Dorothy Speak
Dorothy Speak was born in Seaforth near Lake Huron and grew up in the small southern Ontario city of Woodstock. She has taught art history and creative writing, and was Curator of Inuit Art at the Glenbow Museum in the eighties. She has published two acclaimed short story collections, The Counsel of the Moon in 1990 and Object of Your Love in 1996, which was also published in the U.S. and China. Her work has been anthologized in the Journey Prize Anthology (1994) and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women (1997).
Though she has lived in Ottawa for twenth-five years, “Southern Ontario has been and I think always will be my spiritual landscape. I feel very rooted there, emotionally and esthetically.” Street names and landmarks of Woodstock show up in The Wife Tree, though the setting is reminiscent of any small city in southwestern Ontario — a region that has spawned novelists such as Bonnie Burnard, Joan Barfoot and Alice Munro.
Speak got some of her inspiration for The Wife Tree from the lives of her parents. Her mother was born in Huron County, her father in Saskatchewan. Like the Hazzards, her parents met when her mother visited a sister in the West during the Second World War. Her father remained attached to the prairies, “but at the time, it was a dust bowl and there were hardships and poverty and motherlessness…. He, like William, was a man whose origins frustrated his ambitions.” Her mother eventually went blind from macular degeneration, and after the death of Speak’s father, she became increasingly lonely and isolated. “I was curious about how a woman of her generation could deal with [widowhood],” Speak says.
While circumstances within the book were inspired by her own family, “My mother never became a rebellious woman who rejected her children or who got to the point where she didn’t need them… She never rebelled against the church.” The seven Speak children moved away from home, but “We were a very devoted family and in my parents’ declining years, we were always there.”
In a novel rich in the details of early 20th-century Ontario, Speak presents a vivid picture of a generation of women. “I wanted to look at someone in her senior years…looking back on her life and seeing she had made mistakes, she had missed opportunities, she had allowed things to happen that she regretted and how she could…come to terms with these and become a new person and redirect her destiny.” The discoveries she made when she took this germ of an idea and explored it in fiction are what make writing exciting for Speak.
This is familiar territory for Speak, who explored similar moments in Object of Your Love, her most recent book of short stories, which was called “psychologically astute” by Ottawa X Press. The nine stories tell of the disappointments and reconciliations of women whose lives have fallen out from under them, who are abandoned by daughters or husbands, who must rise from seemingly devastating situations. Salvation comes through small acts of defiance and through slow self-recovery. The Wife Tree grew from the seed of a story in that collection called “Stroke.”
The U.S. publication Kirkus Reviews observed of Object of Your Love several of her female characters are “women who sin more than they’re sinned against.” One character avenges herself on her family who exploit and ignore her only to realize that, by failing to set a loving example, she has sealed her own daughter’s fate. Failed love and the ways in which, as humans, we cannot always provide fully for our loved ones, is a recurring theme. But Speak does not condemn her characters for their failures. In The Wife Tree, Morgan recalls how she forced William to marry her, to stay with her; she considers how imperfectly she loved Morris, recalls times when her children might have felt a need for more parental love. She remembers how her own mother was trapped and warped by the demands of her many children. In the end, she comes to a tough but liberating realization that she might have to abandon the needs of the family to allow her self to thrive.
Speak’s short stories received high praise from such writers as Timothy Findley and Margaret Atwood. The pieces were well received by literary magazines and periodicals before being published in book form. W.P. Kinsella said, “Dorothy Speak can run with the best storytellers: Alice Munro, Ellen Gilchrist, Alice Adams, Joyce Carol Oates…” Although Speak has been writing for twenty years, she knew that crafting a novel would present a number of new challenges structurally. “I had to see the world in a different way, I had to look at life as a continuum,” she explains. “With a novel, I had to consciously construct.” In her short stories, she had thought of her material as “a lake, a pool. Here, I had to turn that material into a river and make it flow.” This meant being able to discover her characters every day she sat down to write.
“The more life experiences you have, the more deeply you write. I couldn’t have written this book ten years ago. You understand life so much better and there are insights you didn’t see when you were twenty,” she admits. With sharp insights about sex, love, marriage and aging, The Wife Tree is a compelling novel full of wit and wisdom.
