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Joanne Vannicola

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Writing Walking through Glass has been a long journey. It began as a novel but it has since become clear that it needs to be a memoir. The DD mentorship helped me to know what I really needed to write. David Layton was a fantastic, incredibly insightful mentor. A friend of mine who is also a writer, Diane Terrana, was also instrumental in reading and rereading and giving notes, as well as a beloved friend, Sharon Simone.

Starting out, I just had a vision of writing a book with the issues I explore in Walking through Glass, and didn’t know how I was going to get to the finished product. David was my first mentor and the first person to read more than one draft of my work. I needed someone who could ask me deep questions and get me to go further into the relationships and the heart of the story. I was very open to comment and criticism. I think that really helps, especially as a first time writer. David gave me great notes and I trusted his notes and dove into the rewrites, staying on schedule because I really wanted to make the most of the time frame of the mentorship. It’s not easy to get someone in the world who will willingly read two or three drafts and continue to give feedback. So, for new mentees, go for it. Even if you do an entire rewrite, save your previous drafts and be willing to challenge yourself on the new draft while you have access to a mentor. Be committed to the process, willing to make changes and open to rewrites or even entire genre shifts if the story demands it. Having a caring mentor to work with without having to pay is a great and rare gift. Thank you DD!

A profile series of DD’s emerging writers sharing their experiences with writing and their participation in the DD mentorship program. Title of work: Walking through Glass
Genre: Memoir
Mentor: David Layton

I just finished my rewrite of the now memoir. I will submit it to a few agents and a junior editor and keep my fingers crossed. If that doesn’t work out, then I will keep pushing until I find someone who believes in the writing and the purpose and is willing to support it.

Finding a title that worked was very hard, but Walking through Glass just seemed right. There are layers to it. It was a good metaphor for strength and survival, and . . . I was silly enough to do it when I was a child!

The beginning section about my childhood is proving to be the hardest to write even now, because I am trying not to bore people with the perspective of the child, and yet try to expose the reality of my childhood so that by the time my memoir reaches the teenage years and adult years the story and choices, the root, make sense. The prologue, which in a way “explains” the mother, might not remain in the memoir. I thought it might be a good way to provide history without going into great detail and would set up the idea of generations of experience . . . but the jury is still out on that.

Carly, the central character in Walking, is me. I believe all humans have choices. When we are grown, we can choose to love, work on ourselves, and treat each other with dignity, or we can choose to repeat what we were taught by our parents. This principle can be seen at play all over the world, in relationships, in families where there might be violence or abuse, or in countries and systems of oppression or war, sexism, homophobia, racism, etc. We can choose the opposite of hate and violence, and it starts with ourselves and in our own families.

The voice in Walking is a personification of the negative aspect of Carly’s/my psyche which internalized the message to think negatively of myself. Homophobia is everywhere, and gay marriage does not erase deep-seated homophobic ideology of a culture. It’s not surprising that most young people have a negative internal voice. Mine was trained to believe that being female meant looking a certain way and that heterosexuality was “normal” and being LGBT meant being mostly invisible. It is changing, but slowly. We need only look to countries where being gay is still criminalized, people are tortured, murdered and imprisoned simply for existing. It’s horrific. But the voice also acted as an internal protector. It is connected to the messaging about body image and body weight, but you will have to read the book to understand it!

I do feel personally changed by having written Walking. At first I was afraid to write the story and chose the novel form as a way to distance and protect myself, but I am not afraid anymore and have come to terms with the fact that it truly is a memoir. I have made significant changes to remove the fictional sections.

I am hoping to reach a wide range of readers. I want them to come away with a deeper understanding of certain relationships, the politic of art, of the body and relationships, LGBT issues and family violence. There are multiple stories and still many taboos in our culture. I hope people in film, women, LGBT communities, educators, therapists, young adults, and anyone, really, relate or take away something new or see themselves reflected. It’s a unique book and I hope people from all walks will be willing to read it! If it inspires dialogue or a shift in thinking, then that’s good!

Next, I am working on a book about the lives of LGBT talent. I am compiling lists of LGBT performers to interview about what it’s been like to succeed, or try to, as LGBT actors or comedians, how the culture has responded, what it’s been like to be performers or political figures in a time of homophobia, and what defines success. It’s not an easy culture especially if you don’t “pass” as heterosexual or choose not to. I feel like we haven’t really heard enough of these voices. There are pioneer performers that few people know about, dating back to the Stonewall years in the ’60s. And I’m also playing a small part in a movie about Stonewall by Roland Emmerich that is shooting in Montreal this summer, which feels very right and in sync with the rest of my life.

Walking through Glass

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2010

I never knew what condition my mother would be in when I arrived at the hospital, if she would be lucid, sleeping, in an altered state, or maybe even gone, dead.

While snow melted and everything was slowly coming to life, my mother lay dying. I finished my cigarette outside, squatted on the ground in the grass. I cried and smoked and touched the grass all at once as if it were the fur of a sleeping cat. There were permanent dark circles set under my green eyes. My fingertips were yellow with nicotine where I chewed the skin from nervousness. Even the sky seemed scattered and uncertain as if the Spring sun might disappear and a storm might crash in.

“Are you okay? ” asked a woman who approached me in a gray suit, everything perfect and in place, stockings, heels, and a pearly face with red bold lips. I squinted, shielded my eyes from the light like a vampire as I looked up.

