Seniors’ Writing Workshop participants share their stories

Craig Bakay | Nov 20, 2019

Author Jean Rae Baxter introduced participants from the fall sessions of Telling Your Story: the Seniors’ Writing Workshop Series Tuesday afternoon at St. Andrews Church Hall in Sharbot Lake.

The series is part of an ongoing program put on by the Kingston Frontenac Public Library that consisted of five sessions as well as a polishing session in which the aspiring writers wrote memoirs.

“A memoir is not the story of a life,” said instructor Jean Rae Baxter, who has written several historical fiction pieces for young readers as well as murder mysteries. “It is a story from a life.

“It’s usually a significant story from that life and can be anywhere from four to 4,000 pages. It’s usually around 400 pages.”

Tuesday’s stories weren’t that long but were, in Baxter’s words “something you yourself have lived.”

First up was Bhawani Nadarajah, who is originally from Sri Lanka but has lived in many places as her father worked for the UN.

She told her story of going to school in Somalia with her siblings for six years in the ’70s.

“My brother was very protective of his little sisters,” she said. “If anybody tried to bully us, they usually went home with a bloody nose.”

Mary de Bassecourt wrote about growing up on a farm in Upstate New York during the ’50s and ’60s with several entertaining anecdotes including how she would disappear in tears to her room whenever the family sold a puppy. Baxter praised her story for being not only a personal recollection but also an account of days gone by and how a way of life is probably gone forever.

Peter de Bassecourt’s story was also entertaining. It was about being one of the younger guys who was allowed to join the older 16- and 17-year-olds on a trip to Mount Loupgarou north of Montreal. That in itself wasn’t all that special but the fact that they went in a beat-up old pickup truck with no brakes was quite humourous.

The final story was probably the most poignant.

Karen Bryson was a flight attendant in 2001 when the 9/11 attacks happened.

She began by talking about how airport security was quite lax when she began in the business, even to the point of managing to sneak about the Concorde while it was parked on the tarmac in Barbados.

Things changed though and her account of what it was like being in the air when the attacks on the World Trade Centre happened and what happened when her crew was forced to land in Winnipeg for three days might make a good movie of the week.