gwynnehunt

I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I didn’t want to go.  But the journey presented itself. You died. I had to cross the desert to come to the end of my grief.

There is something to be said for past times when widow’s wore black for at least a year. They isolated to grieve. These days we are planning the funeral while keeping all the responsibility balls in the air. There is a lot to deal with when your husband dies even after the service and memorial.

Nobody gets to lay on the fainting couch and have people around you take care of your needs.  This is probably why so many women die within two to five years after their husband dies. The emotional, mental and physical toll breaks even the strongest woman.

It’s his birthday today. He would have been seventy-seven. He has been gone fifteen months.  We were together over fifty-five years,  It was not enough to say goodbye. I had to go through the desert to find out who I was and to make sense of it all.

It has been like a punishment for living when he is gone.  Why do I get to survive? I was not a great wife. I tried or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know anymore.  I had to review the memories, the pictures and letters and journals.  It wasn’t good enough I wrote a book about our lives.  Most of it hid the truth in an effort to be funny or to keep the secrets I burdened myself with.

When I wrote Unlocking the Tin Box I thought I was writing a well investigated story. The words ran out of my head and onto the page. In a huge rush to wrap it up . . .this messy life of mine. You cant wrap it up if you are not being honest. I thought I was but this past year has shown me I had many secrets I was even keeping from myself.

That is what is so beautiful about keeping journals.  Perhaps I should have read the journals before I wrote the book. It seems I filtered out all the really bad things that happened and left them squished into thirty years of frustration and pain filled pages.

I did tell lots of stories unflattering to both my husband and  myself. I knew I was keeping family secrets and I always will.  What I didn’t know was that to keep going and to survive I told lies to myself. I changed my reality so I could continue to live a happy life.

It was hard to read the truth, face what I should have always faced. I had a few family members who betrayed me including my husband.  In order to continue living the chaos and move forward I wrote my tears in my journal and then closed the book.  It seems the truth was always there but if I saw it then I guess it would have been too much for me to carry on and live a passionate and impactful life.

I did a lot of good with my advocacy work for women and children who have been abused.  I ran workshops to help women deal with sexual abuse and violence. I knew part of it was my own healing plan.

Reading my journals reminded me of things I chose to forget to survive.  I was so busy saving others I let myself drown in anger. I put up with abuse from a lot of people. I was running as fast as I could go but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I see that now.

It took me about 5 months to read the journals. Then I threw them all away. It is done. I accept now everything that happened to me.  I believe I can live out my life in a much happier space.There is no past. There is not a lot of future. Being present is all I have.

The journey through the desert also included 3 months of going through old photo albums and reliving every damn great and lovely moment of my life. I put the pictures in new albums. Fresh start, fresh pages.

Being a thorough researcher I could not stop with journals and photographs. I’ve gone through all my plays that I wrote, compiling posters and scripts and even putting some of the props on display in the basement. An old phone booth my husband made for Breadlines, a play about street people. I also have  six, six foot tall cut outs standing in the basement waiting for an encore.

Posters are everywhere  advertising shows and Fringe Festivals we did and the many years we did The Vagina Monologues.  We even took TVM and my play Missing into two female prisons. There are many newspaper articles.

Of course there are my creepy dolls I adopted over the years. Never had dolls given to me as a child except once and it turned out the man who gave it to me was my real DNA father.I found dolls in alleyways, and old cupboards and later as a collector at thrift stores. I didn’t play with them.  I just kept them, gave them a home. I never felt like I belonged and my dolls  remind me of that loneliness I had growing up.

I went through all my books that I have cherished and put them on bookshelves and out of boxes.  I went through all my collections and sorted them out. I’ve collected a lot of things like rocks and shells and crystals.

I’ve done a major Spring cleaning in the winter of my life. I’ve said goodbye to a lot of people. Some have died. Some I just cannot carry on the charade with anymore. I feel fresh, alive and ready for a new beginning towards the end.

I don’t have regrets. I’m tired of grieving. I’ve been doing it all my life. Grieving my stolen childhood, lost loves and decisions and so many people I love have gone. At my age most of my family and friends have died. I didn’t expect that.

I’m far from done.  I am choosing though, to move on and let the hard stuff go.

Sometimes survival takes over and writers do not write. This is the saddest of times. I have been writing since I can remember. I stayed home from school for 3 weeks when I was 14 and wrote my first book. I would answer the phone when the school called and pretend to be my mom. It was easy. Mom was ‘sick’ as we called it. Every once in a while she took to her bed with a bottle of Johnny Walker and did not get up for a few weeks. That drunk lasted long enough for me to scribble my novel in my room. Dad was working as a telephone con man then, and was gone most of the time. He was selling subscriptions to magazine for the blind. I always thought that was funny. It was a fake magazine that was never delivered.

Other times when I did not write came suddenly when life got too hard. That happened a lot. Yet somehow I have survived and published four magazines, worked for newspapers, written thirty plays and five books. I have to write. Like breathing you can only hold your breath for so long. My thoughts need to tumble onto the pages or my head will explode. Since my husband of 54 years had a stroke and went into a home, I have struggled to survive financially, emotionally and physically. And then my sister died. They were my two biggest fans.

