. Over the last couple of years, we've ssen books of stories inspired by the songs of Joni Mitchell, Billy Joel, Steely Dan, the Ramones, or hits from the 1960s. There are more music-themed collections taking submissions as I post this. Now maybe I can write off all those records I've bought as a business expense.
Yes, you have to hear abut the submission call somehow. Maybe you're in a writing group (Short Mystery Fiction Society, for example. Rob Lopresti is the reigning President) that passes the word along. Maybe you're Facebook friends with someone or on a blog site.
The MWAS anthologies have produced the Edgar-winning story four times since 2002. But you have to be an active member of the group to submit a story. The Akashic NAME YOUR CITY Noir series, now numbering several dozen books, is by invitation only. This may be true of many others, too.
But as anthologies proliferate, they give me more writing prompts. Not only are ten of my last twelve sales to anthologies (including next year's MWA collection, Crime Hits Home, edited by SJ Rozan), but I have sent five other stories to submission calls. And I'm working on two others.
18 July 2021
Spycraft, Old School
by Leigh Lundin
Zoo Station |
Usually SleuthSayers learn spycraft from the invisible-ink pen of David Edgerley Gates. A month ago, Janice Law slipped past the yet-to-be-built Berlin Wall to recall David Downing. I depend heavily on my SleuthSayers colleagues for reading material, and I ordered up Zoo Station.
The tale has a much older ‘golden age’ feel of the 1960s and I had to double-check the copyright of the first in the series, 2007. The initial half of the book is slow paced but it builds tension out of proportion to pages turned. I wondered how the author accomplished that, and I’m not the only one. One critic’s comment on the back cover says, “Downing has shown that he can produce that creepy sense of paranoia along with the best of them.”
Furthermore, the book contains a feature I’ve rarely encountered outside a school textbook, a ‘Reading Group Guide’. Question 9 reads: “Given the relative lack of overt violence, how does Downing create the novel’s sense of menace?”
Yeah. How did he do that?
I have a few notions, but other readers will surely come up with better insights. Mostly I credit the immersive nature of the story where the author puts us in the scene with the perfect serving of detail.
The story’s set as the 1930s draw to a close. Perceptive people smell war on the horizon, but live in hope it doesn’t come. Kristallnacht has left its mark. Kindertransport is under way. Jews aren’t permitted to work, travel, or dine in restaurants. While the word ‘ghetto’ hasn’t yet arisen, Jewry are evermore isolated in restricted parts of cities.
The author has allowed history to do much of the heavy lifting. Much of life seems normal, ordinary, but it won’t remain so. We know the horrors that are coming; we want to warn the innocent, tell them to flee for their lives.
Whereas trains and train stations appear in backdrops and settings, mentions of government buildings feel eerily ominous. Downing mentions 15-foot high doors, evoking the architecture envisioned by Albert Speer.
No worthy espionage story would be complete without Soviet spies. One Russian spymaster isn’t so bad, but woe be he who crosses the path of Stalinist spymistress Irina Borskaya. She eats her young.
The novel’s protagonist, British journalist John Russell, advances through a character arc from somnambulance to getting his rear into gear, helping to get the word out while saving a life or two. His actress girlfriend suggests a hint of Cabaret, but with far more gravitas than Sally Bowles.
A minor note jarred me. Russell is virtually broke when we first meet him. He lives simply, but he drinks goldwasser. It seems a pretension more in line with 007 than our impecunious reporter. I excused the gold-flecked drink on the grounds it was a product of Gdańsk (Danzig), but the affectation seemed peculiar.
Along the line, our hero obtains a ten-year-old motorcar, a Hanomag. I thought myself reasonably familiar with cars of bygone eras, and those of the late 1920s are the peak of design– the Mercedes SSK, the Cord, the Packard, the Dusenberg, the Bugatti, and the gorgeous Auburn.
1928 Hanomag © Bonhams Auction |
I hadn’t heard of Hanomag. I had to stop to look it up. It turned out to be one of the homeliest automobiles ever made. Easiest way to tell the front from the back is to look for the single, motorcycle-style headlight, on the left in this photo. Oh well, our hero’s Hanomag ran most of the time and many folks had no cars at all.
