| Through the pages of her first full-length novel, Running Toward Home (Newest Press, 219 pp.), Betty Jane Hegerat channels her legitimate distress with a social system that tries to forget the unproductive members of its society.
"We have lost the importance of honouring, accepting and caretaking the casualties of life," she says.
Without vilification, Hegerat graciously expresses her heartfelt concern through a story that is, as she succinctly put it, not so much "about social services, but more about us."
The impulse to write began early for Hegerat. Although her working-class family thought being a nurse, teacher, social worker and secretary were the practical career choices for a woman, even at 15 years of age her writing began to get recognition when she was published in The Edmonton Journal.
"I was shy as a younger woman. I did not want a light shining on my work. My timidity held back the writer in me. "
Still, while timid on the outside, inside Hegerat there continued to grow an excitement to tell her stories. Some 30 years later, the 45-year-old, having been an "apprentice to life" through her career as a social worker, parent, partner and gardener, faced the predictable and relentless midlife question: What part of my life have I left unlived? Her answer took her back to school and a creative writing course at Mount Royal College.
Since then, Hegerat has continued to explore her "unsung songs" through more courses, reading scads of prize-winning authors, experiencing writing residency programs and employing mentorship.
"Having someone like icon Robert Kroetsch identify the triads in my first novel was very enriching. And I found myself joining the movement of our Canadian literature identity away from the bleak rural pastoral to the urban realism of today," she says.
Running Toward Home details the life of a 12-year-old autistic boy’s life, lost in the Calgary Zoo. Hegerat skilfully manages to get her point across about the children, foster parents and social workers of Calgary, without going on any soapbox rant. She makes a larger and poignant point around the themes of human loss and human kindness through this novel and her short stories as well.
According to Hegerat, her stories usually begin with a character. However, this time the shape of the story for her full-length novel began with a location – the Calgary Zoo. She personally had spent many years visiting the zoo with her children and shared her love of the tigers and the leopards with her family. Professionally, she had become a social worker, and as she put it, "a necessary intruder in a lot of lives," while respectfully following a mandate to protect. Yet, she admits, "sometimes our protecting felt like brutality, as children are justifiably separated from family to protect them.
"There is a lost child in all of us," she continues. The story of one such lost child, a casualty, Corey, who tries to be invisible, yet is forced to be visible by unstable and unsavoury circumstances, melts frozen feelings the modern day reader might have stored away. With tangible images of the "air night against his skin like a cold hand’ and "the brain full of snow, heaving wet, clinging thoughts," the reader is touched by the boy who is held like an "armful of kindling with matchstick arms and legs."
Enter Wilma, the nurturing foster mother who steps up to care for and protect the child. Of Wilma, Hegerat says, "all mothers, even the ones with broken pieces, still have oversized hearts."
Recently, another of her short stories was selected for publication in 2008, in the anthology A Crack in the Wall. You can also hear her reading as part of the Fictionista reading tour, at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 1 at Pages on Kensington, along with authors Gail Robinson (God of the Plains), Jacqueline Honnet (Limbo) and Rona Altrows (A Run on Hose). |
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