After I paid the ransom, I delivered my best seventeen-year-old lecture on ethics.
I've been meaning to ask Chelsea Wakelyn
I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions about being human.
What is your first memory of existing?
I have a memory of waking up from a nap in my crib and watching light rippling in the leaves outside for a long time while I sucked my thumb.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?
My mom would scribe stories for me, and she helped me fasten pages of my "books" together with yarn.
All of the books were some variation of: a princess runs away from home to live in the wilderness, and when she goes back her parents have forgotten she ever existed.
Also, in Grade 4, I came in second place in a district-wide writing contest, and I had an epic meltdown in the car on the way home from the ceremony because I was infuriated that I hadn’t won. My parents lectured me about being gracious. It worked. Now I’m gracious.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?
The best dream I ever had was in childhood—I was six or seven. My mom was an RN, and she was on strike at the time.
I dreamed that the entire cast of Cheers came to my house and picketed in my driveway. I was their helper, there to serve them lemonade and snacks. They all loved me, but Cliff and Norm loved me the most. They thought I was adorable. Carla was scary but nice.
What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?
This is a story that I rarely tell because it’s so unbelievable, but I love it so much that I’m going to share it now.
In 1999, when I was seventeen, I worked as a child-care attendant in a refugee camp in Tirana, Albania. I had to take a ferry from Bari, Italy to get to Albania. On the ferry, my passport was confiscated. There was a lot of corruption in Albania at the time because they were still in post-Soviet chaos, and their entire economy had basically been obliterated by a pyramid scheme. Anyway, the cops on the ferry held my passport for ransom. The Canadian consulate didn’t help me very much, and I decided to just pay the money. I took the bus back to Durres and went to some office, and it involved walking for a long time in the hot sun, and by the time I got there, I was feeling tired and self-righteous and ready to serve some cunt (which is my favourite Gen Z expression and I would like to thank my daughter for introducing me to it.)
After I paid the ransom, I delivered my best seventeen-year-old lecture on ethics. One of the cops who took my payment wasn’t much older than me, and he just laughed. He was handsome, which made it so much worse.
Six weeks later, I was on the ferry back to Italy. It was an overnight trip, and I didn’t have money for a cabin/bed, so I was trying very hard to sleep on the floor, when who should spawn before me but the handsome young passport thief cop, now in civilian clothes. He introduced himself (I wish I remembered his name) and apologized. He asked to buy me dinner, and I let him, and we ate together in the cafeteria. He said he’d quit his cop job and was heading to Italy to work in construction. I wondered if my lecture on ethics had worked, and assumed it must have.
Then he offered for me to sleep in his cabin. I said no, that’s weird. He said that what he meant was that he would give me his cabin.
He did. He gave me his cabin. He left me alone just as he’d promised, and I got a lovely night of unbothered sleep. In the morning when we docked, he walked me from the ferry all the way through the city of Bari and saw me off on the train, and as we were leaving he handed me this really big, square, ugly gold ring—the kind you see on tough grandpas. He didn’t ask for my email address or my phone number, he just gave me the ring and said goodbye.
I remind myself of this experience every time I start to believe that humans suck across the board.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?
I’m in a glass-half-empty mood, so I’ll share that I really dislike how I feel when I make a self-deprecating joke and someone takes it seriously and says, “awwwwww, no, don’t say that! Don’t be so mean to yourself!” And then I feel like I have to be grateful and smiley and shrink back into myself, when what I really want to say is, “Just fuck off, Brittany.”
Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?
I am embarrassed constantly, but one of the worst times was when I was at this gala for work with a bunch of physicians who were all presenting their quality improvement projects. I was new in the job, and my boss was introducing me around to all the Important People. I went to the bathroom, had a quick, normal pee, came out and continued to mingle in my highly anxious way.
I really do not enjoy forced social proximity with strangers or any expectation of graciousness or witty banter, but that night, I really felt like I was doing okay.
Then this woman tapped me on the shoulder, pulled me aside, and pointed out that the back of my dress was tucked into my sheer nylons and I had a ribbon of toilet paper hanging out the waistband. I was wearing a thong and had just exposed my full ham to a room full of Victoria’s most data-driven physicians of 2018.
What do you cherish most about this world?
I cherish my solitude and the little life I’ve built with my kids.
And I cherish great music in my headphones (in a Nina Nastasia phase right now.)
And books, because books are portals.
What would you like to change about this world?
I think a lot about the public school system. It failed me, and it has utterly failed my kids.
The concept of “inclusion” for neurodivergent people is lovely in theory, but it rarely happens in practice. I could go on with specific examples, but instead I’ll just say that I feel strongly that Western bureaucratic institutions as a whole traumatize and dehumanize individuals and perpetuate hierarchy and harm at a massive scale, and the public education system is most people’s first encounter with that harm.
Coming from a health care world, where there are teams dedicated to transformation and improvement, it astonishes me that parallel initiatives don’t exist in the public education system.
I want to see true pedagogical innovation: new models, new thinking, systems that actually meet kids where they’re at instead of trying to bend or crush them into shape.
What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.
Your vulva is normal.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
I would love to believe in ghosts, but I don’t. I have explicitly requested to be haunted. I am very open to haunting, but my dead beloveds have not haunted me, which means they either can’t be arsed or the universe does not allow such shenanigans.
About Chelsea Wakelyn
Chelsea Wakelyn's first novel, What Remains of Elsie Jane (Dundurn, '23) was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She is currently at work on her third novel. She lives in Nanaimo with her two kids, two cats, and a doodle named Marceline the Vampire Queen. Her day job is in health care, and she writes a (very) sporadic and depressing newsletter on Substack called Kingdom of Slobs.
Publisher’s Description
“A poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, weird, and heartbreaking window into being bereft and being in love… a striking reminder that there can be beauty in devastation.” — EMILY AUSTIN, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of a woman unravelling in the wake of tragedy.
Sam is dead, which means that Elsie Jane has just lost the brilliant, sensitive man she planned to grow old with. The early days of grief are a fog of work and single parenting. Too restless to sleep, Elsie pores over Sam’s old love letters, paces her house, and bickers with the ghosts of Sam and her dead parents night after night. As the year unfolds, she develops an obsession with a local murder mystery, attends a series of disastrous internet dates in search of a “replacement soulmate,” and solicits a space-time wizard via Craigslist, convinced he will help her forge a path through the cosmos back to Sam.
Examining the ceaseless labour of motherhood, the stigma of death by drug poisoning, and the allure of magical thinking in the wake of tragedy, What Remains of Elsie Jane is a heart-splitting reminder that grief is born from the depths of love.
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