An interview about Dance of the Banished, why I write, and my interned grandfather

Oliver Twist had a story!

Marsha Skrypuch was born in Brantford, Ontario, on December 12, 1954

and that was where she grew up. When her inability to read caught up with her, she was forced to repeat Grade Four. She responded by borrowing Oliver Twist, the thickest book in the Children’s section of the Brantford Public Library, and spending a year renewing that novel and teaching herself to read. After becoming hooked on reading, she began writing for her high school newspaper and completed an Honours B.A. in English. She took a detour through the male dominated field of industrial tool sales, a Master’s in Library Science and the birth of her son before finding her way back to writing, first as a reviewer and freelance writer, and then as an author. In 1996 her first children’s book, Silver Threads, came out. Since then she has had eighteen more books published for children and young adults, including Dance of the Banished. This most recent young adult novel is about a Kurdish immigrant’s internment in Canada during World War I and his fiancee’s struggle to survive the war in the Ottoman Empire and then to somehow find him. In addition to readers’ choice wins like the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award, the BC Red Cedar, the Crystal Kite Award and two OLA Silver Birches, Marsha has received the Ukrainian Order of Princess Olha, the highest honour bestowed on citizens of foreign countries, for her picture book, Enough, about the genocidal famine in Ukraine. Most recently, Marsha has been appointed to the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund Endowment Council, which supports projects to commemorate Canada’s internment operations in World War I. Marsha is particularly honoured to be on the council this year, as it is the centennial of the internment operations.

SLiC – In your writing career you have been a journalist, a children’s book writer and a young adult author. What aspect of each of these kinds of writing do you find most rewarding?

MS – Each of these kinds of writing comes with its own rewards and in many ways they blend into each other. What I love about being a freelance journalist is that I meet so many interesting people. It was during my early years as a freelancer that I discovered most of the stories that would become the seeds to my novels. A large portion of my early freelancing was doing book reviews. What a dream assignment for a burgeoning writer – to be paid for reading and writing about books!

For me, to be published in book form is an honour in itself. I am acutely aware of the fact that there are many aspiring authors who would be grateful to have even one book published and here I am, on number nineteen. I don’t decide who the audience will be when I embark on a story. I let the characters speak for themselves. As an example, Last Airlift is for middle grade readers, as is Making Bombs for Hitler, but Dance of the Banished is for young adults, but all three books would appeal to an overlapping readership.

There is one reward that transcends all else: my books allow me to be the voice of those whose stories have been suppressed.

SLiC – What personal quality do you think is most important for a successful writer?

MS – Persistence.

SLiC – What has been the importance of your Ukrainian heritage in your life and in your writing?

MS – Many people assume I must have been immersed in all things Ukrainian since childhood, but I wasn’t. My parents divorced when I was young and I was raised by my mother, whose ancestors came here in the 1700s. I didn’t know much about my Ukrainian heritage until I was an adult. My paternal grandfather came to Canada just before WWI and he was interned as an enemy alien at Jasper Internment Camp but I didn’t find out about that until I read an Op-Ed in the Globe & Mail in the late 1980s about the internment. I did know that he had claimed to have been imprisoned unjustly, but it was that article that launched my research into what really happened to him. One story leads to another, and before I knew it, I had plunged myself into the deep history of Ukraine, including life under Stalin and Hitler. Had I been steeped in Ukrainian culture as a kid, all of this might have seemed boring to me.

SLiC – Early in your career you sold the film rights to Shadows in the Sand, an unpublished novel. Financial motivations aside, would you like to see your books translated into film? Why?

MS – For me personally, it would be neat to see a film producer’s perspective of these stories that have lived in my head for so long. Aside from that, I think my books would give moviegoers something different. I would love for a wide audience to understand the nuances of WWII portrayed in my WWII trilogy (Stolen Child, Making Bombs for Hitler, Underground Soldier). Ditto for Dance of the Banished and WWI.

SLiC – On your website you include “Writing Tips” to support other writers. What has been the importance of mentors and of mentoring in your writing career?

