Elaine Alec on Memoir Honest Writing is Vivid Writing by Jacqueline Carmichael

Elaine Alec’s past was fodder for a stunning memoir.

But the only thing standing between Alec and a hit book was what she told herself about her own past.

When she first started to write her story over a decade ago, Alec couldn’t get past the first seventy-five pages. Dusting off the project, she was stunned to find she’d made herself both hero and victim in her own story—a telling where her woes were all everyone else’s fault.

Seeing her own story, with all its flaws, was the real start of a book so truthful and gripping it’s hard to put down.

Honest writing is vivid writing, Alec said in an October interview. “The number one thing I had to do was to become self-aware…One of the things I stick to is that you cannot change or heal things you do not acknowledge. If we don’t bring it up or talk about it, there’s no way we can address it or change it,” she said.

Elaine Alec doesn’t see the truth as brutal, though. She learned—the hard way—to be compassionate with herself, as she would be compassionate with others.

With heritage from the Syilx and Secwepemc First Nations, she hails from the Penticton Indian Band. She is the direct descendant of hereditary chiefs Pelkamulaxw and Soorimpt; her Indigenous name, telxnitkw, translates into “Standing by Water.”

She outlines four necessary conditions to cultivating safe spaces for people: understanding yourself, working from a love-based place, patience, and discipline.

“The more honest you are, the more vulnerable you are, the more you give other people permission. We all go through things, and we have to be gentle with ourselves,” Alec said. Knowing she would bring an editor on board to help finesse the work, Alec started back at square one—an abbreviated timeline. “I thought about those big moments in my life I remember all the time, those pivotal moments in my life…what was that time about? What was the theme of that part of my life?”

I thought about pivotal moments in my life…what was that time about? What was the theme of that part of my life?

Starting points: Love. Alcoholism. The legacy of the residential school experience.

“I didn’t write from beginning to end. I wrote whatever I was feeling at the time,” she said.

And when Alec had what she called an “Aha! moment,” she wrote about that.

“I talk about a time before I understood what it was to be a woman,” she said, recalling years before she understood her role as a woman, when she dropped out of school in Grade 9 to get into business, being mentored by older white men, becoming part of holding up the “old boys’ club.” Before she understood the parts played in society by matriarchy, patriarchy. Misogyny.

“I was the ‘good Indian woman’. I never said anything, I never challenged anything, I kept quiet…I just did the work,” she said.

Eventually, Alec became a political advisor.

Polished. Direct. Empowered. She became an expert in Indigenous community planning, health advocacy and creating safe spaces utilizing Indigenous approaches and ceremony.

But it wasn’t until she experienced really being a victim—when she was sexually assaulted at 36—that she truly understood her own back story, her PTSD, and that of so many others.

She saw a trauma therapist.

“I had to do a lot of work through that to take care of myself,” she said.

The resulting book, Calling My Spirit Back, “links an extremely personal examination of lived experience to a much broader overview of serious national sociological concerns, accompanied by tangible steps to approach them.” Her website is www.elainealec.com.

Jacqueline Carmichael is online at https://www.facebook.com/ jacquelinellarson