Writing is in my blood. Both my parents were writers. My father was a radio dramatist in Canada in the 1940s, a biographer, historian and playwright. My mother was a food writer, columnist, broadcaster and launched the first kitchen equipment shop in Montreal in the 1970s. They were good people. My mother had boldness and gregariousness and taught me to ‘make your life special’. I knew I wanted to be a writer.
Straight out of university, I pitched a story on homeless women across Canada and to my surprise booked a national feature magazine article. I had zero experience. My editor told me he would pay me on delivery (he did) and call me every week to encourage me (he did). He would also pay my phone bills across Canada (he did). He was a mensch – the best person any young writer could have worked with at the start of their career. I delivered the story. The story was published. The magazine received a firestorm of attention. There was an outcry. There are no homeless women … and if there were, we would take them into our homes. It was my first experience receiving angry backlash from people who did not want the truth. It was par for the course, said seasoned journalists. But I wasn’t prepared for it. I was twenty-one years of age.
In my fifties, I embarked on a true crime story. It came into my life through non-ordinary communication – information dropped into my consciousness, waking me from my sleep. At first, I thought I was dreaming. It unfolded over a number of days. Intrigued, I followed it. It took over a decade to complete the story. When I began sending queries, I was met with harassment – troubling signs I might want to let this go. I had met with lots of obstacles, things that did not add up, things that concerned me at the time, but I persevered. When I consulted a trusted advisor, I learned that everything that did not add up did not add up for a reason, I had been played. It was ‘the blinding flash of the obvious’. The whole thing was a set-up. Intended to make me appear crazy. But who had done this? and why? That became my next inquiry – and it did not lead to a happy destination or conclusion. I discovered as much as I needed to discover.
So I took a step back from writing. And shifted gears.
~ Christiane Schull