{"id":20437,"date":"2020-04-18T18:13:39","date_gmt":"2020-04-18T22:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/?p=20437"},"modified":"2020-04-18T19:42:15","modified_gmt":"2020-04-18T23:42:15","slug":"dorothy-nixon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/en\/dorothy-nixon\/","title":{"rendered":"Essayist Dorothy Nixon has a way with words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"western\">Thanks to Dorothy Nixon for a great far-reaching conversation about Canadian history, the suffragettes, a freelance writers\u2019 life and growing up in Montreal during the Expo \u201867 era.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"37: Essayist Dorothy Nixon Has A Way With Words\" width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mixcloud.com\/widget\/iframe\/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2FTraceyArial%2Fessayist-dorothy-nixon-has-a-way-with-words%2F&amp;hide_cover=1\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2>Books<\/h2>\n<p><code><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B00FBWT5JO&amp;linkId=34247a49df7662ad3575541339b6165d&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\">     <\/iframe><\/code><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B00F1GOUVI&amp;linkId=d005ecb6c23132ec2cde33f423ccc7d3&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B00B7A1IXK&amp;linkId=dc585e54ab78272e2b8c8276bb0f5b20&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B00NK4HNR6&amp;linkId=f54882df21a8aaac572cac1afccf1d66&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"> <\/iframe><br \/>\n<iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B00B26UR9U&amp;linkId=328e7341f4be30320bd84f3d1f9cb17a&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B00DT5ZMN8&amp;linkId=7aa054b808ed62f80b17b1f26dc3338d&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><iframe style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/cm?ref=tf_til&amp;t=notablenonfic-20&amp;m=amazon&amp;o=15&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;IS2=1&amp;asins=B01CMHZ2CE&amp;linkId=a96dd6975c25ddf46709052bbf99e525&amp;bc1=000000&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;fc1=333333&amp;lc1=0066c0&amp;bg1=ffffff&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\">     <\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Links<\/h2>\n<p class=\"western\">Links we mention in the interview follow.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Dorothy on Genealogy Ensemble<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/genealogyensemble.com\/2019\/01\/09\/a-stranger-in-his-her-bed-an-audio-drama\/\">A stranger in his bed radio drama<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/genealogyensemble.com\/2019\/03\/13\/biology-and-ambition\/\">Biology or ambition?<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/genealogyensemble.com\/2018\/07\/11\/montreal-movie-mysteries\/\">Montreal Movie Mysteries<\/a><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Dorothy\u2019s Articles Elsewhere<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.edcan.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/EdCan-2007-v47-n4-Nixon.pdf\">Education Canada<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/life\/my-crotchety-grandmother-deciphered\/article955859\/\">Globe and Mail<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hervolution.org\/site2017\/stemspark-meet-geologist-suzanne-karajaberlian-sparked-concern-environment\/\">Herevolution<\/a><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Bobby Gimby\u2019s Expo \u201867 Song<\/h3>\n<p>Listen to the <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/18-oRTLIe3I\">CA NA DA song<\/a> on Youtube.<\/p>\n<p>Read Bill Waiser\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/billwaiser.com\/saskatchewans-bobby-gimby-was-canadas-pied-piper-in-1967\/\">profile of Bobby Gimby<\/a><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\">Transcript of our Conversation<\/h2>\n<p>Tracey: Today we are speaking with Dorothy Nixon, who is a good buddy of mine from the Genealogy Ensemble group. She\u2019s also a long time, author, specializing in women&#8217;s history and suffragettes and Family Nicholson letters and lots of really fun stories. She\u2019s also one of the funniest people in our group, so I\u2019m really looking forward to this conversation. Hi Dorothy<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Hi Tracey. Nice to be here.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: It&#8217;s great to have you. Now you know the question we&#8217;re gonna finish with, but I thought that we would start with you talking a little bit about why you became a writer in how you were started off on this journey that you ve been on. Because you ve been a writer for a very long time. What made you would a writer?<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">How school teachers influence learning<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: Well, i wasn&#8217;t inspired early on. I remember my teachers would always give me good marks because I was a goody goody in school and I would always get an A no matter what, but I remember sending a composition to a so-called external marker and it coming back with a terrible mark, so that would have turned me off. I guess I went to college. Well, it doesn\u2019t take much when you\u2019re young to turn you off anything you want to be.<\/p>\n<p>I went to university and by the third year, I got accepted in the more advanced courses, and I was a very good, although I got only in the B plus in advanced seminar for the third year seminar. I asked the teacher why and he said \u201cyou came in the best writer, you went out the best writer, but you didn&#8217;t learn anything.\u201d I actually took that to heart. I thought that was a very good thing to say. In other words, you&#8217;re here to improve, it\u2019s not a competition. That was Professor Malick, who was Kady Malick\u2019s father.<\/p>\n<p>So then what happened? How did I become a writer. I just couldn\u2019t stop writing. I had to write. It just had to come out&#8230; and I had little kids&#8230;if I was<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: You did live television news for a while, right?<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: I was a production assistant back in the days of live tv where it was very adrenaline inducing. So I really liked that because you had to be on the ball. You&#8217;re watching the time. You&#8217;re telling the person to stretch it or to make it smaller. By the end, your heart\u2019s palpitating. A lot of PAs hated it but I actually liked it. I was also floor manager once in live tv during a telethon and I really enjoyed that. I might have missed my calling in that I might have been very good in these high pressure aspects of tv and radio, but you know what. They don\u2019t exist any more, so it doesn&#8217;t matter. There are no PAs anymore.