When I put my last ten years of poems together in Coddiwomple I thought I was back. It has been a year since I published that book. I read from it at a public reading once. I have gone to three writer events and tried to sell my books. Sold copies of all of them except for my last chapbook. It is the forgotten child. I do not believe anyone I know has read it, or shown interest in it . . .except for my daughter. I always have to remind myself that long after I am gone my words will carry on . . .my books (some of them) are in the Library of Congress, I hear from people once in the odd while that one of my books was important to them. rampage: the pathology of an epidemic

This book took me six years of research on missing and murdered women and children in Canada. Brave women I know walked across Canada carrying the names I collected based on the work of Mary Billy to Parliament Hill. Where they went then, I do not know. In the paper shredder perhaps? My daughter painted the cover and glued the names from the book . . .over 4,000 of them in the strands of the woman’s hair. She won the People’s Choice Award from Amnesty International at a Vancouver event. The women from walkforjustice are still walking and fighting to end the violence. I only have four books left. Lost files, publishers . . .I do not have an online copy. But I know it is an important work. Someday, someone will find a copy and care. Like I did when I found Mary Billy’s Femicide List on the dusty shelves of SFU.

Even though I am upset the publisher for Unlocking the Tin Box did a lousy editing job, I am happy with the book. Maybe a bit too raw, a bit too much exposure but that is me. A short while before I published I found out the man who I thought was my dad was not my DNA dad. The whole book really was about who he was and how it affected my life. It sent me on another journey and a lot of research to write Through My Lens. It is my favourite book; part truth, part of it made up. That is how I live my life.

My poetry books bruises & bad haircuts and Coddiwomple are full of surprises, even to me. I wonder sometimes who she was . . . the poet. Did she really suffer that much pain? The Adventures of Bob & Boo is a self published little book written about my grandson and I, illustrated by my six grandkids. One of the few books family actually read. That is the hard part knowing people you love have not read your work and they pretend they did. Worse then the ones who did read your words and disputed them, hated them. People who love tend to hurt you more then strangers who have no personal attachment to your words.

The point is, I guess . . .is that writers need to write. Nothing should stop you. Even now, going through the worst of times with the loss of my sister and seeing my husband lose our precious memories, I write. I write everyday in a journal. I write poems. I write angry letters. There is another book I know. When it will escape the confines of my rigid mind I do not know. The beauty of being a writer is that you are never too old. I encourage everyone to write their story. Regardless of social media hype, people still read. Hard cover books are not so popular but they still exist. Buy a book. Go to the Library. Celebrate the writers. It is not an easy job.

Kristen Hunt rated it it was amazing

A peek back in time from the raucous 30’s all the way to the mid-80’s “Through My Lens” offers a look into the life of 4 people who became intertwined during the great depression. We get a glimpse into the world of drug dealing, petty crime, and robbery and learn about the con man way of life.

“Through My Lens” is a love story of sorts, but also a powerful story of family, strife, adventure and nostalgia. Why not take a walk with Gwynne down to 358 Powell Street and meet Bohunk Marie, Gunvor, Ron 

Viki rated it really liked it.

Gwynne’s perspective on her family’s secrets was well presented and though I’ve been off reading from some time, I found I couldn’t put this one down. It’s an easy read although uncomfortable in spots with it’s raw revelations of those secrets. A definite must for your book shelf …moreflagLike  · comment · see review

C.J.rated it it was amazing
Aug 28, 2021

THROUGH MY LENS by Gwynne Hunt

Review by Elma Schemenauer

When Gwynne Hunt was 69, she discovered that her biological father wasn’t Ronald Robinson, as she had always thought. He was Harold Larsen. In her biographical book THROUGH MY LENS, she tells the stories of her stepfather, her father, her mother—Gunvor Berglund—and many people in their lives.

The book spans the years from the 1920s into the early 1980s, and takes place in parts of Ontario and Western Canada, especially British Columbia. It explores aspects of the Great Depression, military service, poverty, unstable families, alcoholism, and crimes ranging from shoplifting to forgery to drug dealing and scams of various kinds.

The three parents Hunt portrays in the book all came from church backgrounds, but rejected religious influences as they grew up. Though they often behaved in ways that were not admirable, honest, or morally upright, their story held my attention from beginning to end.

Hunt is a strong writer with good insights into personality and character. Examples:

-“Ron and Marie never settled into a happily married life. The two of them never settled into anything.”

-“She did not feel like the girl who grew up on the farm anymore, with morals and love in her heart.”

-“He turned every life experience into something grander than it was.”

-“He knew he had not lived up to his potential as a man, a husband, or a father.”

I’m interested in history so I especially appreciate Hunt’s historical references and insights. Examples:

-“During World War I he was a pigeon keeper, helping the war effort with training homing pigeons.”

-Regarding the Great Depression: “They were not all that sad about going to jail; three squares a day.”

-Regarding after-effects of military service: “He still had nightmares from the war. Harold never really knew how to reach out for help, not for his drinking and not for his trauma suffered during World War II.”

-“When they all started smoking, it was portrayed as glamorous and harmless.”

Sometimes I wish the author had written in a more chronological way, for example, when recounting the events of Gunvor’s earlier years. Occasionally I wasn’t sure what was happening, for example, regarding some scams the characters perpetrated. On the whole though, I enjoyed THROUGH MY LENS and recommend it. The newspaper clippings reproduced at the end are a nice addition.

Elma (Martens) Schemenauer is the author of 70-plus books published in Canada and the United States. One is YESTERCANADA: HISTORICAL TALES OF MYSTERY AND ADVENTURE. Another is the 1940s-era Saskatchewan Mennonite novel CONSIDER THE SUNFLOWERS. Both are published by Borealis Press of Ottawa. Her website is https://elmams.wixsite.com/elma .