Last year, one local author got the good news that she’d been selected for a coveted writing mentorship with the Manitoba Writers Guild. Brenda Sawatzky of Niverville, a longtime member of the Guild, had seen the annual Sheldon Oberman’s Apprenticeship advertised many times, but never before had she been in a position to apply.
“Until the summer of 2018, I had only short stories in my repertoire,” says Sawatzky. “Last summer, I challenged myself to create a novel and had a couple of chapters completed. In the fall, when the [mentorship] call came out, I submitted my short manuscript to the Guild, thinking I’d never win because the story was still very unpolished and there were far better emerging writers out there than me. By January of this year, I’d all but forgotten about the award until I got the email saying that I’d been selected out of a total of nine submissions.”
Being selected for the program this year was no small achievement, especially considering that the Guild had significantly reduced the number of mentorships available, due to funding cutbacks.
“I was completely overwhelmed,” Sawatzky says. “Somebody believed in me as a fiction writer. In past years, the Guild had sponsored numerous pairings of emerging writers with established ones. That made my acceptance all the more thrilling.”
Sawatzky says she wanted to set her novel in a time and place she could remember well from her own lifetime, so for her setting she chose Manitoba in the 1970s.
“The story follows the life of a young teenaged girl who finds herself pregnant and without the support of family to get through it,” she says. “This kind of event bore such shame that girls were whisked away to homes for unwed mothers, to carry out the pregnancy far away from the family, friends, and village that should have been their support.”
She adds that most women weren’t given the option of keeping, or even seeing, the young life they’d created. Instead these girls had to carry their secret and shame all their lives, dealing with that shame well into their adults years.
When the mentorship began, Sawatzky was paired with Winnipeg author Keith Cadieux, who was three times published.
“He offered me a ton of feedback on theme, story arc, and character development throughout the months. Keith was a fantastic mentor, gently guiding me but never doing the work for me. He offered up options when I hit a snag but reminded me that every writer’s work needs to remain unique to that writer and that there’s never just one way of developing a story. More than anything, though, the program as a whole instilled in me the belief that ‘I can do this.’ Keith had the same struggles I did when he went through the mentorship program and was living proof that I could achieve what he did.”
One of the requirements of the mentorship, according to the guidelines established by the Manitoba Writers Guild, is that mentees have to showcase a portion of their work at a public reading at the end of their experience.
For Sawatzky, who doesn’t consider herself a public speaker, the prospect of putting herself out there was an enormous challenge.
“I was excessively nervous,” she says. “To stand in front of a crowd and read my work was difficult. Also, when you write a story like I’m writing, a huge part of your inner self is invested in the characters, and writing makes you feel very vulnerable when it’s exposed publicly.”
But on Wednesday, June 26, Sawatzky confronted her fears in front of more than two dozen members of the public at a reading held at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg.
“After the fact, I feel a second wind to keep going with the rest of the novel,” she says about the relief that came from getting over her fear of public speaking. “The warm feedback I received after the reading was just what I needed to affirm, once again, that I might just have what it takes. We’ll see about that when it comes time to send it to publishers!”
