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Sharon Berg A life in words ... |
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Established January 3, 2006 |
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Sharon with her daughters Kirsten (left) and Ila (right). |
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Biography
Sharon was born in 1954, just before Hurricane Hazel swept through southern Ontario. Life in the family home seemed to have been touched by that tumultuous weather event also. They lived in small town, Ontario and, in the first few years the family home was on Water Street. It was a corner lot, backed onto a well-treed ravine and a river. They were just one street back from Main Street. From the back of the house, the view was of a dairy farm on the other side of the river. Incongruous juxtapositions like this seemed rife in her family experience also. Her father had obtained work as the Caretaker of Cedarvale, a large ‘school for girls’ who had strayed from the social norm or who were simply plucked from the tumult of their abusive homes. (It has now become a popular park in Georgetown, Ontario, Canada.) The grounds of the Cedarvale estate were massive, hidden in a valley, and protected by ‘do not trespass’ signs on all sides. The children grew up relative isolation there and Sharon felt she was in the right ‘place’, with an intimate connection to the land, but that she had somehow been given to the wrong family. In fact, she was so certain she was misidentified that, at the age of seven, she told her mother she had been given the wrong name.
This statement was indicative of the life-long search Sharon would undertake to discover a sense of belonging on the winding path of duty, temptation and discovery she was destined to walk. At one point during her writing career she even took up the pseudonym Elke Brix. It was, perhaps, an attempt to define herself apart from her family. It was also the result of constantly hearing from friends that she should not report on her experiences in her family home until her parents and their siblings were dead. The advice put her into deep personal conflict because, as anyone who meets Sharon discovers within minutes, she is almost incapable of biting her tongue on issues surrounding the voice and rights of children to be raised in the embrace of protective adults.
Her experience in elementary school was not easy, either. She was easily distracted in the beginning, and by Grade 2 she was ill with kidney disease. It was some of the difficulties that she experienced as an ill student whose Doctor notes were ignored, that sealed her determination to become an elementary school teacher. Again, she just didn't fit in school. Yet, instead of walking away from the experience, she was convinced she could make other children feel far more comfortable with who they were than she had been.
Sharon demonstrated a clear talent in Visual arts during Grade school. She was one of a few students placed in a pilot program for ‘flex boundaries’ which allowed students to attend schools outside of their local boundaries to apprentice in trade programs if they qualified. As a result, in her first two years of high school she attended Thomas Laird Kennedy S.S. in Cooksville for its special apprentice program in Commercial Art. However, the prevailing 'here's how to catch the attention of the sheep in a grocery store' attitude of her main Teacher offended her to the point that she turned to her other interests. She had been writing since she was in grade school, even publishing a poem in The Toronto Telegram’s poetry corner in Grade 5. She now developed a far greater focus on English Language Arts and switched back to her local high school, Central Peel S.S. in Brampton. Yet, her early experiences with Visual Art training left a strong impression. It rendered her poetry and prose (and later her academic essays) taut with rich visual imagery.
Moving out of home at 16, Sharon spent the next four years with the painter William McLure Brown. They arrived in Toronto, taking up residence just a few doors north Of Grossman’s Tavern on Spadina Avenue, in 1972. This was the end of an era as the ’hippies’ graduated out of the boutiques on Yorkville Avenue. There were lots of fresh music clubs such as The Riverboat and The Purple Onion and the blues and rock at Steel Rail, Grossman’s Tavern and The Elmacombo were all on the list for most people who indulged in bar-hopping. This was an area of the city that was truly alive, with Kensington Market just a block away and many musicians, writers and painters calling that neighbourhood home. The Spadina strip somewhat was gritty but electric with creative activity. At the bottom of the Avenue they had begun construction on the CN Tower. It was not far from the Harbourfront and Sharon quickly joined her half-brother, Brian Purdy (Al Purdy's son) in The Bohemian Poet’s Embassy, a writing workshop led by George Miller. It was housed at a renovated warehouse on Queen’s Quay. The group met on Saturday mornings. In the evening, on one day of the week, the same building also housed The Bohemian Embassy, a Coffee House venue.
