Paris Times Eight by Deirdre Kelly

Author:Deirdre Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV009050, BIO000000
ISBN: 9781926812229
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2010-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Miss

Lonelyhearts

· 1990 ·

SOON AFTER I returned to Toronto, The Globe and Mail hired me as its full-time dance critic, then the newspaper’s highest-ranking writing category. It was a job I adored. I loved the challenge—criticism is hard, dance criticism harder still. Often I felt like an astronomer with a telescope, focusing on faraway detail through the narrowest of lenses, seeking out the last twinkle of phenomena no longer existing in real time. Dancers as exploding stars, gone in a twinkle of an eye, their incendiary presence more a memory of experience than experience itself. My task was to reconstruct the energy that had pushed them into being in the first place, to make their trajectories through space clear to the readers. After a performance I would pull away for the wider view, looking to connect a single source of starlight with the other brilliant dots studding the dance universe. I was also always looking for a narrative, a structure with which to tell their ephemeral stories.

You could say I was good at it. In any event, my professional peers acknowledged in me a talent for dance writing when in 1989 they nominated me for a National Newspaper Award in the category of feature writing. This category was normally the preserve of foreign correspondents and war reporters, writers of so-called hard stories. My nominated article was a piece of investigative reporting on the National Ballet of Canada. My editor at that time commended me, saying arts writing, considered soft—especially dance writing—had never before been so highly recognized. I didn’t win, but went home with a citation of excellence that my mother proudly framed to hang on her wall. It was my last moment of glory. Shortly afterward, the newspaper experienced a change of guard, and with that came a sharp reversal in my fortunes.

WHEN A NEW editor arrived on the scene, I was inexplicably deemed unworthy of the dance-critic title. This new hire, a woman with no prior newspaper experience, called me an incompetent writer to my face. Merit? The idea appeared ludicrous to her. She thought me wholly unprofessional.

The newspaper was unionized, so she couldn’t get rid of me just because, as she told me one day during a par- ticularly memorable tête-à-tête in her office, “she hate[d] that insipid smile of yours.” She could only fire me for cause. At first she just made life miserable for me. She axed my weekly national arts column, telling me she couldn’t abide my picture logo. She got the music critic to write on dance without my knowledge, and published our articles side by side in the newspaper to let the readers, she expalined to me, see who did the better job. A colleague, then the paper’s books editor, told me that she stuck her fingers down her throat when he put forward my name for writing a new column. Soon other colleagues were siding with her against me behind my back. She scrutinized my expenses. She got me to write on subjects in which I had no expertise or interest, seemingly in hopes of seeing me fail.

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