The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

lit erary Jancis Andrews: Real-Life Stories by Ann Macklem Although she didn't begin writing until she was in her mid-forties. West Vancouver author Jancis Andrews' "literary" roots can be traced back to her childhood. When asked about her unusual first name, Jancis explains--with mild embarrassment--that she was named after a character in a romance novel. When she finally screwed up the courage to read the book, Jancis discovered that her fictional namesake wasn't much of a role model, having drowned herself and her baby after becoming pregnant out of wedlock! The real-life Jancis grew up in a community where women faced similar constraints, yet she is anything but pitiable and submissive. She was raised in Northumberland, a small mining town in England where "the men beat the women, the women beat the kids, and the kids beat each other." She ran away for the first time at age 14, almost looking forward to the punishment of being sent to reform school because it could only be better than life at home. A t 18, still running, Jancis joined the Women's Royal Naval Service and was posted to Malta. She met her husband there, and they emigrated to Canada in 1966, spending five years in Toronto before settling in West Vancouver. She was a storyteller as a child (she remembers telling stories to her siblings and cousins down in the coal hole, and writing lots of "dreadful little poems that rhymed at the end"), but it wasn't until she was well into her forties that she discovered--much to her surprise, given that any sense of self-worth had been beaten out of her as a child--that she had real talent. She was registered in an adult education creative writing class at Capilano College with Pierre Coupey, and as part of her course requirements had to write a poem. Coupey was so impressed with it that he published it in The Capilano Review. He encouraged her to continue writing, which she did. She also enrolled in university, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from U . B . C . at age 53! Jancis kept on writing, and kept on getting published. Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and she won the Vancouver Sun's first Great Canadian Poetry Contest in 1991 (with "Grandmothers in Chinatown," reprinted below.) She graduated to short stories, and her collection, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair, first published in 1992, has recently undergone a second printing. Jancis has also tried her hand at film scripts and playwriting, and is currently working on her first novel, tentatively tided Getting There. About her writing process. Jancis maintains that it is not deliberate: "What happens is that the characters take over, (as they always have done all my life, but I assumed this is how everybody was.) 1 hear these voices talking in my head, or a character starts a conversation and then goes away and I find their conversation continuing in my head, taking various turns. Every now and then 1 find myself getting angry or laughing at the way the conversation was going in my head." Getting the voices down on paper is essential to her well-being--they can sometimes be rather intrusive, waking her up in the middle of the night, demanding attention. She continues, "I don't think about these things before I write. M y problem is getting it all down before it how she is. She chooses the latter, and in a symbolic act of acceptance, she goes home to create a "perfect dish." Jancis has done a lot of work in the women's community, particularly around pornography and the sexual abuse of women and children (she was an active member of the North Shore Women's Centre for 14 years). She is currently part of an umbrella group that is lobbying to have rape declared a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Despite such support of women's causes, Jancis resists the feminist label. Theory and politics didn't help her shed her anger and pain over her upbringing, religious faith did. A s she says, it was "always a source of comfort to me--I may have had a hideous father on earth but I do have a just father in heaven." Feisty and determined, Jancis is a true uid Mrs. Smith Have One of Their Little Chat Many of her stories and poems speak of the feminine experience. In her poem " M r . and Mrs. Smith Have One of Their Little Chats," the 'she' character says to the 'he' character: "If I am the eye of a needle,/ then you are its coarse/twist dragging me down^if I am the eye of a needle/then you are its barb/shafting mcjif I am the eye of a needle./then you are its steel/ hemming me in..." One of her more autobiographical stories, "Bloodlines," recounts how a young woman refuses to be cowed by her abusive father, how he as a result comes to be intimidated by her, and how she eventually uses that power to protect her sister and her mother from his rage. 1 Grandmothers in Chinatown They seem boneless, these women, twigs of black pants and dragon-embroidered jacket, shuffling between family and franchise on a culture still alien after 50 years. Their jet eyes reveal nothing except an onyx patience: apology-- or intuition maybe-for living. Stung by my Wasp eye, they twitch their gaze to oriental jungles of shark fins, birds' nests, clasping grandchildren: small sprigs of cherry blossom, by the hand. What do they have to teach me, the loudmouthed, white-skinned giantess from British Properties crashing the barrier of Chinatown's East Pender Street? What do I know of dragons, however silken, that stalk their sleep? How does one ente shaped like twigs even though those twigs be cherry blossom ? O A West Vancouver writer d i s c o v e r s her talent at age 50. Nor does Jancis force any false optimism onto her stories. In "Bloodlines," her mother and sister actually turn against her for having intervened. In " A Thing of Beauty," Myra Dillon, the teenaged protagonist, falls from grace when she becomes pregnant by an older man. Already an outcast of sorts because of her incredible beauty--to be seen next to Myra meant not being seen, and visibility is crucial to young women who are seeking out boyfriends and husbands-tobe!--she becomes even more so. Her parents beat her, they keep her and her swelling belly hidden, out of sight. Once she gives birth, they summon the adoption officer, but she--defiantly, incredibly-- refuses to give the child up. (Perhaps here Jancis is exorcising the legacy of her fictional namesake!) Despite the harsh realities her characters sometimes face, Jancis refuses to allow them to become victims. The title story in Rapunzel, Rapunzel... tells of a young chef who mistakenly takes a young man's compliments about her cooking for romantic advances. They go out on what she thinks is a date: he, on the other hand, simply feels obliged to return the favour. She is terribly overweight; having never been on a date before, she goes all out-- hair, makeup, clothes, perfume. They are at a fair, she is exuberant, in love; caught up in a whirlwind of desire, she forgets her grotesque appearance until they end up in the Hall of Mirrors. She has never seen herself in a full-length mirror. It is a crucial moment--she can either wallow in revulsion and self-pity, or accept herself A n . A « c M . i c h / A p d 1993