It was a rich childhood fantasy—the distended realism of youth allowed the tendrils of the dream to wrap the imagination up ever so tightly. Marina Endicott would fall asleep at night, tucked in by those dream tendrils, making a list of everything she would need to make her vision come true.

She would sneak into the library in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, when it was nearly closing time. She would hide in the bathroom while the librarian or security guard made a final sweep of the building. Then, she alone would be in the library and have all of its treasures to herself. She planned what food to take, the right flashlight to bring—everything to the last detail. And though the fantasy would lull her to sleep most nights she never, in reality, rested her head down for the night in the Yarmouth Library. Though she has, in a way, made it through the night there; her award winning novel, Good to a Fault, rests on the shelves now.

As a girl at BSS, she never quite thought of herself as a writer. Despite feeling as if she could do anything in the world as a BSS graduate, she subconsciously dismissed writing.

“Even with the sturdy sense of possibility that I’d gotten from BSS, writing is not a sensible career to go into,” she says. “I was always working in other art forms to support my writing habit.”

Though not a writer from the get go, at least not purposefully, Ms. Endicott was always the creative type and set high standards for herself. She came to BSS shortly after moving to Toronto and attending C.W. Jefferys Secondary School. She spent all of Grade 12 and 13 at BSS, during which time she enjoyed many of her classes, including Greek, drama, history and English. She took a course in Grade 12 that, in retrospect, had a profound impact on her life trajectory by dispelling her prejudices towards Canadian literature.

“I’d never before considered Canadian literature to be worth reading. I thought it had to be old to be good,” she explains with a hint of a smile and gentle reproach of herself in her voice. “We read several Canadian plays and I’d never seen a Canadian play before,” she adds—a rather profound realization for someone who made a living for many years in Canadian theatre.

After graduating from BSS, Ms. Endicott studied acting at the University of Waterloo. After graduating, she returned to Toronto with the intention of making a living as an actor. Although constantly busy, participating in a touring children’s theatre and many other theatrical endeavours, she wasn’t where she wanted to be.

“I wasn’t terrifically successful, but I worked a lot,” she laughs. “I wasn’t making a whack of money but I was working all the time.”
It was a satisfactory and enjoyable living, but Ms. Endicott had fallen in with some fellow thespians with lofty ideas. Barbara Barnes, Mike Myers and Ms. Endicott packed their bags and hopped across the pond to England where they expected to find fame and success.

“We gradually came to think that…Canadian theatre wasn’t really up to us and we should go to where we believed that the theatre would be, I don’t know, more intellectual I guess.” She giggles in the retelling of her youthful idea.

The only snag in the plan was that England didn’t seem all that impressed by the Canadian intruders. For a while, each of the friends struggled with landing work, but Ms. Endicott, in particular, found herself taking mind-numbing office jobs to keep financially afloat. She was comforted by the familiarity of another BSS girl living in London at the time, Beth Lang.

Being an artist and being deprived of an outlet (regular theatre work) and being stunted by mundane office work, Ms. Endicott took up an activity that flexed her creative muscle and channeled her artistic inclinations. Often while pretending to be productive in the workplace, she began to write short stories. Born out of boredom and necessity, many of those stories went on to be included in her anthology, Coming Attractions, which was nominated for the 1993 Journey Prize.

Though Ms. Barnes was able to make a name for herself, and still lives and works in London, after two years abroad both Ms. Endicott and Mr. Myers repatriated. He went on to work at Second City and is now internationally known as a Canadian funny man.
She, like her other two friends, continued to pursue a career in theatre. She was offered a job with the Saskatchewan Playwrights’ Centre and took up as a dramaturge—a position that incorporated her writing and her theatrical knowledge. A dramaturge works closely with writers and helps provide research and editorial direction. She
believed that she had found her life-long career and remained with the Saskatchewan Playwrights’ Centre for seven years. It was during her time in Saskatchewan that she met and married Peter Ormshaw, a poet and aspiring RCMP officer, though she wasn’t sure he was entirely serious about his law enforcement pursuit. At first she laughed
when Peter revealed his career goals to her, but she quickly took him seriously as he applied and was accepted into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Peter’s first posting was Mayerthorpe, Alberta.

