The Author of Skid Dogs is in Owen Sound this weekend, with hopes her book will help change the view of girls and women.
Emelia Symington-Fedy will share her coming-of-age tale at the Owen Sound Memoir series Friday evening.
"Skid Dogs is about me in my mid-30s, going home to small town, in BC. There's a killer on the loose, as a young girl has been murdered on the railroad track," she explained. "This is in 2011 and it happens to be the same track that I grew up on as a young girl in the 90s. So as I go home to take care of my mother, she's terrified. There are curfews. People have to lock their doors. There's a murderer on the loose. As I said, as I go home, I start to consider my own childhood and realize, you know, we weren't murdered on those railroad tracks, but we did have harm caused to us. And I start to consider the minute, kind of everyday taking over of our bodies, not the violent kind of hashtag 'me too' stuff that we're now comfortable as a culture talking about, but the more subtle, insidious ways that girls lose their agency and lose their bodies at a very long age."
Symington-Fedy said there are a couple of messages in her story.
"One is that the women who are my age reading this book feel affirmed that it's true. It happened. You know, like pain and trauma does not have to be big and extreme," she said. "It can be quiet, and we can even be implicated in it. And we can even search it out sometimes. And so let's get to a more nuanced conversation about rape culture."
She said despite the book's intensity, it would be beneficial for teenaged girls to read it as well.
"I think my, my overarching dream or hope, is that young women claim more agency over their own bodies," she stated. "Young women can feel confident saying no. No. And that's okay, because that's not a skill I learned, and I'm 45, and I'm just learning that skill, and that's wild. "
Symington-Fedy wrote about past experiences of sexual assault, and about the complex dynamics of mother-daughter relationships as she loses her mother to cancer.
"The hardest part in this memoir was actually really coming to terms with my relationship with my mother. That was the big grief for me, and my mother had died by the time I'd written the book, and so doing some healing and grieving and wanting forgiveness in some ways, and knowing I was never going to get it because my mom had passed," she shared. "And so, in some ways, the book is also an honoring of mothers and a reminder to all women who have mothers still, how complicated the relationship is and how much your mother loves you, even if she, you know, behaves incredibly crazy."
Symington-Fedy is grateful for the feedback she's been getting on her book. She added many women have told her they can relate to her story.
"I felt this, but I never had a word to put to it. That's been a lot of the comments. Oh, this was my life. I felt like I just read a book that was my life, but I never had language for it. So thanks for putting language to it," she continued. "I'm having a lot of men reach out to me saying, you've opened my eyes to a world I didn't know existed, and it's making me change how I see women and girls and how I'm perceiving my own parenting."
She'll share her story at the Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library at 7 p.m. Friday evening. Symington-Fedy will then host a writing workshop, starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 22.
