Toronto writer, poet and visual artist Deb O’Rourke talks to AW’s Lucy Black about her debut essay collection.
LB: Congratulations on having written such a comprehensive book on alternative schooling. You briefly mention the significance of such movements on Indigenous and Black education. Given the recommendations of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, I wonder if you might like to comment further on the historic relationships among these movements?
DO: There’s strong evidence that the liberty of Indigenous life on Turtle Island inspired contemporary democracy, starting with the French Revolution and the American constitution. In the 1960s, the movement for Black Civil Rights was a model for those who resisted the Vietnam War, and who sought full rights for women and for Indigenous and LGBTQ persons. The free school movement extended this struggle to children and youth. In terms of responsibilities such as those listed in the TRC, writers on social issues are tasked not to perpetuate the colonial cover-ups that render Black and Indigenous people, and their contributions, invisible.
For over a century, grassroots communities have grown justice-based schools within Black, Indigenous and European contexts. Black Freedom Schools were created by various Black Communities since slavery was abolished. The Indigenous Survival School model, rooted in the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, was brought into Toronto’s public school system by Pauline Shirt and Vern Harper, founders of the Wandering Spirit Survival School, in 1977. Freedom Schools and Survival Schools aim to restore cultures and inter-generational bonds shattered by slavery and colonialism. Free schools, on the other hand, were inspired by English educator A. S. Neill’s Summerhill. Neill sought to protect children from what he saw as their parents’ sick European culture, and to raise them not to be perpetrators of the fascism, war and genocide that shattered Europe through the first half of the twentieth century.
LB: Your book covers a great deal of material, including personal narrative, political underpinnings, cultural movements and educational pedagogy. How did you prioritize your selections in ways that contributed to the overall narrative without becoming completely overwhelmed by the mass of information you were dealing with?
DO: I have to credit my publisher and editor, Ronald Weihs of Artword Press, for protecting the storyline as I wove in the information I felt was crucial. This work started as a master’s thesis, but I wanted the book to be accessible to families and educators, like the classic books that inspired the free school movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We can’t quite achieve that because ALPHA is a public school. The bureaucracy that makes it accessible to all incomes, yet threatens it at times, isn’t easy to write about. My editor ensured that I told the story primarily through people’s voices. Ron is a polymath—a computer pioneer, an entrepreneur, a publisher, a theatre owner. But primarily he’s a musician, director and playwright, a story-teller. Ron had also participated in the movement for alternative schools in the 1970s. He cared enough to read everything I’d written. When he decided to take on my book, he worked with me the way I’ve seen him work with actors, an often-passionate process, a theatre person’s way.
LB: The book celebrates the work of ALPHA without including any concrete data or specifics about how students fared when they integrated into mainstream schooling or pathways. Are you aware of follow-up studies or is this an area of research you are yet to explore?
DO: I’ve thought about this, as have others. Euro-based culture regards tests and numbers as concrete, but are they? What does concrete even mean, when we apply it to living children? I haven’t seen that kind of data for elementary schools in the mainstream, so what would it mean? ALPHA carries out regular qualitative inquiry, in a form that the school uses. Every few years, ALPHA alumni return to share with the current community what their experiences were when they moved on to other educational formats. This is recorded, and influences how the school operates. I quote some of that information, and asked thesis participants that question. Early ALPHA alumni Ariel Fielding and Michael Barker conducted an excellent qualitative study of their peers. It is posted at https://michaelbarker.ca/alpha-alternative-school/. In the international arena, there are books about alumni of Summerhill, Sudbury Valley and other schools. Psychologist Peter Gray and researcher Gina Riley gather and undertake research. Much can be accessed through Gray’s blog on Psychology Today at https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn. Like other democratic schools, ALPHA has plenty of success narratives, including some who managed to dodge the mainstream to live unique, meaningful lives. But the human journey is arduous and those who struggle, or whom we lose, are valued just as much.
LB: Tell us about your decision to write this book. What inspired and/or motivated your interest in the subject matter?
DO: You could say it was a life-long project. My high school newspaper was closed because of an article I wrote on student rights. As a student, I tried with peers to create a free school. I always hoped that any child of mine could attend one. Years later, to stumble on one of the few surviving free schools only a few blocks from the factory where I worked, was a stunning bit of synchronicity. I always wanted to write about ALPHA, but as a working mom and struggling visual artist, there was no time. By 2004, I had wrung all I could out of an art and design career and I forced myself to lay down those beloved tools. A door opened into graduate school and I took it, though I didn’t know how I’d pay for it. Toronto’s weekly, Now Magazine, began publishing my articles and ALPHA, on my third attempt to work there, hired me. I hadn’t wanted to go to university, but I told myself that there, I would learn how to do a proper study of ALPHA. I always planned to turn the thesis into a book.
LB: What is the biggest challenge or hurdle you have had to work through as a writer?
DO: As a White prairie settler with a Calvinist background, I was raised not to express myself. I choke on words. Children were to be seen and not heard; women were to quietly serve, work and please. Men only communicated when drunk, and then most often, you’d wish they didn’t. My immediate family was loving, and gave me a good base in many ways. But they were restrained by such conventions. No one spoke up to authority. No one risked hurting anyone’s feelings or pissing anyone off. No one confessed to having an inner life. But they were touched by my intensity. “You’re deep,” they’d say. They were proud that I was a science nerd and an A-student, and tried not to limit me. In my basement room I kept animals, made art and wrote my adolescent poems. The poems were secret but the art scared them. Dad came from generations of homesteaders. Mom’s parents were a tinsmith and a boarding house keeper. My parents had made the leap to white-collar suburbia, and feared to fall back. They would be proud that I wrote a real book, but they’d deeply hoped I’d get over it all and become a teacher.
