The first story I was ever told came from my grandfather, Giovanni-Batista (John the Baptist) Favro, who came from the Italian Alps. The story involved a vat of polenta being cooked outdoors and a group of alpini whooping it up and enjoying the polenta (which they found even more delicious than usual) until they got to the bottom of the pot and discovered that a snake had fallen out of a tree and drowned in the polenta –– yewww!
The snake-at-the-bottom-of-the-pot story pretty much sums up the literary tradition that formed me: a combination of dark humour, hidden evil (watch out for snakes!) and fatalism (don’t go around thinking you’re having fun until you see what’s on the bottom of the pot, my friend). If you can work food into the story, all the better.
Storytelling was considered a practical skill. In an area where Hannibal had once hauled his elephants through the mountain passes, my grandfather and his brothers would find themselves snowed in with their herds and need a way to keep themselves entertained for weeks on end without going mad. The Favros were intensely practical and skilled with their hands –– as indicated by the name, which means ‘fabricator’, in the sense of a blacksmith or artisan, but could as easily apply to fabricating tales. On my mother’s side –- Lombardian lowlanders from the Po valley –– stories were also necessary but they required a punch line. Being able to make one another laugh was highly valued and if you were very, very good at it, you were rewarded with the sight of someone from the quiet, practical Favro side laughing until hot liquids shot out of their nose.
I started telling my own stories by about age four, eventually turning to writing when I knew how. I grew up in a small vineyard on what was then the outskirts of St. Catharines –– Grantham Township –– near a lock on the Welland Canal. We were used to seeing the superstructures of ocean going ships pass over the horizon, appearing to cut through farmers’ fields. In the sixties and seventies, the neighbourhood was almost totally immigrant, Italians, Ukrainians and Polish families, as well as Black families descended from arrivals on the Underground Railroad. Living so close to the border we tended to look south to the States rather than north to the rest of Canada –– everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who’d been smuggled over the Niagara River. It was a neighbourhood of biker gangs that met at flower shops, floating crap games and Catholic street festivals. Most of my relatives lived in the States –– New York City, New Jersey, Buffalo –– because my mother and her parents had been deported from Ellis Island, banished to the wilds of Canada (the Niagara Peninsula being as close to the U.S. as you could get without actually being inside it).
I’d always planned to be a writer –– the practical choice since it was my only skill. I went to university in Hamilton, graduating into the stagflation period of the early eighties (no jobs). One day I discovered that the house where I was renting a flat was being demolished –– by the demolition men showing up at my door. No one had thought to evict me so I quickly packed my stuff in some boxes while they stood around with sledgehammers snickering at the New Yorker cartoons pasted to the walls. Within minutes I was homeless and jobless in Hamilton. Again, there was that dead snake at the bottom of the polenta pot.
Around this time I spent a day with the poet Milton Acorn. He’d come to McMaster for an arts festival for which I had volunteered. My job was to get him from venue to venue, which was harder than it sounds. He would occasionally wander off or start declaiming poetry to medical students at the hospital caf, but he had moments of lucidity when he talked to me about being a writer. I remember sitting on a curb with him, traffic whizzing by on Main Street West, talking to him about needing a place to live, and a job, and not wanting to go home; I understood that back in Toronto, he was living over a notorious bar near Spadina and College. And this was a guy I’d read in school, a genius poet, and he was living over a bar? It gave me a notion of what a writer’s life might be like. I can’t remember exactly what he told me except that it came down to not having a choice: if you were a writer, you were a writer, and that was that.
Thanks to Tut the Boy King, I ended up in Toronto selling chocolate death masks at the AGO Gift Shop and living in a house on Robert Street full of cockroaches and grad students, most involved with cancer research (the students, not the roaches). I was eventually hired by the Writers’ Union of Canada as an assistant to the Executive Director, a job that involved spending a lot of time taking meeting notes at local Hungarian restaurants. June Callwood was the chair of the Union at that time and her reputation as a great woman was proven by the fact that she was unfailingly generous to me, the youngest of the office staff.
Still, despite her efforts to make me feel appreciated, the job totally freaked me out. At the tender age of 23 I found myself giving GO train directions to Margaret Laurence and getting drinks for Pierre Berton and finding a place for Timothy Findlay to catch a few winks. Coming from St. Catharines where the local celebrities were usually grape farmers or that year’s Peach Queen or polka band leaders, hobnobbing with writers was pretty strong stuff for me –– plus I noticed that a lot of them just didn’t seem all that happy. How could you be a published writer and not be happy? This just didn’t make sense to me. Frankly, it scared me: I started to think that I was too “Favro-ish” to be an artist and that I needed something a bit more practical that would allow to me to write without feeling on the knife edge of insecurity at all times. I couldn’t live with my scientist friends forever.
I fell into advertising by accident –– in the eighties, it seemed like a lot of people ended up as copywriters by sitting on a bar stool and saying something witty in front of the right person. (“Say kid, that’s pretty funny –– you think you could write me up a snappy headline?”) And so, I found myself finally paid to write, as well as to sit around trading bon mots with art directors and wearing a lot of black. Advertising isn’t a truly creative industry, despite the hype, but being a Favro I appreciated the steady work. It also fed my story machine: if there’s one snake-in-the-polenta-pot industry, it’s advertising. I spent a few years as an agency writer, then turned to freelancing to keep more time open for my own writing. Then I fell quite seriously in love.
He was an artist, an abstract expressionist-experimental filmmaker from Montreal, this big gorgeous muscular blonde Viking who could quote from Russian novels and Monty Python, lived in lofts when they were still illegal and knew where all the booze cans were. He also knew how to cook. We started collaborating on experimental films together. When I brought him home to meet the folks he was so intrigued by the old neighbourhood that I started seeing my life through his eyes, which seemed to suggest my stories were worth telling. I married him, had two sons, spent a few years in Northern Ontario, did some humour stuff for CBC Radio, eventually returned to Toronto and kept writing –– for literary mags, for commercial mags, for online pubs, for agency clients.
I’ve won or been short listed for a few contests (including three short listed pieces in CBC Literary Awards, possibly making me the Jeff Bridges of that competition). I’ve also managed to write a novel about the old ‘hood (which made the rounds of publishers –– close but no cigar) and I’m in the process of completing another.
My husband and I are collaborating again, now on graphic stories, the first of which we’ve posted online at www.coxwellstation.ca. And so it goes. I’m curious to see what happens next.