As Janice suggests, Zoo Station reads as old style spycraft with luggage storage and postal drops, suitcases with false bottoms, and shadowy men who make others disappear. Downing’s novels aren’t nearly as gloomy as those of, say, John Le Carré.
When you’re bored with the current digital library on your Kindle or Kobo, stop in a musty used book store and pick up a dog-eared copy of Zoo Station. Go old school.
17 July 2021
Voices from the Past
by John Floyd
Years ago, back when you could watch network TV without endangering your brain cells, there was a series of United Airlines commercials I especially remember. One of the two reasons they made an impression was their background music, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which I love, and the other was the voice of the always-unseen narrator. The first time I saw one of them and heard it I knew that voice was familiar--but after repeated viewings I still couldn't figure out whose it was. (No Google or Alexa around in those days.) Finally it came to me. See if you recognize the voice--it starts at about the halfway point in this one-minute commercial from the late '80s.
For some reason I thought about that the other day, and it triggered other memories of overhearing movie or TV dialogue from another room and thinking, I know that voice. Part of that's probably due to the fact that I watch so many movies, but part of it's also because certain voices are just unique--so recognizable that hearing them for only a few seconds can tell you who's speaking.
That got personal a few months ago, when I'd plugged in a Netflix DVD of the James Franco film As I Lay Dying and walked into the kitchen in the middle of the movie to get a snack. As I was heaping ice cream into a bowl I heard a voice so surprising it made me stop in mid-scoop. I hurried back to the TV to see that one of the actors was an old friend from my IBM days named Jim Ritchie--we worked together for years--and who has a voice unlike any other in the world. (Jim also played Matthew McConaughey's father-in-law in A Time to Kill many years ago, but I hadn't realized he had a part in this movie as well.) I later played that scene for my wife after telling her not to look at the screen, and when she heard it she too gasped and said, "Is that Jim Ritchie?" If you want to hear Jim's voice for yourself, here's one of his recent videos.We as writers understand that physical voices aren't as important to our work as they are in some of the performing arts, unless maybe we're doing a reading or an interview or a podcast. What we produce (thank goodness) is usually intended to be read, not heard. But in the TV or movie business, a distinctive voice is an asset. I can think of several actors like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Tommy Lee Jones, Rosie O'Donnell, Gary Cooper, Slim Pickens, Ben Johnson, Kathleen Turner, Alan Rickman, and others, whose voices also tend to fit in with the characters they play. And some--Bernadette Peters, L.Q. Jones, Fran Drescher, Strother Martin, Steve Landesberg, Jennifer Tilly, Lorraine Bracco, R. Lee Ermey, Holly Hunter, G.D. Spradlin, etc.--whose voices are certainly unique but maybe not immediately familiar to the general public.
You know, of course, where all this is leading. It's leading to a question.
In your opinion, who are the actors and actresses with the most recognizable voices?
My picks:
Katherine Hepburn
Lee Marvin
James Earl Jones
Lauren Bacall
Jack Nicholson
Henry Fonda
Steve Buscemi
Cary Grant
John Wayne
Kirk Douglas
Suzanne Pleshette
Humphrey Bogart
Morgan Freeman
Michael Caine
Samuel L. Jackson
Christopher Walken
Audrey Hepburn
Jimmy Stewart
Jeff Goldblum
Al Pacino
Burt Lancaster
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Sam Elliott
Rosanne Barr
Sean Connery
I think I could identify any of those people after ten seconds of listening to them speak.
As you can see from my honest but unscientific list, a voice doesn't necessarily have to be pleasant to be distinctive or easy to recognize. So my second question is, Which actors'/actresses' voices do you LIKE the most?
