Today’s mail brought a dream fulfilled!
About 15 years ago I wrote a creative nonfiction piece, “This Place of My Father’s Heart”, about my late dad’s connection with his family’s summer cottage during his boyhood – and adding in my own three visits to the Dorset, ON cottage, which was a real privilege to visit twice with my elderly father there as well. The third visit was tough: my role this time was to bury a portion of his ashes on the family property on the shore of Lake of Bays. It was just my (now late) Aunt Hildie Tuthill and me, putting together a home-made funeral and needing to get everything just right to honour my father, Walt Lohans.
This story poured out of my heart and then bounced around the marketplace for a very long time. Kind of tough with those rare pieces that come from deep within. We know at the deepest level that there’s “really something there” – and yet odds are, that the vagaries of the market will toss it off as just one more submission that never quite catches an editor’s fancy. We have to be vulnerable to write things like this, but at the same time need to develop “calluses” to protect those same soft places.
And then last year it won 3rd place in a writing competition sponsored here in Saskatchewan by the Tisdale Writers’ Group. It was a wonderful validation of everything that had gone into the writing of “This Place of My Father’s Heart”.
Today the published piece arrived in the mail!!! (The cheque was nice to receive as well.) Thank you SO MUCH, Ted Dyck, editor of Transition Magazine! …. I’ll post some “proud mama” photos – after so many years of trying!!
Alison Lohans 