Bill Engleson's Blog, page 5

A tribute to International Women’s Day…

Yesterday, in response to a flash fiction prompt at Microcosms 10  in honour of the National Women’s History Project (an American effort I am sure many other countries could easily embrace,) I did a bit of research on Margaret Chase Smith. I was vaguely aware of Senator Chase Smith. She had taken a run at the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964, losing, of course, to Barry Goldwater.

The little flash fiction piece I submitted basically addressed her failed effort to vote against the successful decision to make HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, a standing, and therefore, permanent committee of the House of Representatives.

While there are some aspects of Senator Smith that cause me concern (she apparently encouraged JFK to nuke Russia) there is much to admire in her career.

Most impressive was her “Declaration of Conscience” speech delivered on June 1, 1950.

Here is an excerpt that I was particularly taken with.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:

            The right to criticize;

            The right to hold unpopular beliefs;

            The right to protest;

            The right of independent thought.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.  Who of us doesn’t?  Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.  Otherwise thought control would have set in.

 

Even with the full speech’s slights towards the Democratic Government of the day, it has, I believe, a message for America and the rest of the world.

But you be the judge.

To conclude this little missive and as we approach March 8th and International Women’s Day, a recent Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 6 out of 10 American Women identified as “Feminists” as did 1 in 3 men.

Room to grow, I figure.

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In the almost incidental line of an author’s less than friendly fire…

An old acquaintance (and Facebook friend,) Larry Gambone, has written a book entitled No Regrets: Counter-culture and Anarchism in Vancouver.

While I had no measurable truck with Anarchism back in the day, except for a union supporters lifelong flirtatious interest in the IWW, and barely any as it is manifests itself these days on my charming little Island of Denman, I do consider myself, as friends once described themselves some years back, a veteran of the counter-culture.

Larry’s book is an engrossingly personal, cultural and political memoir. It scans decades and is an entertaining, occasionally jargon-heavy polemic.

Our lives rarely intersected. We do and did share a few of the same friends and contemporaries.

The times we lived through affected us in appreciably different ways.

We briefly lived together in a dynamic Co-op house, the Campus Residence Cooperative Association, an institution (actually two side by side Edwardian homes) still in existence today and planning its 50th Anniversary for August, 2017. This, above all, enhances the nostalgic tone of the book for me.

I make a brief appearance in No Regrets. It is a walk-on role. On page 87. It is not a flattering depiction. Well, it’s not devastating but it was unexpected. As a writer, I spend a reasonable amount of time diving into the deep pool of my past, snorkeling around, recalling people and incidents who might serve me with writerly inspiration. I mask, I reinvent, and I vary characteristics. I protect.

This go-around, I am on the receiving end. Naked, with nary a nom de plume, nor a fig leaf, to cover me.

Here is Larry’s brief reference to me in Chapter 13 (New West Coop.)

“Although a coop in name it was in some ways a collection of individuals. Many people were there because it was cheap. A minority were so eccentric this was the only place they could live with other people. In a smaller group, their rough edges would be intolerable, but they could find a tolerant space among forty people. One such eccentric was Bill Engleson. Everyone found Bill arrogant, cynical and full of himself, yet he lived there for ten years.”

That’s it. The sum of me at twenty.

I suppose it feels a bit like time travel. Larry’s facts are not faultless as far as the Co-op goes but I have to assume that how he sketched me is how he observed me.

Living communally for almost fifteen years, a small factual error easily forgiven, was one of the most significant experiences of my life. While Larry only skims the raw surface of a complex social experiment in group living that continues to this day, I have many fond memories of those days, with the various waves of people who came and went all too briefly and the few who stayed for longer periods. I could easily have lived there forever.

Living communally with a large disparate group, folks from many backgrounds, a range of ages and experiences, was, however, a constant challenge. Problem solving was a daily occurrence. The population was fluid. It was a time of transience and transition.

To keep our communal ship afloat we held weekly Sunday night meetings. Attendance was de rigueur although we had no capacity for enforcement.

I learned how to share, how to care, how to negotiate, how to be a more complete human being.

Still, I suppose, for a time, I was arrogant. I know I was cynical. I think I still am, albeit in a more elderly, curmudgeonly way.