My top-twenty choices of voices:
Morgan Freeman
Billy Bob Thornton
Judi Dench
Katherine Ross
J. K. Simmons
James Earl Jones
Patrick Stewart
Jane Seymour
Dennis Haysbert
Emma Thompson
Gerald McRaney
Sam Elliott
Melanie Griffith
Diana Rigg
Ben Johnson
Lee Marvin
Kim Dickens
Barbara Bel Geddes
Powers Boothe
Gregory Peck
Why do I enjoy hearing these folks' voices? I'm not sure. If I had to give reasons, I guess some of them--Freeman, Thornton, McRaney, Dickens--bring back good memories of my southern childhood, and some are soothing and relaxing, and some have a foreign accent that I like . . . and some are just interesting. I think my all-time favorite voice is that of Lee Marvin.
A closing note: I always found it fascinating that the voices of brothers James Arness (Gunsmoke) and Peter Graves (Mission: Impossible) sounded exactly alike. If you're not old enough to remember those guys, take my word for it.
Here's another video I saw on YouTube the other night, on this familiar-voice subject. It's part of an episode of the updated game show To Tell The Truth (one of those many remakes that are sometimes fun and sometimes irritating).
And FYI: If you didn't recognize his voice, the narrator in the aforementioned United Airlines commercial was Gene Hackman.
See you in two weeks.
16 July 2021
A Sherlock Holmes Canon for Kids
“A book.”
“What kind of book?”
“Uh, it’s a Sherlock Holmes story.”
“Really? Is it a mystery?”
“Well, yeah—they’re all mysteries.”
“What’s the story? Can you tell me? Because, you see…” she said, her voice rising, “I like MURDER!”
One of the guys sitting in front of us—a total bro in sunglasses, Croakies, and a 20-ounce microbrew sloshing away in a flimsy paper cup—whirled around. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but this conversation suddenly got very interesting!”
Which was a hoot.
Except I didn’t quite know how to quickly summarize the plot of the Holmes tale I was reading in language suitable for a child. Especially someone else’s child. If the tale had been the Red-Headed League, for example, I might have focused my description on the strangeness of hiring gingers to copy the encyclopedia. Or, if it was the story of Silver Blaze, I would have treated her to Holmes’s deductions regarding the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
But this story, the Crooked Man, if I remember correctly, was a little too adult. Sexual jealousy and spousal manipulation is not something you want to delve into with a kid unless you’ve got parental consent forms filled out in triplicate. I was not going there. Instead, my little friend and I talked about about Holmes and Watson and sweet, sweet murder in the abstract.
Many of us grew up reading those stories. I loved them, but I also remember that many of them went over my head because I didn’t have the maturity to understand what these grown-ups were yammering on about. When you couple that with archaic language, mores, customs and behaviors, it’s not hard to see that the best Holmes for kids may well be cherry-picked Holmes.
Since I’m not going to be able to do that for everyone’s kid, I’ve compiled the following list of children’s book series that I think would make good introductions to the Canon. Understand: I don’t propose these as a substitute for Canonical Holmes. Rather, I see them as a bridge to Holmes.
Basil in a Box! |
Growing up in 21st Century Florida, 12-year-old Xena and her 10-year-old brother Xander play an unusual game. They study strangers and deduce their occupations based on clues gleaned from these people’s manner of dress and behavior. They’ve learned how to play the Game from their father, whose family has apparently “played” it for generations.
15 July 2021
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
by Eve Fisher
“The Governor has authority under SDCL 5-24-12 to accept a donation if she determines doing so is in the best interest of the State. The Governor has additional authority to accept donated funds for emergency management under SDCL 34-48A-36.”
But "experts say it sets a troubling precedent in which a wealthy patron is effectively commandeering U.S. military might to address private political motivations." And South Dakota State Senator Reynold Nesiba (D) said, “This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want."
Once upon a time Rome was a Republic consisting mostly of free farmers surrounding the city-state of Rome. But Rome was always paranoid. They always thought their neighbors were out to get them, and the best thing was to conquer them first. (See the Punic Wars.)
