Marilyn Norry has 30 years’ experience in Canadian film and theatre. Not only is she a Jessie Award-winning actress, she is also a writer, teacher, director and producer. She has been a dramaturg at Playwright’s Theatre Centre in Vancouver since 1996, was a story editor on the television series Madison, played a continuing role on Battlestar Galactica and is the creator of My Mother’s Story, a project of plays and books dedicated to telling women’s history one mother at a time. For more information about the project, and for some beautiful stories, check out their website.
Marilyn will be speaking at the upcoming Write! Vancouver Festival, which takes place on May 26th, 2012. For more information visit: www.writevancouver.com.
Tariq Hussain: First of all, I’m amazed by all the many “roles” you have in the arts such as writer, actor, director, teacher—is there a role that you feel most comfortable in or are they all connected for you?
Marilyn Norry: I don’t know if I move from one thing to the next because I get bored or if it’s economic necessity. Sometimes it’s just curiosity.
TH: One of your many roles is being a “teacher” and you’ll be presenting a workshop at the Write! Vancouver Festival this month called “Telling Mom’s Story.” What have you got have planned for this workshop?
MN: With memoir writing, people are overwhelmed by the amount of things they could put down and they don’t know how to start. I encourage people to get the big picture of their mother’s life first because then they can figure out what they want to focus in on. Part of the exercise I’m encouraging everyone to do is to force themselves to think: “Okay, what was the beginning? What do I remember next and what happened after that?” We never do it. We’ve got memories scattered all over our brains and it’s a real process to just sit down and write it all out.
TH: The workshop ties in with your website “My Mother’s Story” that you started in 2004 in which people submit a 2000-word piece about their mothers. Are there some memorable stories that have come out of that?
MN: There were two women in our group whose mothers died when they were ten or eleven and they said, “Well I can’t do this because I don’t remember her.” And I said, “Well, write down what you do remember.” It was a big experience for them. One woman wrote about her investigation to find out more about her mum and the other one decided that she was going to have the assignment be just what she remembered and to really plumb the depths of that. Also, in that initial group, we had three women who were in their late eighties and one of them was saying that she hadn’t thought of her mother in sixty years. She had to do this assignment, and she started remembering more and feeling that affinity and kinship with her mother again.
TH: There are a number of challenges with writing memoir, like when the story doesn’t cast a flattering light on the subject. What do you tell your writers who are faced with this challenge?
MN: What I recommend to anyone is to write the whole story out just for yourself. Don’t show anybody. Just write it all out in chronological order and gather those memories and then look at it. There are ways, when you’re going public, of phrasing things so that the facts are stated without undue emphasis. If we’re looking at the decisions that a mother made in the face of the circumstances of her life and making those the important turning points—in the same way that you would have a character in a script—if she was a drug addict and that influenced all the choices that she made, that probably should be in the story. If she had an affair with her boss and only you and your sister know, that doesn’t need to be in there. It didn’t change things. It does reflect on her on her personality, it does say things about a woman’s history and things like that, but I think it’s not worth it.
TH: At Write! Vancouver, you’ll also be involved in a workshop session called “Blue Pencil” in which writers bring a piece to you for one-on-one feedback. Do you have a specific approach to the workshop process?
MN: I have no idea what’s going to happen! (laughs) People can ask for anyone to do their work so I don’t know what they’re going to be bringing in. It’s going to depend on what it is and what they need to do next with the work.
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Cara, Jordan, andrea and Erin (and the incoming editors-in-training!) are so excited to announce that PRISM 50.3 SPRING 2012 is now available! In this issue, check out the winners of our Literary Non-Fiction Contest: Jean McNeil, Jane Cawthorne, and Katie Fritz, chosen by our judge Amber Dawn. There’s also new fiction by Yasuko Thanh, and edgy new poems from Garry Thomas Morse, Jay MillAr, and Sheryda Warrener. And that big sky on the new cover? The talented work of photographer Danny Singer.
