Pleased to meet you

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/09/2023 (1094 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Writing for a new audience feels kind of like re-entering the dating pool after two decades of monogamy.

It’s exciting and nerve-wracking; you want to be at your best, but not coy or falling-all-over-yourself eager, either.

I’ve worked in newspapers for all of my career, starting out as a production staffer and feature writer for the then-fledgling Hill Times in Ottawa, then as a wet-behind-the-ears reporter for The Telegram in St. John’s before eventually becoming its managing editor — the first woman to do so, I don’t mind saying.

I realized early on the power of the press by resurrecting a St. John’s shopkeeper from the dead. I had been interviewing (unbeknownst to me) the widow of said shopkeeper, who referred to her husband so warmly and so often and in the present tense, that I made a passing reference to him in the article, not realizing he had passed away several months before.

It was an important lesson about not making assumptions.

Apart from my editing career, I’ve been writing a column for 20 years. The subjects that interest me vary, from love and loneliness to politics and abuses of power, to gardening, travel and gastronomy.

I’ve written more columns than I can count on the spectacularly misguided Muskrat Falls hydroelectric megaproject in Newfoundland and Labrador. In one piece, I asked a series of trivia questions about the over-budget, behind-schedule monstrosity, and the first letter of all the correct answers spelled out the word “boondoggle.”

I love words and language, both for their capacity for creativity and their ability to affect change.

I’d like to think that some of the things I’ve written have had an effect, in some small way.

I’ve written a lot about my mother’s dementia and how cruelly diminishing it is. I’ve written about the plight of girls and women in Afghanistan. About the incivility and downright hate that have infected Canadian politics. About why there should be a landfill search for the Indigenous women who are missing and presumed murdered in Winnipeg.

Mostly what I write about is injustice in some form or other — from the war in Ukraine to the inequities of hunger and homelessness that affect people across this country.

This summer, I’ve had the pleasure of doing some copyediting and proofreading for the Free Press. It’s a great way to get to know a city I haven’t been to yet but have always had an interest in, right back to when I was a 16-year-old kid in high school, nearly swooning in the front row of a Burton Cummings concert. (If you think “nearly swooning” is over the top, I’ll put it to you this way: when at one point he winked at me as he sang and played his white baby grand piano, I burst into tears. If I’d been around for Beatlemania, guaranteed I would have been one of those pale girls whose near-lifeless bodies had to be carried out of the stadium by bobbies.)

That same year, I begged my mother to buy exercise books and binders with Cummings’ photo on them that I found in a bin at Woolworth’s. I scrounged up my own money to purchase his new solo album, Sweet, Sweet, on cassette.

I’ve always been intrigued by the mystique of your famous intersection, Portage and Main. And I am a lifelong fan of Neepawa’s Margaret Laurence. A first-edition hardcover copy of The Prophet’s Camel Bell is among my prized possessions. It came to me with a reply letter enclosed from Laurence (who was then living in England) to a reader in Ottawa, who had written the author to ask a question about the Somali language.

So, through the pages of the Free Press I’ve been learning about your city and province. I’ve learned that you have a thriving arts culture, that you’re willing to line up for good takeout, that you sometimes dance on rooftops, and that the word “nip” doesn’t only refer to the part of a woman’s anatomy that can become exposed during a wardrobe malfunction.

They say a newspaper is meeting its mandate when it reflects a community back to itself. I would go a step further and say that a very good newspaper does not just reflect community, it creates one, too.

I can tell from reading the opinions section of the Free Press that this is a strong, invested and thoughtful community.

I feel privileged to have a space here and I hope before too long you will see me as part of this community, too. I look forward to hearing from you, whether you agree or disagree with what I might have to say.

As Margaret Laurence wrote in her letter, “This kind of direct contact with a reader means a great deal to me.”

Thanks for reading.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.