Full of myself? I was nineteen when I first made contact with the coop living. I was on the Simon Fraser Student’s Council and strongly supported the sort of housing being considered by the founders of the CRCA. We helped bring Howard Adelman out from Toronto to assist with planning for coop student housing as there was hardly any student housing available. At around the same time, the students of SFU were rejecting the notion of Fraternities which had made some forays on campus.

Sadly, or perhaps not, we never achieved the size of coop housing project some were envisioning.

I first moved into the CRCA in September, 1967 because I fervently, arrogantly, eccentrically believed in group living. Yes it was economical but more than that it was an experimental model that would serve many of us very well then and for as long as we allowed it to.

Eventually other forces came into play. Life has a habit of doing that. I moved on.

Nevertheless, many of the people I lived with then remain friends to this day. Others whom I have lost track of remain with me in memory, in spirit and always close to my heart.

All that aside, I have just read that Larry has been nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness. I sincerely congratulate him for his nomination and his interesting retrospective.

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Thoughts on a Monday morning…

T he first thing I heard on the news this morning was that a school and two medical facilities, including a MSF (Doctors without Borders) Hospital, had been bombed in Maarat al-Numan in Northern Syria. The dead are being counted.

The bombs were Russian bombs, they say. Or Assad’s bombs, perhaps. From Russia. Bombs do what they will, almost as if they have a mind of their own. There is that element of chance about bombs. They are as targeted and as indiscriminate at hate.

It may now be a minority view in Canada but I am thankful that Canadian Warplanes are being called back. The price, unfortunately, is more engagement, coupled with humanitarian aid. Life! Death! They do form a tapestry, one with the other.

So I wrote a haiku for another flash site, Ronovan Writes,  to acknowledge the death from the sky.

A poet’s meaningless gesture.

Later, I wrote a 99 word tale for a new flash site, The Carrot Ranch. I am channeling my inner westerner, creating a small saga of the old west 99 words at a time. For those brief few words in time, I had travelled back to a past I know little about, imaginary moments feted by my lifelong cinematic excursions.

This morning I was also pleasantly surprized to see that one of my two entries this week to another flash site, Microcosms, was selected a winner.

So my day has been a collage of small creative moments, bracketed by news of another set of bombing horrors and, somewhat later, a Donald Trump press conference.

It too inspired a haiku.

Oh, to be The Trump,

Donalding forth on the Stump,

a gaseous grump.

Trump’s trek as a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination had been excruciatingly delightful for me. Though still early in the selection process, the outcome far from determined, the end result will be a political extravaganza of mammoth proportion. Epic!

Before it is over, I am sure I will feel the urge to compose at least one or two other Trump haiku’s.

 

 

 

Walking for a while in the shoes of a Social Worker…

Life moves on, usually with a pace that remains unchanged. Individually, we may sense a thrust that suggests we are out of control. The mind races; the heart beats wildly; the seasons seem rushed.

I create my own panic these days. Aside from the slowly, inevitable winding down of my body and brain, I lived a measured life. Any stress is of my own making.

Gary Mason’s column in the Friday, January 15th 2016 Globe and Mail, While most of us sleep, social workers are tackling real tragedy, in real time easily took me back to an earlier time when I worked, I served as a Child Protection Social Worker for the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

I think he captures well the dark ending drive of nighttime and daytime demands, especially placement issues, which befall social workers and the youngsters in their charge.

In my own novel on child protection, Like a Child to Home, I touch frequently on the unending complexity of placement. At one point, in Chapter 14, I reference one ward who is placed back in the same hotel she absconded from 2 years earlier.

“She was moderately compliant now that her irritating companion had skedaddled. I was ill at ease about driving anywhere with her. I explained my reservations to the cops. It was a slow night. They said they would drive her. A half hour later, we rendezvoused at the same hotel she had hit the road from two years prior. One of the child care workers who had been looking after her then was still around, and we had requested her. After a few informational exchanges, I left Angie in her keeper’s hands, thanked the cops for above-and-beyond work, and went home. “

My novel was ripped from the experiences I had in a career that primarily spanned the years 1978-2002. The extract above references an incident in the mid to late 1980’s. Placing that particular youth in a hotel with child care support, while not standard operating procedure, was a sensible decision.

I like what Gary Mason has to say. I think his observations reflect the joint report just released by the Ministry and the Children’s Representative. And when he says “Rarely do we attempt to understand the often complex underlying factors that lead to some of the difficult decisions that social workers and others have to make in incredibly trying conditions,” I would hope people pay heed.