The Bohemian Embassy was rich in history and its activities. Founded in 1960 and operated by Don Cullen and John Robert Columbo, it was a Coffee House (/ support network) with a reading series that gave many of Canada’s better known poets a stage to read from (e.g. Margaret Atwood, David Donnell, Dennis Lee, Gwendolyn MacEwan, George Miller and Joe Rosenblatt). When the baton of The Bohemian Poet’s Embassy was passed to George Miller, it was regarded as the longest running workshop in Canada in the 1970s. George was soon named The Bohemian Embassy’s poet laureate. In his capable hands, it operated as a writing workshop that continued to attract some of the people who would become the next generation of Canada’s poets and publishers (e.g. Rosemary Aubert, Sharon Berg, Heather Cadsby, James Deahl, Richard Harrison, Maria Jacobs, Robert Priest, Brian Purdy, Libby Sheier among others).
The baton for the Coffee House had been passed on to Greg Gatenby. While many of the people in the workshop participated in the Open Mic, or were granted feature readings, the truth is that they operated as separate entities. Moreover, Queen’s Quay and Harbourfront were about to undergo vast changes. The drafty warehouses along Toronto’s waterfront would be replaced by artist workshops, suave restaurants, tall condo buildings, and later, even an artists’ co-op housing unit. Ironically, the Bohemian Poet’s Embassy would loose its home on Queen’s Quay just as the Harbourfront Reading series guided by Greg Gatenby was beginning to get into full swing. The group of writers who were members of that workshop were forced to look for a new home… and, ironically, a new name. The name was considered ‘copyrighted’ and on leaving Harbourfront, the poetry workshop was told, they were no longer allowed to use it.
The group rallied and launched Phoenix, a Poet’s workshop. It became a long-running poetry workshop collective that eventually counted some 30—40 poets among its members during its day. Finally, Sharon had discovered a place that suggested belonging. These writers were integral to the Poetry Scene in Toronto as both audience and performers during the 1970s and onwards. It was a guiding principal of the Phoenix workshop that poetry is meant to be an aural art. This led the group to establish and operate the Axle Tree Coffee House as a performance venue which became almost as important for musicians, comics, and prose artists during the 1970s and early 1980s as it was for local poets. In fact, like its predecessor, Phoenix became the longest running Poetry Workshop in Canada. The workshop and Coffeehouse both continued into the 1990s under the guidance of several fresh faces. Indeed, a quick internet search tells me that while the Axle Tree Coffeehouse has closed, Phoenix: A Poet’s workshop, still continues at the College/Shaw Library in Toronto (downstairs, on the 2nd and 4th Saturday of each month @ 2 pm).
Sharon was a mother and a writer who believed that children have a place at the center of community activities. Her daughter, Ila was born in 1976 and became a familiar (if very short) figure at almost every workshop or poetry event Sharon attended. In those days, it was a radical social stand for a mother to take her child with her to readings and workshops. She sometimes had to wait in a friend's car when some Tavern or restaurant chosen as a place to eat supper (in the two hours between a workshop and a poetry reading) would take the group's orders and then flatly refuse to serve Sharon and her daughter because there was alcohol at the table. In support, the group scouted for new restaurants and resisted ordering alcohol.
Sharon published her first book, To a Young Horse, with Borealis Press (Ottawa: Canada) in 1979. A year later, she moved to Peterborough, Ontario. Sharon was soon running her own Wordsmiths' Ink: A Poetry Workshop out of Peter Robinson College at Trent University . She also joined The League of Canadian Poets in 1982 and traveled to the Banff School of Fine Arts and the (renamed) Banff Centre Advanced Writers Studio on two occasions, in 1982 and 1987. In 1983, her second daughter Brynna (who later took her second name, Kirsten) was born. As before, Sharon brought both of her daughters to virtually every writing workshop or performance she participated in. Sharon had received a Canada Council B Gant to assist in work on the manuscript that became her second book. In 1984 she published The Body Labyrinth with the original Coach House Press (Toronto: Canada).
