It was my job in journalism or fiction to defeat the power structure.” And that was my obsession in journalism as well as when I first started writing. It could be welfare or fundamentalism or the mental health care system. There’s probably a theme through my work about the individual versus the system, whatever the system is. “I’ve always been obsessed with my own wonky activism, you know, social justice. That freedom allowed her to write her first book, Summer of My Amazing Luck, the story of Lucy van Alstyne, a single mom on the dole. I thought I could do a better job showing that world through the freedom of fiction.” “I was working on a documentary about mothers on welfare and I had been a mother on welfare. After graduating, Miriam ended up at CBC in Winnipeg where she made radio documentaries. And he was right.”īut she didn’t know it at the time.
“He said, what I really should do is go back to my ramshackle home in Winnipeg and just write fiction. She remembers one professor, Ian Wiseman, who told her she could be a journalist but, as she recalls it, he then challenged her. It was a worthy thing to do – noble, good work – That is what journalism is and that is what writing fiction is.” Talking to other people and finding out what it means to be human was encouraged. I had great encouragement from my teachers.
“When I was a kid I didn’t know how I was going to do that … studying journalism was the impetus for me to realize that I did want to tell stories. “All of my life I’d been looking for my form of expression, that necessity of self expression, of creating art and telling stories,” she says. In a release from the Writer’s Trust, Miriam is described as a writer who “has the unique ability to generate humour alongside heartache, enlivening life’s dark moments with her quick offhand wit.”įor Miriam, it is all about telling stories. There are five other novels and a list of other awards, including the Writers’ Trust Fellowship, that would make most writers swoon. Today, Miriam is a celebrated author and winner of, among other awards, the Governor General’s Award The Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction CBC’s Canada Reads – and those are just for her novel, A Complicated Kindness. Who she is today is astonishingly different. It is Miriam Toews talking about who she was when she arrived at King’s to study journalism in 1990. That could so easily be the beginning of a novel. “I was a poor, young Mennonite woman from the Prairies with little children. Miriam Toews Novelist Bachelor of Journalism, 1991 Doctor of Civil Law, 2010 I’ve always been obsessed with my own wonky activism.
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