By 267 BCE, they'd conquered the entire peninsula of Italy. Then they went abroad, and fought Carthage (present day Tunisia) in three Punic Wars. In between the First and Second, Rome conquered the entire Greek world. And by the end of the Third Punic War, here's what they'd gained, territorially:
- BTW, slaves were everywhere: Almost the entire population of Carthage was enslaved after the 3rd Punic War - farm & factory labor – and all those Greeks (a favorite source for tutors and skilled labor). Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul (cd France) sent back 1,000,000 slaves. This flood of slaves meant it was often cheaper to buy a slave than hire a worker, and even when it wasn't, the presence of so many slaves kept wages very low; around 30% of Italian population were slaves.
Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) traced his descent all the way back to Aeneas, son of Venus, daughter of Jupiter; after his death, he would be deified. He made his name as a military commander in Gaul, and he made sure everybody knew about his exploits by writing the Commentaries. He was superb at power politics, willing to pay, bribe, subvert, seduce, or marry anyone he had to in order to get ahead. In 60 BCE he formed a triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus to take over Rome. Crassus - banker, provider of fire-insurance and owner of silver mines, was the equivalent of a billionaire in his own day. Pompey had mopped up the Spartacus revolt with typical brutality, and was mega-rich thanks to provincial governorships in Asia. He also married Caesar's daughter Julia, but when she died in 54 BCE, so did their alliance.
By 52 BCE, Julius Caesar had conquered all of Gaul and invaded Britain. He came back as a conquering hero, with 13 loyal legions (at least 65,000 troops) totally loyal to him and him alone. The Senate was terrified, and made Pompey sole consul of Rome, with absolute power. Pompey "asked" Caesar to come back as a private citizen, leaving his legions behind, a polite way of telling Caesar that he was going to be outlawed, killed, and his property confiscated. Well, nuts to that, and in 49 BCE he "crossed the Rubicon" with his troops into Rome and launched a four year civil war. Pompey eventually fled to Egypt, where Cleopatra beheaded him as a favor to Caesar. In 47 BCE, Caesar was absolute ruler of Rome.
His assassination three years later was supposed to bring back the Republic - that's what Brutus and Cassius said they wanted. Instead, it brought all-out war, in which it was every general and Senator for himself. The winner was Octavian, Caesar's adopted son and heir, whom few would have bet on to win: young, inexperienced in battle, relatively unknown. But Octavian hired the best generals, plus he had patience, a genius for administration, and always spoke out firmly on behalf of conservative values. It also didn't hurt that, as Caesar's heir, he was fabulously wealthy. Octavian, at 32, became master of the Roman world, and was transformed into
He maintained the facade of the Republic: elections were held, the assemblies met, the Senate passed laws. But before anything passed, Augustus sponsored it and approved it. He had absolute power, and everyone knew it: you just didn't say it bluntly. At least, not at first. Later, no one worried about it.
14 July 2021
The Sound of Bow Bells
I
first saw Michael Caine in Zulu, but
he didn’t stick, not like Nigel Green’s stern Color-Sergeant, or James Booth’s
cheeky slacker, Pvt. Hook. Caine had in
fact auditioned to play Hook, but the director Cy Enfield cast him as the
junior lieutenant, Bromhead. Caine later
said it was lucky
Then in
1965, The Ipcress File was released. Alfie,
a year later, made him a name, and Shirley MacLaine hired him for Gambit.
Those three pictures essentially established him as a star, and
established the character he so often played, insolent, a little below the
salt, a striver with an ironic sensibility, and somehow detached from his own
self-regard. Ipcress, though, was the movie that put him front and center, at
least for me personally, and he played Harry again in Funeral in Berlin and Billion-Dollar
Brain. Not quite a franchise like
the Bond pictures, they seemed a good deal less calculated.
Bob
Hoskins remarked that Caine basically opened the door for working-class
stiffs. Before him, you had to mimic the
posh. Roger Moore, who hailed from
Lambeth, not far from Southwark, where Caine grew up, had to get rid of his
speech patterns, which in
The
trick of Michael Caine is his natural authenticity, his transparency. He’s not pretending to be anything but what
he is, although acting is play. Caine,
like Bob Hoskins, is recognizably not
Oxbridge, the Royal Shakespeare, or the soothing tones of the BBC. His voice identifies him.
He’s
got over sixty years in the business, but earlier on, in 1971, he made the
movie that for me personifies him. You
can’t imagine anybody but Michael Caine playing Jack in Get Carter.
The
movie is more nihilist than the Ted Lewis novel it’s based on, which is going
some, because Ted Lewis could be as hardboiled as they come, but Get Carter is a particular kind of Brit noir.
You could cast back to Brighton
Rock or Odd Man Out, or the truly
odd Never Let Go – Peter Sellers as a
psychotic gang boss – or look ahead to The
Long Good Friday. Richard Burton did
Villain, a remake of White Heat, the same year Get Carter came out. More recently, Essex Boys (2000), with Sean Bean, or Tom Hardy’s astonishing
double turn as the Kray twins in Legend
(2015).
Get Carter has a
deceptively simple premise. A legbreaker
for the
Get Carter was
the director Mike Hodges’ first feature, and he wrote the screenplay. The cinematographer was Wolfgang Suschitzky,
who says he waited for the light, and set the exposure. The rest is Hodges. This is generous of him to say, because the
look of Get Carter is very
specific. It begins with a slow zoom in,
to the lit upper floor of a dark
This
is a clear esthetic choice. The shooting
method reflects the movie’s objective content.
Pornography is the story hook, and a visual correlative.
We will, in charity, pass over the painful remakes. The original is the one to see, and in a very real sense, it’s sui generis. You can’t do better. This is Michael Caine epitomized; this is visceral, committed movie-making, as if the fate of the human condition depended on it.
13 July 2021
I Said It: The Rhythm Method Has a Role in Your Writing
by Barb Goffman
12 July 2021
Danger in Paradise
by Janice Law
Back in the days when radio was the cutting edge medium, I remember rushing in from school to catch the latest episode of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and my dad's banning a safari themed series during our dinner hour. But the radio play that made the deepest impression (and perhaps foreshadowed my later literary career) was an overheard adult offering about a young couple who are menaced by a vicious escaped convict on a deserted tropical beach.
I don't remember the name of the play or the denoument, just the set up: The couple are enjoying the beach when the husband is somehow trapped below the tide line under a heavy timber, probably the relic of a pier. The wife is frantic to release him and as she struggles, the convict appears. Ever after, that template of a threat of death in paradise has seemed to me the perfect recipe for suspense.
Maybe that is why I enjoyed Tana French's The Searcher. Granted, rural Ireland's weather is not exactly tropical, but the Republic's scenery is superb. Cal Hooper, unhappily divorced and recently retired from the Chicago police force, sees Ardnakelty as a tranquil rural haven after too many years on mean urban streets. The fishing is good, there will be rabbit shooting (and eating) after his gun permit comes through, the locals are friendly, if eccentric, and he enjoys putting his much-neglected cottage into good repair.
Life in Ardnakelty is pleasant and undemanding until a scruffy, half-feral youngster seeks his help in finding a missing sibling. Cal has all kinds of good reasons, legal, personal, and intellectual for rejecting this plea, but gradually Trey Reddy secures his help in finding out just where nineteen year old Brendan Reddy might be.
Not too tough an assignment for an ex-cop who did a stint in the missing persons division, but there are complications. French, who lives in Dublin and who has written a much-praised series featuring various members of a Garda force, is very good on cultural misunderstandings and on the ways that isolated rural communities both spread and conceal information.
As Cal gets acclimatized, he meets his neighbors and discovers the linchpins and undercurrents of the quaint and individualistic village. The rural area is not crime free, either; the young men being, as Mart, his bachelor farmer neighbor points out, uncertain about what they should do and how they should live now that traditional ways and occupations are obsolete. The results are too frequently recklessness and sometimes violence.
Although Cal starts out thinking that Chicago was complicated and Ardnakelty, simple, he eventually has to recalibrate his thinking, since few of his new friends and neighbors are exactly what they seem. Even after Cal solves his mystery, he still faces the bigger question about his own life.
Tana French |
Given that the same old problems and cruelties afflict Ardnakelty as afflict Chicago, is he committed to this new community, to the Reddy child, and to Lena, who offers him a pup and maybe companionship, and to Mart, the farmer, and to folk like the indispensable shopkeeper, Noreen?
It is not just that rural Irish ways are not mid-western USA ways or that their common language is not without mysterious subtleties and pitfalls. Cal also has to decide to stay with full knowledge that human frailty resides everywhere or else sell up and make another attempt at paradise, a paradise that he surely knows will come with its own snake.
11 July 2021
Dr. Kona Williams on Investigating Residential School Gravesites: It's Complicated.
Residential schools in Canada were set up in the 19th century, funded by the government and often run by the Church. Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to over 130 schools with the, “primary aim of assimilating Indigenous children”
Stories of abuse at these schools have been told for decades. After another 751 unmarked graves were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School site in Saskatchewan, Canada, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) demanded that charges be laid over the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools.
The NWAC asked that, “sites of former Indian residential schools be declared crime scenes and that an investigation into how each child buried there died — as well as into who is responsible for their deaths — be conducted…In Canada, we live under the rule of law. The law does not allow those who are responsible for the deaths of children to walk free with impunity.” This principle of investigating these deaths and charging anyone responsible has been widely discussed among Canadians.
To address this issue, I had the honour of speaking with Dr. Kona Williams, the only Indigenous Forensic Pathologist in Canada.
Forensic pathologists are medical doctors who are trained to autopsy bodies and come as close to the truth about the cause of death as is possible.
I asked, naively, why aren’t we investigating to charge people for the murder of these children?
Dr. Williams explained that she has had many talks with the Indigenous leadership and her colleagues in the forensic world about how to proceed as more gravesites are found. While acknowledging the anger and grief these gravesites are engendering, she explained that it is very complicated.
“We know that there are stories of children being injured and who died from these injuries, as well as children who died from malnutrition or not receiving medical care.”
“We know that some of these graves may be older than 50 years so we don’t have the legislation for those over 50 years on how to deal with these deaths.”
Deaths over 50 years ago are considered not ‘forensically relevant’ in Ontario because prosecuting deaths over 50 years ago is - in most circumstances - unlikely to yield convictions.
Dr. Williams then went on further explain how complicated the process of any investigation would be. “It’s going to be hard for families and communities to decide what to do. Some will want to let them rest, some will want it investigated… It’s up to the families and communities. “These are difficult discussions. This can’t be forced. it has to be driven by what the communities want. “We might not be able to find all the children, or identify all of them or even maybe not even find the cause of death. What do you want us to do then? “The investigation is more complicated if we only have bones. If they died of pneumonia - bones aren’t a lot to go on. If it’s malnutrition or blunt trauma, that’s easier. “It’s going to be hard for families and communities to decide what to do. Some will want to let them rest, some will want it investigated.
“Also, with my work, generally we have records that we compare to the body, for example, dental records. Here we only have bones so we could get DNA but we would have to go to the community and ask if they would provide DNA samples to compare…the ethics around this are huge. How do we ensure that the information is kept securely and not used for anything else?”
When I asked how would they even know which body to exhume if some families and communities don’t want an investigation and some do?
“We need to ask the communities about how to proceed. I’m happy to provide the expertise, but I’m not going to do it without the permission of the people involved”
When I asked if there were about 150,000 children in these schools, Dr. Williams said, “That’s an estimation, because we really don’t know. The records kept by the government and church aren’t always clear. The Catholic church has never provided the records that they have…do we have the authority by law to get these records? I asked [someone recently] do we have the authority to subpoena the Catholic church?”
Then Dr. Williams added, “There is something I’ve been chewing on. There is a ‘death in custody’ if the person is being held against their will, they may be some responsibility on the part of the people whose care they’re in…legally this is an interesting question. The custodians and institutions can be held responsible…Can this be put under “death in custody”? Would this allow these people to be charged past the 50 years? Dr. Williams replied, “Potentially. The legislation doesn’t exist - it might still be limited by ‘forensically relevant’.
