The next author participating in the Owen Sound Memoir Series is hoping to have thoughtful, provocative conversations with parents while revelling in little “girl-joy.”
Emelia Symington-Fedy was raised in the Shuswap region of British Columbia, where she and her teenage friend gang spent all day unsupervised on the local train tracks and trying to navigate their way to becoming grown-ups amid 1990s social culture.
While reflecting on her personal experiences to write her memoir Skid Dogs, she was thinking back to all the things she and her friend had pulled while their parents weren’t looking, and was able to weave together a story that was both a celebration of teendom and a cautionary tale for the next generation, as she speaks from the perspective of a Gen-X kid who grew up in the only-recently spoken about rape culture of the 90s.
Part of her story focuses on a time when she was 14 and had passed out while drinking with friends. When she came to, she realized that she may have been assaulted.
She says that she really wanted to aim her story at teens, especially girls, and their parents.
“I wrote Skid Dogs for the 13, 14, [and] 15-year-old girls out there. That is who this book is for,” Symington-Fedy says excitedly. “It’s graphic. It’s intense. I suggest parents read it before giving it to their children – boys or girls. This is the demographic I wrote it for. It’s to catch the children before it’s too late. By the time I was 14, I had already surpassed. I had already started doing the things that I’m in therapy for now. I wrote this book for my nieces. For the parents, it’s a pretty graphic book, but I can promise you they’re talking about it and if they’re not doing it already, they’re talking about it and they know about it. So let’s get ahead of the game.”
Although she and her self-described girl gang had shared experiences, it wasn’t until they were adults that they figured out that things that happened to them simply shouldn’t have happened at all, and now that they learned from those experiences, they could heal and grow, even if it took time and maybe even some therapy.
“I thought that was normal. And there [are] these kinds of illuminations, these lightbulb moments for these women, and that’s what happened to me too in my early 40s… Thinking about how I had allowed this trauma to happen to me, why had I done so? And then passing that information on so other women can relate and feel a resonance in their own bodies. [Realizing] ‘Oh, I’m not nuts for having feelings about sexual trauma now in my middle age. It happened. It’s real.’ It’s affirming in the end,” she explains. “I’m not slamming someone, I’m not naming names, I’m not ruining anyone. I’m talking about a culture that existed, that we need to acknowledge existed.”
After growing up and moving to Vancouver to pursue her career in the performance arts, she eventually moved back to her hometown in her early 30s, when she was going to help out her mother, who was dying of cancer.
“My mom phoned me because a girl had been killed on the same railroad tracks that I had grown up on. These are the railroad tracks that me and my girl gang drank our slushes on, smoked our cigarettes on, learned how to kiss on. We were a little gang and we lived from morning till night all summer on these tracks for most of our high school years. So to find out that a girl who had been my age at the time in the 90s was killed [at]… the place that felt most sacred to me, was total cognitive dissonance to me.”
The teen girl who Symington-Fedy is referring to was murdered in 2011. Her killer was sentenced to life in prison in 2018.
But while thinking of all the good memories she and her friends shared on those railroad tracks, it started a conversation about the things that were remembered as funny, when they were actually traumatic.
Upon reflecting on her own teenagehood, she says that there’s a big difference between her upbringing and the way she’s raising her sons, aged 9 and 11.
“As a parent now, I would say it’s the latch-key kid thing because my parents didn’t know where I was. Obviously, there were no cell phones, so there was a lot of freedom. I really try to stay pretty close to my children and I try to keep our relationship pretty bonded and strong. They know they have to tell me where they were, who they were with, what was going on. There’s information sharing and gathering that is required for my children. That’s my attempt at this point.”
She wanted to also reclaim a time of her life when she was young and free – particularly free of society’s expectations on her as a girl and as a young woman, and before the male gaze started to dictate her actions and behaviours.
“One of the main points is joy. Amongst all the pain and growing up, there’s a relentless quality of “girl-joy” that we don’t talk about. And that’s a huge thread in the book. The hysteria of being a young girl growing up with her best friends when there [are] no eyes on her. What is that like? It is wild. It is profoundly pleasurable. Writing about that and remembering that is also an act of reclamation.”
Symington-Fedy is going to be doing a reading from Skid Dogs on Friday, June 21st, and a writing workshop on Saturday, June 22nd.
She says that she’s happy to tour and promote her book, as the six years spent reminiscing and writing was a challenge. As a performer, she’s excited to promote her memoir and meet people who are interested in her work.
She says that when it comes to writing a memoir that may contain personal stories and possibly deep, dark secrets, it’s important to understand how telling one’s story may affect the other people involved.
She wants to help strike a balance between telling the whole story, without saying too much.
“I learned to protect the living. How much do you want to harm someone’s life, who’s alive and just trying to still be alive in their communities? Taking that into consideration, that became important to me. Because… who is the villain in these stories? It’s complicated,” says Symington-Fedy. “People also have rights to making mistakes and [to grow]. In my particular story, I’m talking about boys who I grew up with in the 90s, who didn’t know they were being harmful. That was the culture we were raised in. We didn’t know as girls that they were harming us and our bodies, and they didn’t know they were harming us. What would be the point of returning and hurting these now men, who have children, who play baseball on the same team as my son?”
Tickets are available here.