There is room for much criticism of MCFD. But it needs to be informed criticism. This requires that MCFD be more forthcoming, not about private information, but about the issues. We’ll see if there is a defrosting of responses to future tragedies.

“Oranges and Sunshine…”

A few weeks ago I watched a very powerful film, Oranges and Sunshine. Based on the memoir of the same name, it tells the haunting tale of British Social Worker, Margaret Humphreys and her efforts to reunite children in the Legal Care of the British State who were shipped, unescorted to Australia, principally in the post WW2 years up to and including 1970.

I am now savouring, in the painfully delicious way one can enjoy a terrible expose, the book.

Canada has played her part in this forced mass migration of Children. The website, The British Home Children & Child Migrants in Canada, begins with this declaration

“ From the late 1860s right up to 1948, over 100,000 children of all ages were emigrated right across Canada to be used as indentured farm workers and domestics. Believed by Canadians to be orphans, only two percent truly were. These children were sent to Canada by over 50 organizations including the well-known and still working charities: Barnardo’s, The Salvation Army and Quarrier’s, to name a few.”

As I continue to learn about the events portrayed my Margaret Humphreys, I will also remain patriotically aware of Canada’s complicity.

How we are today defines how history will judge us.

 

 

An exquisite moment as a writer…

I write each and every day.

Lately I have found myself writing reams of flash fiction for various Flash Fiction sites, brief stories which vary in length from 100 words to just slightly over 500.

Additionally, I am about a month away from completing an exercise to write one poem daily about war. I call the project A Year in the Life of War. Each poem, usually written shortly after I get up in the morning, is a visceral response to the horrors of the world.

My largest, most intense project currently is creating the prequel, Drawn Towards the Sun, to my one published novel, Like a Child to Home.

Two other projects involve a compilation of two streams of essays on life in Ruraltania. One is out in the universe being beta rad. The other awaits more attention.

It is flash fiction that most frequently provides instant feedback.

One site, Micro Bookends, today granted me winner status. My contribution involved construction of a brief story of between 90-110 words beginning with the word “perfect” and ending with the word “pitch.” There was a photo prompt of a young guitar player to be incorporated. Anyway, here again is the link to the site, to the other winners and  to my entry, Cortigiana di Lume .

Thanks

 

Another death in care…A letter to the editor

T he state  care of children of all ages is a difficult and convoluted task. The care of older youth has a built in best before date. Time speeds along. It often gets overwhelming for both the youth and those involved in shaping and supporting youth  in those final months.

Here is a letter sent late last night to the Vancouver Sun in response to one of the stories that attempts to address the life and times of Alex Gervais, who died recently while in care.

“Dear Editor,

Again, another tragedy has befallen the Ministry of Children and Family Development. While the key offence appears to be the placement of a youth, indeed an unknown number of youths, in motels and hotels and the like,
I wonder if the issue is not something much more insidiously systemic.

For a child welfare system to work effectively, and I doubt many do, what is most required are sufficient staff to handle the workload.

While a significant part of the workload is servicing the needs of both kids in care and families and youth in crisis, another critical function is resource recruitment.

I would surmise that Alex Gervais had been through a long string of placements.

At eighteen years of age, he likely had been on Independent Living for a period of time.

Unless it has changed considerably from my time as a youth social worker,
Independent Living is a hugely underfunded program where youth who have been deemed to capable of managing some aspects of life on their own.

Some reach that stage by burning resources bridges.

Others truly are mature enough to live on their own (or more frequently in some shared arrangement.)

No matter how mature they are, their options for housing are limited.
Cash is meagre. If they do find some cheap housing, it may not last.

If they are exhibiting antisocial behaviour, their tenancy will be brief; youth in care move often once on their own.

Although youth on Independent Living can fare well, they usually need a vibrant support system, teachers, child-care-workers, an engaged social worker, family still involved.

Once a youth has tasted some of the more obvious benefits of Independent Living, freedom from oversight, an unrestricted existence, it is difficult for them to transition  back into a Group Home when something goes wrong.

Most foster homes would shy away from temporarily housing an 18 year old unless he was a known and safe quantity.

At this stage, there simply aren’t any viable options.