MS – Writers by their very nature are solitary beings but it’s darned hard to stay in a vacuum and hone your craft. I attended the inaugural Humber School for Writers Summer Workshop in 1992. I had just written the first draft of my first novel and didn’t know what to do next. That week at Humber was a transformational experience and it set the course of my writing career. I had the good fortune of being in Jane Urquhart’s group and during our one-on-one she told me that I had a lot of work to do on that manuscript, but that I was a good writer. The key benefit to that program was the critique process. I realized that doing critiques is as important to a writer’s development as getting them. In order to continue with the critique experience, I joined an online critique group. This was in 1992, before the internet. It was in a Compuserve forum called the Litforum and participation was via a dial-up modem and you paid by the minute. I eventually became the sysop for the kids’ writing section and formed Private Kidcrit with the onset of the internet. I migrated this private crit group over to my own website a few years ago. It is the longest running online children’s crit group on the internet. At any given time we’ve got about 30 participants and they all know that they have to crit and post regularly or I’ll boot them out. Over the years many kidcritters have become published and I have to say that there is nothing more thrilling for me than to see a newbie writer hone skills in kidcrit, then pass on what they’ve learned to the next newbie writer. Former and current kidcritters are one big family and we try to get together in real life whenever possible. Often when I’m out of province doing presentations, a kidcritter will sneak in to listen, then we’ll go out for coffee afterwards. Anyone who’d like to join kidcrit is welcome, as long as they’ve written the first draft of a children’s story and they’re willing to consistently give and get critiques. Email me at marsha@calla.com.

I was thrilled to be asked to teach at the Humber School for Writers’ Summer Writing Workshops and I did that for a few summers. It was neat to be able to give back and I was honoured to receive the Calliope Award for mentorship and excellence in writing from Humber School for Writers in 2010.

SLiC – If you were capable of teaching yourself to read Oliver Twist in Grade Four, what were the obstacles to your becoming engaged as a reader before then?

MS – I was a student in the early 1960s and back then, we were supposed to learn how to read with tedious books like the Dick and Jane series. To me, there was no point in learning to read if all it would get me was Dick and Jane. Dr. Seuss was just becoming popular and while his books were not tedious, they terrified me. To this day I have nightmares of being attacked by the Cat in the Hat, and Green Eggs and Ham still makes me gag. I tuned out. Failing Grade Four was a wake-up call. I decided that I had to teach myself to read and so I chose Oliver Twist because it looked interesting. Also, it was thick, so I figured even a good reader would take a while to read the whole thing so I wouldn’t look out of place if I kept on renewing it.

And Oliver Twist had a story! Even though it was hard for me to decode the words, it was worth the effort because the story was just so darned interesting. After reading Oliver Twist, I read other fat novels. I completely missed out on what most of my contemporaries were reading and didn’t actually read children’s fiction again until I was doing my library degree.

SLiC – What was it about Charles Dickens’ writing style that won you over to reading?

MS – Dickens writes about the urchins and orphans and unfortunates whose stories are largely left untold. He also writes from a child’s point of view, with a child solving the problem. This was different than many of the prescriptive books of the 60’s where all problems were solved by adults. After reading Dickens I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I got older and I wanted to write the same sort of books, but Dickens used too much description for my taste and so I figured I’d write on similar topics but would leave out the words people tend to skip over.

SLiC – What was different about the teachers who were most successful in cultivating your interest in reading in either elementary or high school?

MS – I wasn’t the easiest student to deal with, what with the dyslexia and being a daydreamer. The teachers who most influenced me were those who didn’t write me off as unteachable, but who encouraged me to learn in my own way.

Jim Cameron was my principal and grade 8 teacher at St. Bernard’s School in Brantford. I still had the shame of failing Grade Four hanging over my head, but he was so encouraging. When we got the results of our grade 8 provincial tests back, he took each student into his office for a one-on-one counselling session. He showed me on a graph where my standing was – basically off the chart in a good way – and I was gobsmacked. He told me I could do anything I wanted. It took me awhile to even comprehend what he was saying because I had it so stuck in my mind that I was a failure. I won an art award that year, and he took me into each classroom and the kids applauded. I was also the editor of our school yearbook. The highlight of my career as a writer was to do a presentation at a school in Brantford where Jim was the principal. After he introduced me I showed the kids my own grade 8 report card and the encouraging comments he made and they thought that was pretty nifty.