LD: During the course of this writing project, were any of your beliefs or perspectives challenged or stretched? If so, please explain.
DO: There was much I didn’t know about this school that I loved: its flaws and vulnerabilities, and its role in its place and time. I struggled and learned, throughout. ALPHA’s community periodically experiences the shock of having to fight public school authorities for the school’s survival, at great personal cost. That was just about the last thing I wanted to revisit, but that difficult research shed light on what I’d previously found incomprehensible. I learned that bureaucrats are people with interests to protect, which are unconnected to the needs of students. More painful, was to engage with the issue of diversity. Jonathan Kozol’s arguments about literacy in free schools, helped me to understand why ALPHA’s early casual approach to reading, a legitimate one that works well for students in the private Sudbury Valley and Summerhill schools, made it seem too risky to many of the racialized and low-income families of Color in its urban environs. Even harder was to learn from the parents of Color who created an admissions policy that increased ALPHA’s diversity, how traumatic it was to argue for that change within what they called “a culture of Whiteness” which exists in all mostly-White rooms and institutions.
LB: Do you have a writing routine or regimen? What does that include at the different stages in the writing process?
DO: Raised to do my duty before I do that which I find personally meaningful, I must circumvent discipline in order to create. So I write almost constantly, obsessively, many hours each day. I use discipline when it’s time to cook, or just to be a human to my mate. Forget cleaning. I start in bed. Even with non-fiction, the brain does a lot of work during sleep. I pick up those threads right away. My husband and I each have an office/studio in our two-bedroom unit. Eventually, I move from our bed in the living room, to my office: a maelstrom of books, papers, natural objects and art. Summer is great. I set up on our downtown balcony, where finches, cardinals, blackbirds, the local peregrine circle above. I find non-fiction and journalism to be very difficult. I lean toward more subjective forms. In the morning, I may start where I am—write down that dream or idea or snatch of poetry. Under deadline, I try to start where I need to be, get rolling on the right track. But even when non-fiction deadlines loom, sometimes I must devote time to work at something natural to my mind—these days, poetry.
LB: If you were to give a young writer a piece of crucial writing advice, what would that be?
DOR: I’ve learned that the ways of writing are diverse. Some people must build a structure to work within, but my non-linear mind needs to spew it out and then go back and order it. I revise a lot, but some writers hardly revise at all. Some work methodically on one thing. I go back and forth between first drafts and editing, often on different pieces. When I was sixteen, my well-intentioned creative writing teacher told me I had talent and needed to explore form, to give it a proper outlet. I’d only begun to release my repressions and let feelings, ideas and emotions out so, faced with that block, I drew pictures for the next thirty years. My first book was published at sixty-nine, because I couldn’t let myself do what works for me. I wish I had journaled more. Sure, it gets sophomoric (my journals will be cremated with me!) but it keeps up a flow and can be mined later, for ideas and facts. I love to read what others have to say about writing. My favourite book in that realm is “The Motion of Light on Water” by Samuel Delaney.
LB: What are some of the ethical challenges you face as a writer?
DO: When working on an academic article or journalism or non-fiction, I’m acutely aware that I’m writing about real people, in a civilization that creates wonders like space travel, but causes massive suffering and destruction. Even without systemic oppression, life is suffering. At ALPHA, it’s so touching to be with kids as they struggle to balance their wants and needs with those of their peers. Even in a social, supportive school, they often feel loneliness, stress and confusion. There are tragedies and broken hearts, mistakes that hurt people. Many of ALPHA’s families have disabled members, or are racialized, or economically challenged. The school itself is vulnerable. I don’t want to add to anyone’s burden or risk. But I have limitations and make mistakes, especially under deadline pressure. Alas, even in poetry I have this struggle, because I’m writing a lot about petroleum culture, which I grew up in. It could be worse. After all, doctors and train drivers agonize about hurting people at work, too.
LB: How do you choose which aspects of a true story to emphasize?
DO: In the reportage and analysis I’ve done over the years, I pick up on what seems urgent, that isn’t being covered much. To illuminate a little-known education alternative that I know well, seems worthwhile. But a dozen books could be written about ALPHA. Which one would I write? I ended up focusing on the aspect that distresses me the most, even as it makes all other things possible—the democratic struggle for survival. The most fun approach to writing about democratic and free schools, and I think the most useful and communicative, is to tell stories of the children in these places where they are free to be themselves. Children are clever, fey, mischievous creatures, like elves. They create chaos and comedy, but they show sense and compassion. They daily spout poetry and make profound insights. But that storytelling has been well done, in the lively tradition of books written by democratic educators like A. S. Neill, Chris Mercogliano and Jerry Mintz. My thesis supervisor, Harry Smaller, helped me to see the unique contribution that I could make: to use ALPHA’s story to illuminate the social and political forces acting on a public community school, from within and without.
Deb O’Rourke is a White settler born in Treaty 7 territory, whose life is now supported by lands belonging to the Anishinaabek. She is a writer with over eighty prose publications: in Toronto’s news weekly Now, in The Dominion, and in cultural publications that include Espace, In/Words, Artword, and Matriart. Her poetry has been published in The New Quarterly, Little Blue Marble and several anthologies. Deb is also a visual artist and has a Masters degree in education. Her first book, Can this be School? Fifty years of Democracy at ALPHA was published in October, 2022, by Artword Press.