The social worker and the supervisor are forced to make
an unpalatable decision from very few alternatives.

They know they work in a system that is under-resourced.

I know nothing about Alex Gervais’s short life.

Whether his death was a horrible accident or an equally terrible, desperate act of a lonely youth, I doubt it was the hotel placement alone that killed him; rather it was a system that constantly needs more of everything.

More workers; more tolerance; more answers to often unanswerable and complex situations that, nevertheless, also need a carefully constructed triage each and every day.

Even with all of that there is often never quite enough of what is needed.

With care and much regret,

Bill Engleson”

A world of lost children…

Sometimes, I sit, immobilized. The story, the massive telling of the Syrian migration, has caught the world, almost by surprize. But should there be any surprize about the residual fallout from wars? Children have wandering the earth for eons. The current waterfall of migrants in Europe has been compared to the aftermath which befell Europe in 1945. The European Union is in disarray. The razor-wire obscenity constructed by Hungary between that regime and Serbia augers disaster.

The Canadian Government seems to me to have erected a razor-wire bureaucratic fence to manage the risk of  terrorists penetrating  the goodwill, the empathy of Canadians. We may have to wait for a successful change in Government to reclaim that sense many of us have that we can do so much more.

In the meantime, the spectre of Donald Trump, his meandering and malicious mind, actually succeeding to the White House, hopefully will create a discussion about our place in the world, our values, our ethical duty to ascend beyond the small-minded, morally bankrupt set of ramblings he and our reactionary current Government represents.

 

The Murder of a Vermont Social Worker…

Even as the child welfare system in British Columbia yet again comes under a significant scrutiny, and even as the unimpressive quality of social work practice in a specific area been skewered and exposed by the exquisitely reasoned and measured critique of the Provincial Supreme Court and even as the Provincial Government again (as it so often has before) failed to accept that the system is broken, or, at the very least, incredibly bent, another jurisdiction, also undergoing critical examination, has suffered an inexcusable loss. The murder of Vermont Social Worker, Lara Sopel, is a worst case scenario, not often experienced, but frequently considered, by many child protection social workers.

Child Protection work is fraught with high emotion, powerful decision points, difficult ramifications no matter the outcome, and, as so evident in the murder of Lara Sopel, heavy with risk, not only for the children and others intimately involved, but also for those charged with the complex mandate of Child Welfare and the protection of children.

As weak as it is, I offer my heartfelt condolences to the family, the friends, the colleagues and the clients Ms. Sopel.

 

There is no law against distracted writing…yet!

It is less than a week to the start of my favorite annual literary adventure, the Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival. This year, in addition to being one of the local writers presenting at one of two local writers reading events (sort of a delightful repeating trek for me and one for which I am ever grateful,) I will be taking a 4 hour a day 5 day long writing workshop guided by author Steven Price. Each of those taking this course will have been doing quite a bit of prep, reading each other`s 20 page or thereabouts submissions, noting legibly (I strive for legible penmanship but it is not a strong suit) our writerly thoughts, appreciating so much excellent writing.

On another front, my enthusiasm for flash fiction continues. Two of my submissions this week received kind and appreciative note. In both of these brief set pieces, I entered the thinking of two quite unique characters; one, Floyd Thursby, who suffered an early off-screen demise in The Maltese Falcon, and the other, Nameless Cat, a feline narrator and witness to a deteriorating domestic tableau.

Though writing, in my experience, is a necessarily isolated (or isolating) activity, I have found two communities of writers to engage with. One is a large family of flash fiction writers, a worldwide and worldly bunch on the number of sites I have joined. The other is on Denman; 20 or more local writers who meet monthly, test drive our material, share feedback and encouragement.

This second group has been helmed and shepherded of late by JP McLean. JP`s The Gift Legacy series is an amazing accomplishment; entertaining, exciting and energizing. The fourth book in the series, Penance, has just been released and it is at the top of my summer reading list.

To maintain a healthy retired life balance, my writing endeavours share time with community volunteering. My key activity these days is serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Hornby & Denman Community Health Care Society. This wonderful non-profit provides an array of home care and children and family supports on the twin Islands of Hornby and Denman. It also reached deeply into sections of the Comox Valley and provides the leadership to the United Way funded Better at Home program.

Writers, though they inhabit worlds inside their heads, also have to live in the here and now. This I strive to do.