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Words by Heather Ramsay

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Portfolio of Work

Past. Present. Future.

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July 2022

My Great-Aunt Winifred rode a steed, her back straight, her short hair like a helmet. Joan of Arc. Why did a picture of a girl on a horse on the wide-open prairie make me think of an armour-clad warrior in medieval France?

A Work in Progress

Even though I had a vague notion that my Grandma had once lived on the cousin’s farm where I’d hopped onto muddied ground, I had not looked deeply at the meaning of those fences.

The Autograph Book

YYC Pop: Poetic Portraits of People

2021

Go little book on your voyage of pleasure
Gather sweet words for your owner to treasure

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Portfolio of Work

Fact. Fiction. Poetry

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Fall 2019

I’d never heard of Sumas Lake before pulling up stakes and relocating to Chilliwack, BC, an hour drive east of Vancouver. In the years I’d lived in Vancouver and later in northern BC, I hadn’t thought much about the Fraser Valley, or its bounty of dairy cows, Brussels sprouts and broccoli farms.

Easy


carteblanche

Fall 2018

Jack’s grandfather could relate to serial killers. 
“After you do in the first one,” he said. “The rest are easy.”
The old man unlatched the gate and slipped into the fenced yard, cooing at his prey.

Progress

The Antigonish Review

Fall 2018

Skinny L’il Bitch packed with straps,
a long-handled axe, steel-toed boots, a ladder— 
something that could be scaffolding—
chases Suck My Tailpipe down the road.

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March 2017

Most people think “ocean” when they think of Vancouver, forgetting about the broad river rolling by the city’s back door. But the Fraser—whose tributaries drain a third of the province—plays a key role .. ... The danger time on the Fraser River is during the spring freshet, when meltwater from the winter snow races out of the mountains and down towards the sea. Most years the flow is manageable, but every once in a while the rushing river becomes unwieldy.

July 2017

A man with a chainsaw climbs through the branches and razes a giant cedar tree in 12-foot sections so your husband can make split rails to match the old fence. The thump from the too-large log ripples through your house in Ryder Lake, a hamlet of forest and cows in a hanging valley a few kilometres above the Bible Belt city of Chilliwack.

December 2016

An Interview with Bev Sellars: Your first book, They Called Me Number One was such a powerfully personal book. I understand that writing it was a path to healing for you. Now you’ve written Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival. While this book is very much written in your voice and includes injustices you’ve experienced in your personal life and your twelve years as chief of the Xat’sull (Soda Creek) First Nation, it focuses more on the larger picture. How did this book come into being?

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Bless Our Little Pigdom

Vancouver Review and The Tyee

2011

“Make sure you cut the testicles off before you slaughter them,” says one experienced friend, “or the meat won’t have the flavour you’re expecting.” 

What I’m expecting is smoky bacon, mustard-crusted tenderloin, sticky ribs, apple-stuffed shoulder roast, salty ham and a spicy sausage or two. 

Raven Talk

Canadian Geographic

2011

“When I was a young boy I could understand what they were saying,” said the old man. 
He told me he’d asked his grandmother how the birds came to learn Haida. Never tell anyone you understand their talk, she warned.

2009

A black and white portrait of him hung outside the principal’s office, but I’d never made the connection between the picture of a guy decked out in chaps and a cowboy hat and the real thing. At least not until my fifth grade teacher nabbed me for sneaking into my seat after the late bell had rung.

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About Me

Heather Ramsay is seriously concerned about the state of the world and tries to remain calm in the Fraser Valley. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has worked as a journalist and communications professional. She has published two books with the Haida Gwaii Museum: Gina ‘Waadluxan Tluu 

The Everything Canoe and GyaaGang.ngaay: The Monumental Poles of Skidegate.Her creative writing has appeared in The Malahat Review, Room, The Antigonish Review, Numero Cinq, Maisonneuve, Canada’s History Magazine and more and her journalism has appeared in The Tyee, Canadian Geographic, Northword Magazine, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and more.

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Education
Teaching Experience
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Mary Elizabeth Ramsay, Lives Lived

June, 2004

Mary Fish Ramsay


Stenographer, bank teller, member of the Eastern Star, sorority sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, poet. Born in North English, Iowa on February 20, 1909. Died on March 30, 2004 in High River, Alberta at age 95.


“Think of rowing across Clear Lake when a storm picks up.”

Her daughter, Lynn McCracken, recalled the strength it took to get across the windy bay and back to the family’s peaceful summer cabin on the prairies, as Mary Ramsay dealt with pain and fear in the High River hospital five days before her death.

She had, only week’s before, reached her 95th birthday, a formidable achievement, considering the struggle she went through the previous year when weeks before Christmas she was in the hospital with congestive heart failure.

