“I don’t want to reduce people to victims or villains”: An Interview with Julie Salverson

All Lit Up: Congratulations on your new book, A Necessary Distance. In it, you reflect on your father George Salverson’s legacy – particularly his 1963 trip to document world hunger. How did the experience of exploring his notebooks and writing about his legacy impact your own life and work?

Julie Salverson: I’m going through the pandemic while reading my father’s personal notes as he flies from Japan to Indonesia to India to parts of Africa and South America. I include what is happening in my life as I write, I can’t seem to do things any other way. For example, I’m trapped in lockdown at the same time that I’m “trapped” in my father trying to understand Jakarta, rural Indonesia, his complicated responses to another culture. And I’m “trapped” in the challenge of seeing my father—a white guy in his forties in 1963 who has never left North America—as a man full of ideas and feelings shaped by many things. I have always tried to write about beauty and violence, loss and joy, as intertwined parts of our lives. In my work, usually addressing violence in some way, I don’t want to reduce people to victims or villains, but see their complexity, their agency and their failures. But this time my subject is my father! Can I let him be inspiring and ordinary and, occasionally, appalling? I think having to face his deep humanity has helped me to face my own, both in my life and my work. This is a harder and more important challenge than ever, for me, with the results of the U.S. election and the divisions and polarities around me. How do I not reduce people to victims and villains? Can I put my “money where my mouth is” and look for everyone’s humanity? This sounds a little lofty, I’m laughing writing it, but that has been and is the challenge. And maybe to do it with lightness – my dad had a great sense of humour and fun. He told me that once he walked into a producer’s office in Toronto, “I’d like a few days to develop this idea some more.” The man looked at him for a moment.  “Oh, come on George. You know you just write it.”

ALU: Did you uncover any surprises or moments of insight that shifted how you understood him both as a father and public figure?

JS: When I sent the first draft to Noelle Allen, my publisher, she said to me, “Julie, you don’t have a normal family.” What she meant was that my father, his mother (my grandmother,) and also my mother were part of the shaping of how Canada grew to understand itself in the early days of radio and television. I knew my grandmother Laura was a writer, that she was the first woman to win the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1937 (and won it again in 1939). But I didn’t know how much scholarship there was about her, or that she wrote consistently about women and poverty, about the situation of immigrants—she wrote the first novel in English that was about non-English immigrants, the Icelanders. My dad was one of a handful of early radio dramatists and in the early 1950s became the first television drama editor for CBC. When they did live radio plays, he would pitch an idea Tuesday, write it Wednesday and Thursday, rehearse Friday—full rehearsal with orchestra Saturday, and perform live on Sunday! He never said no to any job, and other notebooks I found of his are full of budgets. Every month he worried about paying the bills. The life of most writers in Canada! But learning of all he wrote—and his tremendous character and ability to be self-critical as it is revealed in the notebooks—has given me an ancestry, roots, I didn’t know I had. It is a wonderful thing to have a legacy of stories—we all do, but we don’t all get to learn about them. I also see how my life as an early activist, decades of theatre with community groups facing political and social problems, comes from concerns I’ve inherited. A fierce determination to make good art (theatre, writing, opera) that witnesses risky stories.

ALU: What were some of the most challenging aspects of writing your family history; how did you navigate the emotional complexity of writing your book?

JS: The most challenging thing was to let myself try to really see the man in the notebooks, beyond my own assumptions of who he was; and, more importantly, to shut out what I thought others in this particular political cultural moment might think. In the book I talk about Canadian essayist and poet Tim Lilburn who writes how, when we walk alone in the woods and encounter a deer, perhaps—probably?—we don’t know how to see the deer. Just see the deer, without all the stories and assumptions we bring. The deerness of the deer, if you like. I had to learn to see my father. And his two companions, the cinematographer Grahame Woods and the director Gene Lawrence.

Here’s something dad writes only a few days into the trip: “Some part of me hates it here, some resentful conservative. It wants to escape, this stupid protected provincial element of me. The rest is exhausted by the tempo of fascinations. It’s a combination of ‘get away at all costs,’ and ‘hurry on, see more.’ What is there in this physical reaction? Is it shock at discovering something really not in the least like Portage Avenue in Winnipeg? This is interesting because I have always sneered at details which cause so-called differences between people, as between Catholics and Baptists. But perhaps, even to me, enough details become powerful enough to become what is the important thing. I love new foods, but now I want unseasoned food. I want a piece of bread from Brown’s dull old bakery. I want a steak with no sauce. Ridiculous.”

