The Juliet Stories (29 page)

When I was nine, my parents moved our family from Bluffton, Ohio, to Managua, Nicaragua. It was 1984 and Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. The American government was supporting — both overtly and covertly — a group of guerrilla fighters known as the Contras in their attack on Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The impoverished Central American country had become a symbol of the Cold War struggle. Neither side wanted to lose the ideological battle, and they fought it out with all-too-real tactics and victims.

My parents strongly disagreed with American involvement in the Contra war, which was, according to eyewitness accounts, a dirty and vicious campaign of fear, torture, and murder waged largely against civilians. And so my parents did what few would do — they got involved.

Sound familiar?

The characters in
The Juliet Stories
take a similar journey into that time and place, and for similar reasons. But
The Juliet Stories
is not a memoir. It is not a memoir because I am not a memoirist; I write fiction. I love the shape of a story, and life does not unfold story-shaped. Life’s a mess, frankly. It’s rough and patchy and a lot of it makes no damn sense at all. Stories make sense. It’s their very purpose, I think.

Writing
The Juliet Stories
was my attempt to make sense of a time and a place that has never really let me go. The beauty of Nicaragua, amidst the horror of violence happening at a remove from our home in Managua, haunted me; I suppose it haunts me still. How could something that was tragic for so many have been the opposite for me — a dreamy childhood experience of escape, of delicious new flavours, of wonder and delight? Writing this book is one way of coming to peace with some of my own contradictions.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction, and the one with the most potential to hurt those closest to me, has been my choice to write and publish fiction anchored by a real, and shared, experience. How to explain?

When I look at this photo of my brother Christian and me at our school in Managua, surrounded by the faces of Nicaraguan children, I don’t see Juliet and Keith. I see Christian and Carrie.

Likewise, when I look at this photo of me and Christian and Clifford and baby Karl happily posed near a beach with our mother seated behind us, I don’t see the fictional Friesens. I see my own family, of course.

But that doesn’t prevent anyone else from seeing what they choose to see.

While researching the time period, I spent many hours scanning through microfilm looking for an article in
USA Today
that my brother Christian and I remembered hearing about it, but no one was sure they’d ever seen it —an article with a photograph of my father, two of my brothers, and me posed on our porch in Managua beneath the headline: “American Sandinistas.”

It wasn’t apocryphal after all: here we are, almost exactly as rumour had it, in January of 1985. You can’t tell from the photo that we’re posed on the porch, but that’s where I remember the photographer asking us to stand. Who knows who wrote the headline. It wasn’t the message my parents were attempting to send — the last thing they wanted was to be identified as American Sandinistas. But there it is. A fragment of history into which we were dropped. The truth is so much more complicated than it appears on first glance.

My early attempts at handling this material did not touch my own history, not with a ten-foot pole. In 2006, I earned a Canada Council grant with a proposal for a Nicaragua-based story that was nothing like this one — and my family and I travelled again to that country. Only my family was now made up of my husband and our three eldest children, then ages five, four, and fifteen months. (My mother and my brother Clifford came along, too.) The smells were the same. The food tasted the same. The wilds of the countryside were the same. Nothing else was, not really.

I returned to Canada with a hum of confidence inside of me. Forget fear. Forget worrying about getting it wrong. Forget the consequences. It had come to me, quietly, while in Nicaragua — a new direction for my project. I felt compelled to return, in writing, to the time and the place and the story that belonged to my childhood. So I began to write
The Juliet Stories
. The further I wrote into it, the further my characters became themselves. The less the story belonged to me and the more it belonged to them, until it wasn’t mine anymore, except in conception. That is the way it is with stories. Stories have a kind of insistence to them; they want to become. Juliet wanted to become.

Did writing out Juliet begin to make sense of my childhood experiences? I’m not sure. Ultimately, I don’t think that was the point. The point was to let go. The point was to leap into the deep dark lake of the imagination. My work is not to collect and collate the remains. It isn’t to hold on forever. It is to go under and reemerge with something new, something made whole in a way that the past can never be.

This book would not exist had my parents not chosen to follow their hearts. For giving their children an unforgettable gift of an experience, I thank Linda King and Arnold Snyder first and foremost.

Though I never set out to write a book about siblings, I’ve come to cherish
The Juliet Stories
for its portrayal of that particular relationship. My brothers and sister are the most talented, creative, interesting people I know, and I hope my love for them shines through in this book.

In 2006, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, I travelled to Nicaragua with my family to do research towards a book that was not
The Juliet Stories
. I want to thank my Spanish teacher Isabel Cisterna for preparing me for that adventure. And I want to thank Sharon Hostetler for hosting us while in Nicaragua and for agreeing to be interviewed; our conversation changed the direction of the book entirely. I came home knowing that I was going to write a story much closer to my own. But it would be nothing like a memoir. Throughout many drafts and versions, the writing of
The Juliet Stories
has been a delicate balancing act, pushing away the real past while seeking truth in invention; I hope I got it right.

I’d been looking forward to writing these acknowledgements for a long time, and now I’m terrified of leaving someone out — because it took a crowd to lift this book. My agent, Hilary McMahon, has been with this project for as long as I have, and she’s seen it through every stage, always with invaluable suggestions and encouragement. I was also helped early on by Barbara Berson.
The New Quarterly
came to my rescue at a particularly low point in the writing process when I was coming to grips with the term “labour of love.” They recommended the stories for an Ontario Arts Council grant, and later published three in their magazine;
enRoute
and
Rhubarb Magazine
also published stories that appear here. I would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for assisting in the development and polishing of this book. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Melanie Little, and the entire team at House of Anansi (you, especially, Sarah MacLachlan). Sarah saw not only what this book was, but what it could become. And Melanie and I clasped hands and took a big brave leap together into the unknown. Damn, but I’m proud of what we made. Thank you.

In addition to the editors and mentors who guided the direction of this book, it could not have been written without help from friends and family, many of whom volunteered their time to look after my children during chaotic and necessary “writing weeks.” I live in the best neighbourhood imaginable. Among others, thanks to Janis, Nathalie, Zoe, Marnie, and Nina. And thanks to loving babysitters Amanda, Silvia, and Mehrnoush.

I saved the best for last. My husband has dreamed every dream with me, and he never, ever gives up hope. If there’s anything a writer needs, it’s someone nearby who kindly and stubbornly refuses to give up hope. Our kids are pretty awesome too. Thank you, Kevin.

November 2011