Q & A with Nellie P. Strowbridge

1. What is your favourite book(s)?

The Bible! The Ten Commandments give us the blueprint for treating others the way we want to be treated. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini also had a profound effect on me. It helped me recognize this fundamental truth: People who back away from other people’s sorrows, often do so to avoid the emotional pain that empathy can bring. I’ve enjoyed books from the time I was a child and tried to wrap my mind around the sentences in my father’s books. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was my favourite when I was a teenager. I’ve collected most of Pearl S. Buck’s books. I recently read Easton’s Gold by Paul Butler and enjoyed it thoroughly.

2. What are you reading now?

Other people’s minds! Joke aside, I always keep several books on my night table. If I wake early thinking about a situation I can’t do anything about, I distract my mind by picking up whichever book I’m in the mood for. I’m at the beginning of Donna Morrissey’s Sylvanus Now. I know it will be a treat. I’ve also gone back to rereading Mind Your Eyes, a collection of poetry by Marian Frances White. Her superb book provides a beautiful landscape for my own memories. I also have Tom Dawe’s new book (illustrated by C. Anne Macleod) Moocher in the Lun: A Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Alphabet, which I’m going to enjoy reciting with my daughter Janalee’s’ kidlings.

3. What was your first piece in print?

The Family Herald, published in Montreal, had a “Just for Girls Page.” It asked readers for the best answers to a girl’s problem of how to share a room with one’s sister. (Perhaps, this is what triggered me to become Newfoundland’s first advice columnist) My answer was chosen as one of the best solutions. It was published when I was 14. My older sister and I got along most times. One time though, when she was playing the piano and I bugged her to come and help me do the dishes she got mad with me and tore up a box of Sunday School papers I had stored under our bed. Each paper contained a chapter in the story of Zonya, a Jewish girl hiding out in a cave. I later bought the book, Zonya, read it, loaned it, and lost it.

4. When do you like to write (time of day, day of the week)? Where do you do your writing (location)?

I can write any time of the day all day and all week long, if I don’t rein myself in. Writing is hard work, but it’s something I love to do.

I don’t always write at my work station. My laptop gives me more mobility—though patio writing presents a challenge when mosquitoes try to get blood from my keys. I never take the laptop into the bathtub. My words would fizzle in the Algemarin foam. Otherwise, I write anywhere.

5. What other jobs have you had besides being a writer?

Writing has always been an ongoing preoccupation. In between, I have been a school teacher, an Accounts Payable Supervisor, a VON Worker, and a receptionist. My parents never encouraged me to write, and my mother often tells me now, “Don’t do any more writing. Sure, it’s too hard on your head.”

6. What do you like to do in your spare time?

What spare time? I have to make time to enjoy a coffee with Clarence, my husband, sitting on our patio, or going for a run in the woods with him. I enjoy cooking for my family and recreating stories for my grandkidlings from my life and from their great-grandparents’ lives. I like to garden, bird watch, and bike ride—sometimes with the grandkidlings.

7. What kind of music do you listen to?

Inspirational, Country and Western, Instrumental and, of course, my son Michael’s incredible guitar playing and Darryl’s (my son-in-law) drums. Darryl plays the drums in a way that doesn’t dent my eardrums. Rangatang (loud and furious music) is not for me.

8. What is your favourite food?

Steak, a baked potato, and salad, with a small glass of wine.

9. What city/country would you like to visit and why?

Ireland! My heart is fiercely attached to this beloved land of my forebears. Somewhere inside me there lives a genetic memory of the place. I want to revisit it. That, despite the fact that I was accosted in Dublin by an Irishman, hit a rock wall with my head and didn’t dent it at all (the locals laughingly christened it “Nellie’s Wall”). I got bum-slapped in Cobh by a stranger walking his dog, and hit on by a young waiter in Westport who had the audacity to try and handle more than my food. I would also like to visit Israel, the land that gave birth to Christianity and my way of thinking.

10. Make a question of your own and then answer it.

Why do you write?

Writing becomes me! It’s great for my well-being. Despite my mother’ admonition, my brain gets a regular workout. My pen is never far from my thoughts and my night table. Consequently, I’ve left ink on bed sheets—as well as on sheets of paper.

I write, too, because writing gives me the ability to take my readers to a place they may never have been inside their own thoughts; I can inspire them to fulfill their own dreams while wide awake. Writers and readers share a common love: words.

I have to go. There’s another dozen books to finish, a few articles and . . .