Even then, with her declining health, Mary, who delighted in life’s adventures, fretted most about whether she was ruining the holidays for the friends and family who had gathered round.

Much to everyone’s delight she survived and was back on her feet, but Mary had surprised her family before.

In 1991, at age 82, she had triple bypass surgery on her heart. Her doctor made sure she was aware of the risks, but she, refusing to live up to the frail old lady image she imagined he had of her, steeled herself and decided to get on with it.

After hours in the operating room, the anxious doctor, shaking his head, asked Mary’s son Dick and his wife Carol if they’d ever tried sewing butter before.

Two months later when it was time for a check-up, Lynn sat in the waiting room while Mary walked in to be examined. The doctor burst out a few minutes later demanding to know whether Mary was telling the truth. She’d told him that she was living as usual; preparing meals, doing housework, visiting friends, volunteering in the community and playing bridge.

Twelve years later her trip to the hospital was unlikely to lead to a similar happy outcome.

One night she was rushed from the small High River hospital to one in Calgary when the doctors noticed gangrene in her toes.

This time the surgeon refused to consider the only option — amputation.

“I will not take a 95-year-old woman’s leg off,” he was reported to have said.

Carol, Mary’s daughter-in-law, was angry they’d even bothered to ship such a patient in the middle of the night.

It was undoubtedly a terrifying experience for the family matriarch, but to top it off the paramedics had bent her knee in a funny way during the ordeal, and it was this pain that bothered her most.

Throughout, the graceful woman who had raised three children in the small town of Edgerton near the Saskatchewan border, maintained her sense of humour.

“They put old cows out to pasture,” she said suggesting her family just find a big hole to throw her in, putting her out of her misery. 

But in an equally characteristic moment she said, “I might just surprise you all, walk out of here and go home.”

Mary had, as mentioned, surprised the family before.

She came to Canada with her parents in 1912 to Rosetown, Saskatchewan and they moved to Wainwright in 1914. She had one brother, Bill, and two sisters, Margaret and Eleanor. 

Mary’s family witnessed the Great Fire of 1929 when downtown Wainwright burned to the ground including her father’s sheet metal shop. The winds were high that night and the townspeople galvanized to wet the roofs as burning shingles blew towards the residential neighbourhoods. 

This and a later experience with fire when Lynn was a newborn instilled a lifelong fear of flames.

In some ways it was a miracle Mary lived through each of her children’s early days.

When her eldest, Bob was born, she and her husband Fred, a grain elevator operator, lived at the whistle-stop of Butze, AB, 40 miles from the Wainwright Hospital.

The local westbound train had already passed when Mary realized she was in early labour. 

Their only hope, as Mary wrote in one of the verses she was famous for, was 

“…the coast to coast Continental [which] still daily ran

Never stopping at sidings for beast or for man.”


The doctor caught the eastbound train to them and commandeered the Flyer in the pouring rain. They made it to the hospital, but Mary was left with a great tear in her nether-parts from the birth which left her in great discomfort and as she was told later could have caused further health problems.

Eight years later she brought Dick into the world. But soon after his uncomplicated birth, she was rushed 30 miles to the nearest hospital to have her gangrenous appendix out. 

This was 1941 and Fred was on citizen’s patrol watching the CNR trestle bridge over the Battle River that night. 

Fred was often away with work and it was one of these days that a freight train crew noticed sparks flying from Mary’s chimney. They stopped the train and leapt to the young woman’s rescue. She had no idea the imminent danger she was in.

But her most intense experience with fire, was while staying at her parents in Edmonton after giving birth to Lynn in 1946 and is chronicled in another of her poems.

There was a broken element in a fireplace nearby.

This was brushed by my housecoat and the flames rose high. 

I screamed and my father rushed up to the stair

Grabbed the housecoat and left me quite noticeably bare.

I had multiple blisters from head to toe.

Fred, on the other hand, loved fires, always tending the coffee on a fire at family picnics. Story has it that he tried to hold onto the old wood cookstove in their home in Edgerton as long as possible, but when electric ranges came out, Mary would have no more of it. Whether this was due to her fear of fire, or a young woman’s understandable desire for modern conveniences in her small town prairie life was never clear.

They moved to High River in 1960 and after Fred passed away in 1989, Mary was left with another story to tell. In 1993 she suffered a stroke and was stranded on the floor of her basement suite. She managed to bang loudly on the water pipes to get the attention of her landlord, and was once more swept to the hospital.

Fred, like Mary, could tell a story and often added a few other harrowing experiences to Mary’s list, such as when she drove his new Pontiac into the ditch or when she forgot the park brake and let his precious car crash into the aspens at Clear Lake.

As with many ladies of the day, she never did learn to drive, but she certainly learned to survive.

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