“My mother is dying,” I said with the sound of apology in my voice, still touching the earth with my other hand. I had forgotten that people could see me, and this stranger standing above me reminded me of human connection. I needed to tell someone in that moment and the woman in the gray suit would do.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly and walked away.

I stood up from my patch of soil, put my cigarette out with my shoe, crossed the street, went through the revolving doors and back up to my mother’s room. On the way up in the elevator I put a piece of peppermint gum into my mouth, fished my shades out of my pocket and put them on. It took forever to get to the seventeenth floor, an elevator crammed with patients in gowns and bandages holding their IV poles, or visiting guests and doctors. We all knew someone with cancer in this hospital. Some of us were here for those in the beginning stages of the disease with family members or friends newly diagnosed, in treatment or having surgery. Then there were people like me, the disheveled and overtired, the ones who looked like we hadn’t left the hospital in days, on constant duty, not wanting to miss the end, scared to go to the bathroom or steal away for a smoke, just in case.

The palliative care ward was quiet. My sisters were outside our mother’s room talking in whispers. They traveled from Montreal and Vancouver to say their goodbyes to our mother who had slipped in and out of consciousness over the last three days, almost in a coma, her eyes glassy, hollow, her body bruised from multiple needle entries from IV fluids, morphine, saline.

The rooms of the dying were small and sterile with no color, just bodies, wires, oxygen masks, gray speckles in the floor. I entered and sat beside my mother’s bed, where I had covered the walls with images of the natural planet, perhaps it was to remind me of my own life and to give my mother something beautiful to look at in her own quiet moments alone. Maybe it would calm her or maybe she could imagine herself in the images themselves, in Africa with animals, or by the edge of a cliff, or winged, able to see from a bird’s eye view.

Sometimes mother and I would stare into each other’s eyes as if we were thinking or feeling the same things, looking for a way to speak to each other, the pauses filled with a lifetime of stories desperate to come out, but now, nothing. She had been in a coma all night and morning. Her eyes were almost transparent, her mind far. I wanted to shake her, to scream at her even, but I knew she was dying and I just wanted it to end, couldn’t bear to see her vulnerable, in fact I hated it, hated looking into those glassy eyes.

My mother’s eyes in earlier times were full of expression, always on the go, rushing to get to lessons, dropping dad off at work, or the looks she gave us girls when she was mad. One look from my mother could silence me. In those days mother had long curly hair, round beautiful green eyes and a sharp tongue. When she was mad, all she had to do was look at you and you would know to shut it, and sometimes she might eke out a tiny phrase like, “If you even dare,” or one word, eyes like darts: “Don’t.”

But now, now her eyes were dull, heavily lidded from the months of morphine, chemotherapy and radiation treatment, now she was bald and her power nearly gone.

Emerging Author of the Month: Joanne Vannicola

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Tell us about yourself.

I’ve had a long career as a film actor in Canada. I started working as a child and had a professional career at a young age. I’ve won an Emmy, been nominated for a Genie, a Gemini and an ACTRA award. I’ve traveled to a number of places and have weathered the storm of being a female actor in a sexist industry, still weather it! I’ve also been an activist since I was a child and the merging of creativity with social justice issues is part of who I am. I founded a small nonprofit a while back called Youth Out Loud, and the goal was to raise awareness about child rights and violence issues, to provide creative outlet for teenagers and young adults as well through writing poetry and making art. Now I’m focusing on my writing because I’ve always wanted to write. I started out writing plays about adolescent experiences, around issues of race, gender, sexuality or being LGBT. Writing this first novel has been a challenge, but one where I get to use my politics and expose the harsh realities of growing up in a difficult environment, with a protagonist who must cope with a lot as a child and find her way in the world.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

It’s from my novel, Walking Through Glass. It’s near the opening of the book where the protagonist Carly Bello is about to visit with her mother who is in the hospital. The novel moves in time from the 70s, 80s, and 90s up to 2010 where Carly’s mother is dying, and Carly hasn’t really seen her mother for a number of years until she is diagnosed with cancer. With the clock ticking, Carly is desperate to learn some truths, but you will have to get the book some day to learn what those are!

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

When I was a child and participated in an activist march during the first International Year of the Child in 1978, and saw the power of words in speech, in chants and in the energy of people coming together. At the same time, I was performing in plays and television as an actor, and there was freedom in being able to feel, speak and make things up, even if it wasn’t reflected in everyday life, even if life was hard at home or at school, I understood there was a way of living in alternate realities or of exposing truth through words, theatre or activism. I felt the power of words at a young age.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

I would say books that had some type of social, emotional or political impact, books like A Fine Balance, Tipping the Velvet, Don’t, or inspiring people like Nelson Mandela, Sarah Waters, Lawrence Hill, Dorothy Allison, or current books like Room, poets like Sylvia Plath and activist writers and thinkers, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison. Oh . . . Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit—books that pushed the envelope in their time, or made people think beyond their own reflections about difference, gender, the human condition.

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

Hopefully a good one. A writer that changes a person’s perspective or opens minds or provides moments of clarity, something that sticks, even if only in a single sentence, or books that inspire young adults. I wouldn’t mind writing some books that also push the envelope, that dig deep into social issues that matter through character, other worlds, or just this one!

How and when do you find time to write?

I make time to write when I am moved to write . . . more like a fever. I don’t always write, but when I do it’s as if something must come out, and I can sit down and write for hours and hours or days and days on end . . . then won’t sit down again for weeks, unless of course there is a deadline. But because I am also an actor and activist, my schedule always changes as does my available time or writing time.

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