It’s a milestone no parent wants to face: the anniversary of a child’s death. However, that’s exactly what Susan Webb will be doing on May 27, one year after her daughter, Amber Bowerman, was murdered by Joshua Lall, before he went on to kill his wife, two of his three young daughters, and finally himself.
On May 23, just days before the first anniversary of her death, Amber’s memory will be marked publicly at the 2009 Alberta Literary Awards. The Amber Bowerman Memorial Travel Writing Award, with its $500 cash prize, will be given to one of three finalists, all 30 years or under, who have written essays on how travelling outside of North America changed their lives.
Ann Campbell, a travel writer who lives in Edmonton, came up with the idea of offering an award in Amber’s name and donated money to make the award possible.
“I always wanted to give back in some way to writing, and I didn’t find the right way to do so until now,” says Campbell.
Though she didn’t know Amber personally, she says they share common bonds. “We had this thing in common with travel, she was a Calgarian, a writer, a traveller, and it dawned on me that this would be perfect for a young writer,” says Campbell.
“Amber did love to travel. She’d been to so many places,” says Webb, listing Oman, Pakistan and China as a few of the countries Bowerman visited in her 30 years. “On her to-do list was to travel to China again and write a novel.”
“She wanted to travel with her younger brother, Jonny. They were both learning Chinese on their computers and would call each other and practise over the phone,” recalls Webb.
The Amber Bowerman Memorial Travel Writing Award is not the first award given in her name. Since her death, Bowerman’s only brother established a scholarship at Lord Beaverbrook, where they both attended high school and where Amber worked for the school paper.
Webb says she hopes the awards in memory of her daughter will spark peoples’ curiosity and prompt them to visit the Amber Bowerman Memorial Foundation website (amberbowerman.ca) and learn more. The foundation offers post-secondary scholarships in arts and writing, but isn’t responsible for this award.
“You don’t think about why the money is being given to you, but maybe there’s a tragedy behind it. Even if one more person knows about her and what we lost,” Webb adds, her voice trailing off.
The three writers whose works have been shortlisted for the prize certainly know about Amber. Like her, they are early in their careers and have a passion for travel.
Calgarian Leah Bailly, who is currently attending grad school in Las Vegas, is nominated for her essay about being mugged in Kenya. “It’s my first foray into non-fiction,” says Bailly, a playwright currently working on a play based in a sleazy Las Vegas casino. “Now, I’m completely converted. I think it’s my new genre,” she laughs.
Titled “Long Views Across Nothing,” Bailly’s essay describes the mugging and, in the course of the essay, tries to imagine what it’s like to be one of the street kids doing the mugging.
“There are a lot of ethical questions about writing from another culture’s point of view. I was playing with that,” Bailly explains. Her essay concludes that it’s almost dangerous to write from another culture’s perspective.
Bailly, who has also spent months in India, South America, Russia and Asia, will return to Africa, specifically to Liberia and Sierra Leone, next January to work on a project for Journalists for Human Rights. Before that, however, one of her plays, Some Reckless Abandon, will appear at Calgary’s Fringe Festival in August.
Erica Wiens’s essay “The Composition of a Memory,” was inspired by three photos from her trip to Colombia. “Ever since I went there, I’ve been trying to put something down about it that wasn’t trite,” says Wiens. “I didn’t want to write an, ‘I went to Colombia, now we must all go out and save the world’ piece.” Finally, she decided to rely on the old rule-of-thumb: “Show, don’t tell.”
“There are photos I’ve hung up in my office from my trip. I picked three and told stories around their circumstances,” explains Wiens. One of those photos is of a man and his son walking along a road in the slums of Colombia.
“A lot of us had never seen anything like this [the slum] before. But, the scene ahead of the boy and the man walking looked so perfectly everyday,” she says.
Wiens, who just finished her third year in Grant MacEwan College’s professional writing program, also intends to keep travelling. She’s going to Asia for six months this fall, with stops in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.
Appropriately, the third nominee, Andrew Derksen, is on the road, in Costa Rica. A trip to the Caribbean last fall inspired his essay, “El Verbo Esperar.”
“To me, the trip was the catalyst to a reflection about human experience and different cultural approaches to life and catastrophe,” he says.
Derksen, who studied English and philosophy at the University of Alberta, has been writing since he was 12. He hopes to continue with travel literature, but also aspires to publish children’s books and fantasy one day.
“I think good travel writing is able to communicate both the unique aspect of an individual's journey, and the universal aspect that arises from that experience,” he says.
As for Webb, she'll be at the awards ceremony to see which of these young writers will walk away with the prize honouring her daughter, whose own career was cut short by her untimely death.
"I have to remember that Amber wouldn’t want us to be sad all the time,” she says.
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