While self-isolation is no vacation, it certainly has given pause to the hectic schedules so many of us were accustomed to before COVID-19. As we slow down and take stock of our new reality, now is the perfect time to reintroduce ourselves to the simple pleasure of reading.
In today’s article, part four in a series featuring stories written by local authors, we’ll take a look at those who have penned memoirs.
Anna Maynard
Published in May 2019, My Every Breath is author Anna Maynard’s debut book, written with the assistance of veteran writer Karen Emilson of Grunthal. The story captures Maynard’s compelling yet vulnerable experience of rising above physical affliction only to face the tragic death of a loved one.
At six months of age, Maynard was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a disease that came with a short life expectancy in the 1960s.
“I was born at a time when [children with CF] were lucky to live past the age of 14 years,” Maynard says. “My sister passed away at that age of [the same disease]. No one knew much about it, and in reality we were Guinea pigs.”
She was exposed to a lifetime of trial medications and treatments. All the while, she tried to hide her illness from others in order to feel “normal.”
Defying all the odds, Maynard made it to the age of 42 before her lungs finally gave out, requiring a double lung transplant. She is thankful to this day for the donor who made the decision to sign the donor card.
“I never knew what breathing without gasping and coughing was like,” says Maynard. “I never knew what it was like to not feel my heart pounding.”
But seven years later, Maynard faced her darkest day yet when her mother became the victim of senseless murder.
“My mother is one of the reasons I am still here today,” says Maynard. “She showed me to never give up, no matter how hard it is… She was my rock. Now I’ve had to learn to live without her. This was and still is very hard today.”
For Maynard, the purpose of writing her story is twofold. While her goal is to provide hope and inspiration for families and individuals living with chronic disease, her memoir has also provided a passage to self-healing.
Angeline Schellenberg
Angeline Schellenberg, formerly of Niverville, published her first poetry collection in 2017. Tell Them It Was Mozart went on to win three awards at the 2017 Manitoba Book Awards.
The poems in Schellenberg’s collection dabble in the joys and struggles of raising children on the autism spectrum.
“[It’s] about my relationship with my children,” says Schellenberg. “It starts with my story of growing up with two younger brothers with an intellectual disability called Fragile X Syndrome. I always wondered what it would be like to someday have a typical family like I saw on TV. At first when my children didn’t respond the way I expected, I thought I was missing the parenting gene. When my son was diagnosed in Grade One with an autism spectrum disorder, it was a relief. But a few years later, when my daughter was diagnosed with autism too, it was a struggle to accept that I’d never have those typical family experiences I’d planned on. I chose to embrace the mess. I’ve since learned that there is no typical family: we’re all messy.”
Schellenberg adds that most of the challenges her family faces aren’t caused by autism but rather by autism’s incompatibility with the outside world. People tend to misinterpret her children’s expressions of pain and confusion with that of misbehaviour. At the same time, Schellenberg’s attempts to comfort her children are misconstrued as a lack of parental discipline.
“I know my kids are capable of great things, but I don’t know if the world is ready to welcome them,” Schellenberg says. “That keeps me up at night sometimes.”
Marianne Curtis
Île-des-Chênes resident Marianne Curtis isn’t new to the world of book publication. She’s the author of five books and the owner of her own publishing company, Oak Island Publications.
Her first book, Finding Gloria, was published in 2012 and it’s what she calls her survival story.
Born with the birthname Gloria, Curtis was adopted at a young age and raised by a physically and emotionally abusive mother. As a child, the abuse and bullying carried over to the schoolgrounds as well.
In her teens, Curtis finally fled from home, ending up in foster care and finally aging out of the foster care program. But the trauma of her past would bear a heavy weight on her adult life going forward.
“I got married at 18 and had four kids by [the time I was] 25,” Curtis says. “Then my marriage fell apart and I had to learn to be a single working mom. This led to many mistakes along the way—including a total of three divorces, the last being from a man who was sexually abusive.”
At the age of 37, Curtis returned to school to complete her high school education. Thanks to a writing assignment and an encouraging teacher, Curtis began to lay the groundwork for her memoir.
“A few years later, my adoptive mother passed away and I struggled with grieving,” Curtis says. “Unable to share my pain, I started writing things out and as I wrote I started to reveal certain patterns, dysfunctions and things that were life-changing. I myself was leading a dysfunctional life and not seeing it. This self-reflection started to open my eyes to things I had not seen before.”
Even so, Curtis’s book wasn’t completed until after she’d been reunited with her birth mother and found the finale telltale pieces of her life’s puzzle.
Curtis is now working on the sequel, Beauty from Ashes: From Finding Gloria to Finding God.
“I was diagnosed with child development trauma, which is something abused kids get when living in [abusive] homes,” says Curtis. “Once I knew this and understood it, I was finally able to get real help, to make real, positive changes to my life instead of just telling a sad story of abuse survival… I am confident that if my first book inspired so many people to open up and face their inner demons… that my second book will give them freedom.”
Jan Kendall St. Cyr
In 2018, Jan Kendall St. Cyr’s first published story appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Crazy Family. With more than 250 titles in print and sales exceeding 100 million books in more than 40 languages, having your story published here is no small feat.
When the call for submissions came out, St. Cyr knew she had the perfect story. It revolved around a hubby with a prematurely balding head and a longing for hair.
“He was only in his fifties and he wanted hair,” she says of her husband Gerry. “Like, it was just this midlife crisis. So, he finally hit on this sort of international men’s hair club or whatever. It didn’t matter that it was seven hours away and in a whole different country and that we had to be there every four weeks and this hair was coming from the temples of India!”
St. Cyr’s story follows the couple’s zany real-life tale of a custom-made hairpiece gone wrong.
“We were at the mall one day, and we’re coming out into the parking lot,” St. Cyr says. “The wind got a hold of Gerry’s hat, and the hat goes flying in the air. He grabbed the hat, but not until the hair went flying. It was crowded—like, there was a group of people all around—and this hairpiece started rolling like a tumbleweed through the parking lot, and everybody’s standing there, staring. Everyone was just shocked. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, Gerry. Let it go.’”
Embarrassed, St. Cyr fled for the vehicle believing her husband would do the same. Instead she turned to see him chasing his hairpiece across the parking lot.
“I’m crouched down by the truck, ready to pee my pants,” she says. “I’m dying laughing. And then this big trucker guy just stomps down on the hairpiece, picks it up, and hands it to Gerry. He goes, ‘Shit happens.’ Gerry grabs the hair, shoves it in his jacket, and runs to the truck.”
It was the last time Gerry wore the hairpiece, but the St. Cyrs’ tale will live on for posterity.
