Canadian - Novelist | -
The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.
Susanna Kearsley
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Even a writer like me, who, in 'The Firebird,' is telling the story of people who've been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals.
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I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn't been changed since the 19th century.
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A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.
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People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.
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Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
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Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.
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In my book 'The Winter Sea,' set north of Aberdeen, I couldn't just ignore the fact some people there - especially the people in the past - would speak the Doric.
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If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.
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When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.
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After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.
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I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall - something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment.
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