Sharon moved back to Toronto in 1984 and began to participate in the League of Canadian Poets "Poets in the Schools" series. This soon brought her to several Children's Authors Festivals. It was about this point in her career that Sharon accepted the proposal by Erin Moure and Bronwen Wallace that she run for the Chair position of the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets. She was duly elected and served in that position for several years. She was also reviewing poetry books for Poetry Canada Review and event magazine. Paradoxically, in addition to voluminous poetry binges, her writing attention had turned back to a prior focus on a collection of short prose pieces. However, while individual poems were published frequently, and while her popularity as a reader soared, she was having difficulty finding acceptance for her next book manuscript.
In 1986, Sharon and her daughters moved to the Bain Housing Co-operative in Toronto. She also worked with fellow Phoenix member Heather Cadsby to collect and edit the League's publication Who’s Who in the League of Canadian Poets (1988), which received a final edit from Steven Scobie. She also became a neighbour to Pauline Shirt, a Cree Elder (previously known as Pauline Harper) who founded the first Native Way Culture School in Canada in 1976. It was called Wandering Spirit Survival School. Pauline and Sharon became friends, but for two years she refused the invitation to write the history of Pauline's school. Surrounded by the support of this unique community, which earlier fostered the political career of Marilyn Churley, Sharon decided to pursue her academic career. She approached Pauline and asked whether any university’s had First Nations professors who could guide her in a Native Studies degree. Pauline suggested that she should study at Laurentian University in Sudbury because she knew of two key people in her community who were Professors at Laurentian.
It was in 1988 that Sharon began to prepare for the ominous task of writing the history of Wandering Spirit Survival School. She began by studying with a number of prominent First Nations scholars, including Thom Alcose and Jim Dumont. She also accepted training in her spiritual path from Pauline, but it was nearly a decade before Sharon felt ready to proceed with a history of the school. Once she completed her B.A. in Native Studies at Laurentian, she enrolled for a B.Ed at University of Toronto/O.I.S.E. She also collected a certificate in Magazin Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnical University.
In order to insure greater attention came to the story of Wandering Spirit Survival School, she enrolled in the M.Ed program at York University with the proposal to write a collaborative history of the school as her Thesis. Indeed, she convinced Pauline Shirt to attend the same program. Sharon and Pauline arrived at York University in 1995 and they met with several challenges to their work as a team in the world of academia. However, by this point Sharon knew her toes were finally on the path she was meant to travel. She wrote her M.ED Thesis about Wandering Spirit Survival School with Celia Haig Brown as her Thesis supervisor. Sean Kane became the external reader of her Thesis in 1998. Her struggle continued to center on her collaborative efforts in determination to acknowledge her collaboration with Pauline Shirt by including her name as collaborator on her official Thesis (THESIS 030016 MFICHE ).
Sharon won a (SSHRC) Social Sciences and Research Council Fellowship from the Canadian government for her proposal to write a study of the governmental response to the call for Cultural Education among First Nations in North America, the Maori in New Zealand, and the Saami in Scandinavia. However, while she had been accepted to study at the University of British Columbia in 1998 with both her SSHRC and her Proposal in hand, once sh actually began work on her Thesis she met with opposition to her focus of research. She was told several times to let First Nations do the work of cataloguing the responses they’d received to a call for cultural education. Finally, she withdrew from her academic studies at UBC, despite completing all of her Doctoral coursework with Honours and despite gaining acceptance for her Thesis proposal in 2000. Not one of the senior Professors who were actually eligible to be her Thesis Supervisor were willing to take her on. In fact, she was told several times she’d need to change her thesis focus in order to gain a supervisor. She was in the wrong place again.
Despite her investment at UBC, Sharon attempted to move her Thesis work to another university. She was turned down by the three universities which had previously accepted her when she applied as a first year doctoral candidate. They insisted that she’d have to redo many of her courses, and though she was willing her inability to find supervision at UBC was read as a problem. She was stonewalled.
About this time, Sharon realized she missed working with young people far too much to continue pursuing a career in the towers of academia. Her reasoning was that she could return to her research at a later time. In the meantime, she returned to Ontario and joined the ranks of Teachers in the Public School system in 2001. She continues to live in a small Ontario town and commutes to work as a Grade 4 Teacher in Brampton.
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