News Articles
My Mentor, My Friend
BY SANDRA SABATINI
Connie Rooke died on Saturday, Oct. 4. She took a deep breath, and, against all hope, the powerful animating spirit that inspired and challenged everyone who knew her ceased. I'm writing this to commemorate an extraordinary woman and to offer small solace to the ones closest to Connie who feel this loss so intimately and with such dreadful persistence.
Connie was an ardent life partner to Leon and mother to Jonathan; she was a writer, a critic, an innovative administrator, a woman whose book Fear of the Open Heart was compelled into being by her own fearlessness, by her own open, adventurous and commanding heart.
I knew Connie as a mentor and friend. As a U of G undergraduate, I wrote a paper for her based on her directed reading course. She met with me once a week, sometimes over lunch or drinks. She looked at a draft of the paper and asked me a question: “Has no one ever taught you the comma rules?”
I had been working my commas by instinct and doing a fine job, I thought. But no.
She thought the paper was astute and subtle but flawed by an indiscriminate peppering of punctuation. Connie gave me a crash course in the comma. That lesson comes to me whenever I see stargazer lilies, the big pink ones that would as soon eat you as look at you. These lilies presided in a large vase on the glass coffee table in her office, and it was before them and before Connie that I bowed to the demands of the comma.
When I was up to my eyeballs in children, she said: “I envy you.” We were walking away from a first-year English class she had just taught in War Memorial Hall. She had held several hundred students with her gaze and with her language and with her passionate grasp of the issues and the words that conveyed them.
She was walking a little ahead of me. I was pregnant with my fifth child, about to give birth, and I was a new MA candidate. Connie had let me into the program based on one term's performance as a mature student and had hired me to be one of her tutorial assistants. She was walking back to the department in her sharp black trench coat and her blunt blonde hair. I followed her, taking the biggest strides I could. If I could catch up, then maybe I could speak with her. I wish I could see her smile now to hear me admit that this would be the thrill of the day. But it's true. I caught up. We talked.
She said: “I envy you.” She seemed to mean that she envied my large family and messy life.
I said: “I envy you.” I meant that I envied her brilliance, her skill, her gifts, her beauty and her charisma.
She laughed and picked up her pace. She was off to a meeting, and I lost her in the crowd.
Later, on the basis of her recommendation - a recommendation so superlative that I did not recognize myself - I gained entrance to a doctoral program.
As I came to look for faculty positions, I asked her again for a reference. She looked at me over lunch and offered to do all that she could. She said: “I am for you. I am for you.” I have never heard anyone else ever say that to me.
When I sold a book, I wanted to tell her. One year at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, which Connie and Leon founded, Peggy Atwood praised my story to the big crowd. Connie reached across three other people to grab my shoulder, to knead it as though to bruise the moment into my body. Pay attention, she said.
She ate veal. She ordered the best wine. She wore a suit as Armani intended it to be worn. She gave out the best embraces. She kissed you and meant it.
I have heard others speak with eloquence about Connie's administrative initiatives and her 20-year drive to bring into being U of G's MFA in creative writing program, which is turning out to be a marvellous combination of apprenticeship and mentoring that will shape the coming generation of Canadian writers. Former students, colleagues and her peers across the community of writers in PEN - to which she applied the considerable force of her support - also have myriad stories to tell about her advocacy and her friendship. I'm glad for the chance to add mine.
Connie recently sent along a copy of the reference letter she wrote for me. I've said that I didn't recognize myself, but I did recognize her. Her unparalleled capacity for perceiving in people what they most wished were true about themselves. For calling it forth and into being and then for being radiantly surprised to see it. The most imaginative, the most intelligent and the most generous part of you — that's what Connie excavated. You wished to rise to her level. You wished always to catch up.
Editor's note: Sandra Sabatini is the research officer in the College of Arts and author of The One With the News, Making Babies: Infants in Canadian Fiction and The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie.