Author: audreyadmin

“You aren’t religious are you?” a co-worker asked me after she opened The Glorious Mysteries and saw the title of the first story in my collection, “The Baby Jesus.”

“What do you mean by religious?” I asked her. “If you mean a strict follower of a particular religious doctrine, no,” I said. “But if you mean, like the Latin root of the word, religio, to bind together, then yes, I very much have religious sensibilities. I look at the world as a place of connections.” What I didn’t tell her is that many of my stories critique or subvert the Catholic tradition itself, and I am not alone in this.

Last weekend I was at a brilliant performance at the Citadel Theatre (in Edmonton) of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. ONeill’s characters are deeply influenced by Catholicism, often tragically so. Yet the divided family he presents in Long Day’s Journey could be any family dogged by addiction, failing, and disappointment and that is what makes his particular rendering of it, universal, Catholic and all.

I had the privilege of travelling the province last month reading from The Glorious Mysteries. At Word on the Street, in Lethbridge, I had just finished reading “The Water Witcher,” one of the Alberta stories in my collection. There was an attentive crowd gathered, probably 30 to 35 people. It was an outdoor festival; we were under a tent. The skies were clear and warm, the winds were calm for Lethbridge. A hand shot up. A middle-aged man, dressed in the clean, white work shirt and pants of a painter or other tradesman, had the first question. I had watched during my twenty-minute reading as he paused at the back of the tent, leaned in to listen, and finally took a seat with the rest of the audience. “One thing I want to know, in that story of yours, did they really end up finding water in that place?”

Often it’s the sign of a good story when a reader is “taken in.” The man was sincere and earnest. I almost didn’t have the heart to answer. “This is a work of fiction, but it could have happened and it does happen.” The man slumped a little lower in his seat, clearly disappointed. The context is southern Alberta, the summer of the Great Flood of 2013.

That got me to thinking about fact and fiction and why our age demands so much of reality. Metaphors seem to pale beside the reality of devastation. There are fundamental parts of our world that are out of balance. And yet I would argue that stories illuminate and hold out more hope for the future than all the facts in the world. Just saying… but then I am a writer.

I have an artist friend who hasn’t been able to finish her website because of all the little decisions that have to be made: colours, text, logo, fonts, message… I understand. Take the business cards I’m trying to finalize for marketing my next book. A few words, a couple of colours, three weeks later and the mock-up still isn’t at the printers because of one niggling question. What do I want to call myself? A writer or an author?

There’s a huge debate in the writing world about what each of these words means and whether an author is really a writer or just a published personality. Or whether a writer really cares about being published and marketing their work. I confess, I don’t know a writer who doesn’t want a readership. Being published by other people is often a good check that the writing has integrity. Yet there’s no hard and fast on this as anyone in the publishing business will tell you.

That debate aside, neither author nor writer really expresses all of who I am. I have had many lives. I brainstormed over email one night with another writer friend: so what if I called myself a word witcher? She loved it. Yes, it expresses so many layers of who you are, your rural roots, it makes one think of water witching, spirituality and women’s work.

I like the idea of word witching, maybe because one of my stories in this collection is about a water witcher (so this is really some clever marketing ploy), but also, like witchers of water, one has to listen to language’s internal rhythms, spirits and intuitions to find the thread of the story or the vein of a poem. It’s often an irrational process, even dream-like and when one finds the mother lode, it is like a minor miracle.

So what did I decide? Writer or author or word witcher? No one role can describe all of who I am. I think that’s true for most of us. My name is probably the best descriptor there is and so I’ve decided that that’s enough.