Mary Bomford taught secondary school English as a Cuso volunteer in Lundazi, Zambia from 1969 to 1972. Her memoir explores the transformative power of that experience. She attended the Banff School of Fine Arts and workshops in short story and memoir. She lives with her partner, Larry, in Saanich, B.C.
Mary will be reading previously-unpublished work at the festival, as part of Field Works: Four writers share their works in progress.
Interviewed by Nikki Hillman
Nikki Hillman (NH): What inspired the themes or ideas in your latest work?
Mary Bomford (BM): When I was a child, I would listen to my dad and his friends as they sat around the kitchen table, smoked cigarettes and told their World War II army stories over and over again. I thought they were boring and stuck in their past. I swore I would never live my life backwards, wallowing in memories. I would only go forward into new adventures.
Never say never.
My themes are memory and connection. For forty years I have returned over and over again to 1969 when the six years of my life in Africa began. Red Dust and Cicada Songs explored the optimism and idealism of two Canadian Cuso volunteers who taught the first teens to get a secondary education in newly independent Zambia.
My current writing digs into the years after we left the school and became part of a farming project in the southern part of Zambia. Our first child was just beginning to walk, I had no official role and needed to reinvent myself. Slowly, I connected with the women who were my neighbours in the nearby villages, and later, with those I met in England. It was a fractured time as we moved with my husband’s work and research. I began to recognize that in spite of culture, nationality, language or ethnicity, women’s lives hold universal questions. We have questions related to our bodies: choices around bearing children or not: fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, illness and health. We have questions about our relationships: negotiation with our partners, families and friends. The question of how to follow the desire for work outside of family needs opened. These questions and what those women taught me still have complex repercussions for my life in Canada.
NH: Can you share any challenges you face during the creation of your work. How do those experiences shape the final outcome?
MB: When I had a first draft down, I began to search out people from my past to fill in the details of my own memories and to compare their views with mine. Once I began, the invisible threads of connection stirred like strands of a spider’s web ignited by sunlight. Old friends, acquaintances and even those I considered enemies emerged. Their stories challenged my own. I had to question my firmly held interpretation of past events. I talked to and read many writers on how to write about the individuals I had experienced conflict with. From the internet I pulled out historical context that I had had no access to in the past. All the conversations and new information have changed each draft.
NH: Can you walk us through your writing routine? Do you have any particular habits or routines?
MB: My yoga teacher said that the most difficult yoga pose is, “Roll out your mat.”
My writing routine has been influenced by reading how other writers describe their own writing patterns. Their common theme is, “You must write, whether or not you are “inspired”. Equivalent to, “Roll out your mat.”
Over time, I have recognized a preference for black ink, roller ball nib pens, or blue Staedler pencils with soft white erasers. The paper can be whatever is available but it must be lined. I have a random mix of notebooks and loose papers that I will organize someday. I write first drafts by hand then enter them into Word. I begin editing on my laptop but as soon as things get sticky, it’s back to handwriting. The act of beginning to copy stiff text from the screen back onto paper opens up new ways of saying things. It has taken a while to trust that this ritual actually works. Then I read the draft out loud to hear the awkward bits the voice in my mind has ignored and smoothed out. When I can go no further, I give the text to trusted readers. When their responses come, I hold my breath before reading them. Some notes seem brilliantly perceptive, others, opaque. I wonder, “Why don’t they get it?” Next, I put the text away for several weeks. When I take it out again, the readers’ replies become clear and perceptive. Then I get out the black pen or the blue pencil and start again.
NH: What are you most excited about as you look ahead to future projects? Are there any genres or styles you’re interested in exploring next that are different than what you’ve done before?
MB: In the future, I imagine examining my life as part of a couple in their seventies. At 27, my age at the end of the memoirs, I felt that life past 70 would be so boring that a flight over the Himalayas would be a grand finale. I envisioned a fiery crash into rock and snow to forestall the possibility of ennui.
I have been driven to write what I want to read so I can explore the questions that compel me. My age now imposes a sense of urgency. My theme will still be memory. My life past 70 has been lived with the gently insidious erasure of my partner’s memory. Alzheimer’s has muddled his sharp mind and quick wit. I want to explore my growing awareness that we are more than our memories and that the years of connection endure.