“My colleagues and I have been discussing how to investigate these sites. People will get traumatized and re-traumatized, digging up bones is traumatic, and the proper ceremony, protocol must be followed.
“Some people have been asking about the cost - how can we put a price on this? We don’t know how many children there are, and we don’t know the cost. When people ask how much is this going to cost to dig up these kids, I say - I don’t know, how much would it cost to dig up yours if they were your kids? Would you not want everything done? Would you not want to know what happened and would you not want someone to pay for this? The last school closed in 1996 - it’s not ancient history.”
How to proceed, whether to proceed in some cases, in investigating the gravesites at residential schools is indeed complicated. I thank Dr. Williams for giving us a glimpse into the difficulties and how to proceed respecting the Indigenous community because surely, the utmost respect must be given to these children, their families and communities.
10 July 2021
Have a Neat Summer
by Bob Mangeot
I don't know how it's done these days, but when I was a kid, we had that ritual where before school let out in June, the yearbooks got passed around so we could write to each other, no matter what we really thought, best wishes. Often, and also no matter the real truth, we added some level of excitement to see them come Labor Day. Or you played it casual. "Have a neat summer" is what Winnie famously wrote Kevin in The Wonder Years.
Well, a June ritual must've rubbed off. In January, I write the year's goals and priorities, and I post them where I can't avoid them. Mid-year is the pause and rethink. Is my butt in the chair? How's my process and production? Did I produce anything worthwhile? What's my best next projects? These questions have more weight mid-year than in heady January. By June, I've either done things or haven't. Energizing adjustments get made. The goal might've been too optimistic, or maybe it's not important now. Maybe the problem is me chasing shiny objects again instead of staying on track.
This isn't entirely OCD. It's not overthink, either. Like many of us, my writing time is limited. I can't afford bad process leading to avoidable duds. And no way can I be left to my whimsical devices.
A June re-think has special power in 2021. We're coming off an 18-month grinder. We're de-scrambling, or I am. And if I'm more honest than certain yearbook messages, I'll admit to a productivity drop even before the pandemic. Okay, some of that was an intentional focus on rewrites, and that focus paid off in acceptances. Great. Also, unsustainable. I can't edit what I don't draft. My 2020 goals sought to address this--and did to a minor extent--but 2020 had its own plan.
This year's Goal One: Keep it simple. Then make it simpler. Me in that chair and being intentional about it. Forget markets and pushing out submissions. Just write, kid. And have fun, damn it. When it's fun, it shows in the work (hot tip: editing may be required). As of June 30, I've tied 2018's 5 stories (3 romps, 2 serious). Raw drafts, as is my usual, but some with potential. As to weighted production, the cumulative mid-year word count tops most of my annual marks. With a neat enough summer, I'll outpace 2017's production, which became my most successful acceptance vintage (editing was required).
The mid-year check? Progress!
I mentioned not worrying about markets. This has yearbook note gloss to it. I've baked a certain submission rhythm into my goals and process. Often I'm crafting a story with specific tastes in mind. I'll know, for example, if a given piece might work for AHMM or is written to that very spec. Maintaining this was 2021 Goal Two. I'm a tad behind, but that was an audible to write that new stuff. I called it, so I might as well own it. Did I also chase a few shiny objects? Yes. Yes, I did. But not many, because I keep walking past those posted goals.
Score Goal Two as needing focus.
My last 2021 goal worth mentioning is the Gotta Dos. TCB, to quote a renowned Memphis jumpsuit collector. I'm a chapter officer for both SinC and SEMWA, and I factor in those happy obligations. And this summer, I'm doing short story workshops for the Clarksville Writers Conference and for Killer Nashville. The kind with actual people there. I owe them the same rigor that I bring when my butt is in my own seat. Helpfully, one session is on--wait for it--intentionality.
So. June/July. I'll have a cold drink, a long walk, and a hard stare at my posted goals and progress. Done neatly, the writing gets needed course corrections and an energy boost. I'll have that fun if it kills me, damn it, and I'll chalk up stories to share come fall.
Or before then, even. I mean, we're here all summer.