A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency. Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money. Young women in Canada in my grandmothers’ era had little choice but to attach themselves to a man for economic survival. I see that truth in my 17-year-old Romanian grandmother’s sad eyes in her wedding-day photo, married off rather scandalously to a Chinese man in Moose Jaw, Sask. while the rest of her family hived off to Alberta with one less mouth to feed. I feel it in my heart for my 27-year-old grandmother, leaving children and home country behind to travel to Canada for a better future with a man married to her sister just months before, only to be abruptly paired with her after sister and babe died in childbirth.  I’m overwhelmed by it as I learn the tragic story of my third grandmother, whose intellectual disability left her like a lamb to the wolves. It’s still tough to be a woman, bu...

On this night 50 years ago, I was preparing for my wedding the next day. I was barely two weeks past my 17th birthday. What was on my mind that evening? No recollection. I know I wasn’t scared or sad – then and now, I’ve always been up for an adventure, and I’d been eager to get out of my parents’ house for at least a couple of years by that point. (They were good people, but I so desperately wanted independence.) My memories of the weeks around the wedding are like snapshots more than anything. I remember a glimpse of this, a few seconds of that. It’s never big stuff I recall, just these quirky little bits that linger. Me enjoying the fuss of all the big community bridal showers that a girl got when she married a Cumberland boy in those years. Cakes shaped and iced like a Barbie doll's ball gown. Me in the mirror for the first time in my wedding dress, appreciating its low cut. The purple everything in the honeymoon suite of the Port Augusta Motel. Us splurging for two nights in t...

I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for almost 20 years now, but people still pay me to go find things out. I have a habit of finding way more information than the person who hired me wanted, the curse of a curious nature.  Here's some of the surplus I've accumulated recently from some of that work, all of it related to the multiple layers of social crises we're seeing emerging in virtually every BC community. I drive along 900-block Pandora Street sometimes and am at a loss to grasp just what the hell is happening to us, but when I consider all the snippets of social tragedy below, it makes a very, very sad kind of sense.  For instance: We shut down institutions and never really replaced them with much Riverview Hospital used to be BC’s largest mental institution, housing 4,300 people at its peak in the 1950s. But by the early 1990s, locking up people deemed "mentally disordered" for indefinite periods of time, with or without their consent, had fall...

  My partner and I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for almost five years doing Cuso International development work in the 2010s. I concluded very quickly that if ever there was an apocalypse, I’d want to go through it with a small-town Central American at my side. I’m feeling that more than ever in these eye-opening days of global reckoning. Time and again during the period we lived there, I saw people in those countries come through with a quick fix for whatever unexpected weird thing had just happened. It was an ingenuity borne of centuries of certainty that nobody was coming to fix their problems. They stepped up with little hesitation to help random strangers with their problems, too, because they knew a time would come soon enough when they’d need strangers to step up for them. It’s not just a nice thing to do down there, it’s smart and strategic. You need to be ready for anything, and living in a permanent state of pay-it-forward. One day, the car we were in broke dow...

Virtually every day, I go out on a dog walk and start putting together the start of a blog post in my head. But I never get them written. It’s not so much writer’s block getting in my way as a feeling of pointlessness. My schtick is persuasive writing, which I had the great pleasure of doing for almost a decade in Victoria’s daily newspaper as a columnist and editorial writer back before I gave it all up for a chance to get closer to the action on social-justice issues. Now I do communications work and lots of writing for non-profits with noble visions of a better world, because I want to be doing that, too. The draw of persuasive writing as a tool for social change, however, is the presumption that there are people out there open to being persuaded. It’s a means of bringing important things to people’s attention and maybe shifting their thinking a little. It did used to feel like that was possible in years past. Yes, people who hated what I had to say would phone (and later email) fro...