Neither of them had ever experienced small town life before Mayerthorpe: population 200 right next to an Indian reserve and along a far-reaching and deadly highway. Ms. Endicott couldn’t even get The Globe and Mail in town and the only writing opportunities she could seize were with Mayerthorpe’s local newspaper. “I’m sure we will write about it but we haven’t yet acquired the necessary perspective, I don’t think,” she muses of that period of her life.

It was during this time, in 2001, that her first novel Open Arms was published and became a finalist for Amazon.ca’s Books in Canada First Novel Award. It was also during this time that Peter was the first arresting officer for what is now infamously referred to as the Mayerthorpe Incident. On March 3, 2005, four RCMP constables were shot and killed in Mayerthorpe in what was the worst one-day loss of life for the RCMP in 100 years. “It was a very rough time for all of us,” says Ms. Endicott.
Though difficult and emotionally taxing, she took the experience and created a long poem titled “The Policeman’s Wife, Some Letters” which was short-listed for the CBC literary awards in 2006.

After five years in Mayerthorpe, Ms. Endicott and her family, which had grown to include son Will and daughter Rachel, moved to Calgary where her writing continued to take off while she taught at the University of Calgary. She now lives in Edmonton and teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta. Her latest novel Good to a Fault was released last year and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Canada and the Caribbean and was a finalist for the 2008 Giller Prize. Like her poem about the Mayerthorpe Incident, her inspiration for Good to a Fault came from a painful experience.

Ms. Endicott’s sister and fellow BSS old girl, Alexandra ENDICOTT ’82, died from Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2000. One of the main characters in Good to a Fault also suffers from the cancerous disease. Though painful, Ms. Endicott refers to the ability to use the experience in her writing as “a privilege.”

“Having gone through that kind of heightened experience, you have material that is difficult to work with, but it is worth the effort; it is worth going through that again in imagination to be able to say, ‘this is what this is like.’” It has been rewarding for Ms. Endicott to hear from readers that they too have lost loved ones to cancer and can identify with the characters in the novel.

Not all of her inspiration comes from emotionally difficult places. The opening scene for Good to a Fault was created after she witnessed a fender-bender in downtown Saskatoon.

“I think it’s a pretty eclectic soup that everyone draws their inspiration from—memory and experience and imagination,” she says.

Ms. Endicott is currently working on her third novel—a story about a sisterly singing vaudeville act touring Canada around the turn of the century. It’s set for release in 2011.

There are about three additional novels percolating inside her head—slowly forming and solidifying until it’s their turn to be put to paper. She still uses acting techniques to encourage both herself and her students to get creative juices flowing. For her, acting and writing are still close relatives.

Ms. Endicott has become a Canadian novelist and a prized writer, although she still finds defining Canadian literature a tricky task. It is a task she has become more acutely aware of in the wake of British Giller Prize judge, Victoria Glendinning, writing unflattering prose in the Financial Times about Ontario cottages being an apparently “prime setting for emotional turmoil—they sit, brooding, on Muskoka chairs,” and adding that Canadian novels are mostly collaborative efforts, “often about families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine or wherever.” Her comments offended many in the Canadian literary community, Ms. Endicott included.

While acting as a juror for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize this year, she was exposed to almost every piece of fiction created by Canadians in 2009 so far. With that experience in mind she decided the qualifier that makes Canadian literature Canadian is the nationality of the writer and nothing more.

“The diversity of Canadian writing defies definition,” she writes in an email. “I am unable to find consistent patterns of plot or style or world-view or even obsession.”

Ms. Endicott very eloquently counter-points each of Glendinning’s jabs and concludes, quite sensibly, “we do sit in Muskoka chairs, as often as we get the chance, but is that such a bad thing?”

--
Marina Endicott is this year’s BSS Hill Canadian Author.

Posted April 21, 2010 at 12:51am

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