In grade ten I got sent to the Vice-Principal’s office for asking too many questions in English class. The VP pulled out my grade nine provincial test scores and decided that the problem wasn’t me, but the class. He placed me in enriched and accelerated English and I had Mr. Ed Neely for the rest of high school English. Mr. Neely opened my mind to so many different kinds of books and writing and he was so enthusiastic and encouraging. It was also neat to be in a class of students who were all passionate about good books and creative writing.

What both Mr. Cameron and Mr. Neely had in common was that they were flexible about learning styles and they encouraged their students to follow their own dreams and not be caught up in what someone else might want them to do. I had many superb teachers over the years, but these two stand out as mentors.

SLiC – What were the most valuable lessons you took away from your Master’s program in Library and Information Science?

MS – How to do in-depth research. Because my books are all on topics that haven’t been written about, they each take a ton of research. For example, in order for me to write my Armenian Genocide trilogy (The Hunger/Nobody’s Child/Daughter of War) I did about ten years of research, which included sourcing first person accounts, newspapers of the time, physical artifacts and maps. It was slightly easier to do the primary research for my first two books set during the WWI internment operations (Silver Threads, and Prisoners in the Promised Land: The Ukrainian Internment Diary of Anya Soloniuk) because they were set in Canada. I flew to Amos, Quebec, where Spirit Lake Internment Camp had been, and also to Jasper, Alberta where my grandfather had been imprisoned. I sourced camp guard diaries, letters, photographs, and log books – it took about five years.

Dance of the Banished combines these two areas of research, and this meant that I could go back to my collected files as preliminary research, but there was so much different about this novel from the previous five books I’d written set during WWI. Ali and Zeynep were not Ukrainian and they were not Armenian. It took me quite some time to figure out exactly who they were, and once I did that, I had to recreate what their daily life would be like a hundred years ago, Zeynep in Anatolia and Ali in Brantford and Kapuskasing. Without the training I had received at library school I don’t think I would have been up to the detective work.

What makes me chuckle is a question I get asked a lot by students about research: “So, do you just google it?”

I wish!

SLiC – If you could recommend two books, one fiction and one non-fiction, as having been most influential for you, what would they be? Why would you recommend them?

MS – Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

This non-fiction book was written by a white man who chemically darkened his skin so that he could experience life first hand as a black man in the 1950s southern US. A powerful book about literally stepping into another person’s shoes and feeling what it would be like to live their life. Griffin’s writing style is stripped down and bare and oh so eloquent because of that. I read this book when I was about eleven years old and it cemented my desire to write stories that make a reader step into other people’s shoes.

The Magus, by John Fowles

I first read this novel in high school, then read it again and again, getting something different from it with each reading. I love how it plays with the concept of reality depending on whose perspective we are in. It had a profound effect on me because it showed how as a writer you shouldn’t be able to anticipate the turns your story will take. A writer’s duty is to create characters who are then set free on the page. The exhilaration of writing comes when your characters do things that seem outside of your own imagination but are breathtakingly right for the character.

SLiC – What is the most interesting aspect of your work with the War Internment Recognition Fund Endowment Council?

MS – Several years ago, the federal government officially acknowledged the injustice of the WWI internment operations and they set aside a fund to help educate the public so such an injustice would never be repeated. If you ask most Canadians about internment in Canada, they’ll mention the Japanese internment of WWII. The WWI internment is completely off their radar. The few people who have heard of the WWI internment think it was only Ukrainians who were interned, and while the majority of those interned were Ukrainian, there were many other groups affected as well, for example, Croats, Bosnians, Polish, Serbian, Armenians and Alevi Kurds. Some of these communities are not even aware that their own people were targeted in WWI. I love being a part of this Council whose goal is to direct funds to worthy projects to ensure that these various stories are researched, preserved and disseminated. This is a unique part of Canadian history and I am honoured to facilitate others in its telling.

SLiC – What other projects are you working on these days?

MS – I have a few non-fiction projects down the pipeline: two biographical novels and one picture book. Two are about Vietnamese war survivors and one is about a Ukrainian girl in WWII whose mother was executed for hiding Jews.

SLiC – Thank you for taking time from your summer travels to answer our questions about your work and for your stories that help children and young adults to see how human beings find the strength and courage to overcome adversity.

MS – It has been a pleasure.

Dance of the Banished
ISBN 9781927485651

Visit Marsha Skrypuch’s website at www.calla.com.