Writing the book was sometimes overwhelming emotionally. When I’d come across a note about my brother or myself. When I’d be stunned by something he would say—for example, when he is in Kenya and sees all the white golfers and the Black workers, he thinks the Blacks should take their country back. And he writes, “maybe Algonquin Park should go back to the Algonquin.” It was a kind of dizzying rollercoaster reading the notebooks, and the book is my account of what I think and feel as I turn the pages. It’s two stories—him on the trip, me his daughter discovering him. I went for lots of walks in the woods and spent time with my horse, Henry.

ALU: In addition to writing and teaching, you’re also a resilience/resonance trainer. Can you talk a little about what that is? How does it interplay with your storytelling, if at all?

JS: I work with groups who have common challenges, usually people who help others and don’t have much help themselves—first responders, social workers, psychologists, even veterinarians. I have also worked with the military. People who can’t go home and talk about their work because it is too full of trauma. I use drama to share stories and experiences and look for ways to talk to each other, and to make situations better. This comes from the vocabulary of Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, but I have adapted it together with clown work to playfully investigate moments and build connections between people. Name and build resources. The two most important things about this are 1) the body tells its stories and offers all it knows, and 2) we are in the same room, discovering things through relationship. I don’t do this online. The clown work is very important because it means lightness, play, pleasure. I have never yet met a group who didn’t have stories and didn’t get into it—usually people have never done any drama or theatre. All of my storytelling is informed by this kind of work because it keeps me close to people’s lives, in all their ordinary terror and beauty and adventure and failure and tender absurdity. 

ALU: Is there a question you wish someone would ask you about your book, or your work in general?

JS: “What do you mean by the importance of inheritance?”

I think that in this historical moment all of us are needed to save the planet. That means facing our connections to past wrongs, but also claiming the resources and teachings and above all the stories that can help us move forward. What inheritance can we claim that is generative, not destructive?

My publisher wrote me “For Canadians, it is hard to face the skeletons in our closets.” As a white person I am part of colonialism, and I need to tease out the threads of this, understand the damage I inherit but also the possibilities. I have my father’s documentaries, his dramas and my grandmother’s books and essays about immigrants and justice. I have my mother’s passionate caring. I have Icelandic stories about how to live, about what is alive in trees and rivers and lakes, about independence from colonizers. Tim Lilburn says that many of us with European heritage feel restlessness and rootlessness because of our detachment from Western wisdom traditions that could teach us how to live “undivided from one’s earth.” He says this happened to our ancestors long before they left Europe.

I think we all need to dig, listen, seek out anything in our own traditions—not only blood, that is too essentializing for me—also teachers, stories, and what we have read from the past, including the wandering paths of our ancestors. Look for any glimpse of help that reminds us how to listen and look and be. That is what I did in this encounter with my father and my histories—attempted to shape a story from the pieces, to go forward.

ALU: Lastly, we want to know: what’s on your reading list these days?

JS: Top of the list is Navalny’s Patriot.

Ian Garner’s amazing book about propaganda influencing young people in Russia called Z Generation.

Jason Heroux’s poetry, for his sharp whimsical eye.

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. Startling and challenging.

The novel Still Life by Sarah Winman, for the wonder of being alive.

Joy Kogawa’s shatteringly honest and beautiful memoir, Gently To Nagasaki.

Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: the seductive lure of authoritarianism. Because we have to know.

Ralph Benmergui’s I Thought He Was Dead: a spiritual memoir. For delight.

Karen Maezen Miller’s Paradise in Plain Sight: lessons from a zen garden. My medicine.

The Thursday Murder Club novels. My other medicine.

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Julie Salverson is a nonfiction writer, playwright, editor, scholar and theatre animator. She is a fourth-generation Icelandic Canadian writer: her father, George, wrote early CBC radio and television drama and her grandmother Laura won two Governor General’s Awards (1937, 1939). Julie’s theatre, opera, books and essays embrace the relationship of imagination and foolish witness to risky stories and trauma. She works on atomic culture, community-engaged theatre and the place of the foolish witness in social, political and interpersonal generative relationships. Salverson offers resiliency and peer-support workshops to communities dealing with trauma and has many years of experience teaching and running workshops. Recent publications include When Words Sing: Seven Canadian Libretti (Playwrights Canada Press) and Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn). Plays include Thumbelina and The Haunting of Sophie Scholl. Beginning July 2024, she will be Professor Emerita of Drama at Queen’s University’s DAN School of Drama and Music.