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Becoming an expert in Edwardian Montreal<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: And you\u2019re an indie writer because you publish all of your books yourself. You were an indie writer before the indie writer term really became sort of well known. You published your Nicholson book&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Well, I guess you do that when no one was interested. It\u2019s just timing. No one was interested. I think maybe twenty years ago had I had them, people would have been interested, but they just weren&#8217;t any more because of the sort of reality of things. English Quebec stories just weren\u2019t appealing. It was really interesting these letters. I had over 300 from the 1908-1913 period, that very pivotal Edwardian era when the automobile changed everything and the Victrola and a lot of immigration. So it was an extremely important era and those letters taught me all about that era. I knew nothing at the beginning. I sensed there was something in them and I researched them to the nth degree, and now I&#8217;m pretty much an expert in Edwardian Montreal. That was lacking in my education history. I d never took history.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Well, in that period is becoming more popular as people realize. I mean I guess it&#8217;s the change of millennium change, the fact that we are in the early part of a new millennium again people like to look at that period as as another time when we were in great technological change.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Exactly and right when I was doing it, Downton Abbey started. There\u2019s always these ups and downs, eh. That&#8217;s the whole thing. Plus \u00e7a change. You have to wonder.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Facing exponential change<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: Except ours is galloping technological change. It isn&#8217;t a few things, like the automobile and the movies. The flickers changing society. It\u2019s like a whole universe of things and its galloping. It&#8217;s a whole different era. Exponential change I would call it.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: But I think that at that point it probably would have looked like exponential change too, but it just wasn&#8217;t because every time you change technology, there&#8217;s there&#8217;s so many more levels of technology that can change.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: I think people don&#8217;t didn&#8217;t see it back then, so they have a big&#8230;the automobile was a toy for wealthy men. The flickers were a fad. They didn&#8217;t realize would change society because people don&#8217;t realize what new things..they can\u2019t see the future. The few who do become very rich.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: I guess that\u2019s true.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Highlighting women<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: Also, many of your stories talk about women, who are also under-represented as a genre really. Can you talk a little bit about why you focused on the stories about women?<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Every genealogist knows that&#8217;s harder finding info about your women ancestors because they were sort of invisible in records and things. So I wrote about women because quite simply, I identified.<\/p>\n<p>I read these letters. This is my husband&#8217;s grandmother and his great aunts. He didn\u2019t know his grandmother but he knew his great aunts. I read it to a friend who said \u201coh, they sound so old-fashioned.\u201d But I didn&#8217;t feel that way at all. I thought they sounded modern. So that&#8217;s why I was intrigued.<\/p>\n<p>Right there, I identified and maybe I would have taken more history classes in college if our history books had had any women characters to identify with.<\/p>\n<p>Because right away, I identified. They were the same as us. They wanted it all. Quite simply, they wanted it all, these young women. They wanted to have work. They wanted to have love. They were hoping for money. They didn&#8217;t necessarily get any, but they had good lives. They had good lives. Because they also had a firm foundation of you work hard and you earn what you get. It\u2019s not going to come to you. So they had a lot of troubles, a lot of economic troubles and health issues and no health insurance and everything, and they still managed to have really good productive lives. So that&#8217;s interesting too and they lived through these wonderful times.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Can you talk about some of your favorite people or favourite person?<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Margaret Nicholson\u2019s Suffragette Support<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: Well it would just be my husband&#8217;s great grandmother, Margaret Nicholson, because she&#8217;s born in 1853. She\u2019s an Isle of Lewis Scot. I have her letter. She&#8217;s devoted. So, in 1913 there\u2019s a lot of letters because her husband, they need the money, has to go work, far away in Cochrane Ontario on the railway and she&#8217;s basically left alone. So it\u2019s hard managing a house in those days. You have to keep it warm. They didn&#8217;t have servants, they didn&#8217;t have any help. Her daughters were away in Montreal studying to be teachers, and one daughter was there, but she was also studying hard. So, she had a rather tough life, but she was just such an interesting woman.<\/p>\n<p>She was for the suffragists, and she wrote about it and arguments with her very conservative relatives. She had big arguments and she would write them down just like a script. \u201cI said this and he said this. I don\u2019t care about Saint Paul. I don\u2019t live in the time of Saint Paul. I don\u2019t milk cows.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Because St. Paul was always brought up by anti-suffragists that women are supposed to live in the home. So she just paints beautiful word pictures sometimes. A lot of the rest of it is a lot of high anxiety too. Because she&#8217;s under a lot of economic stress, she writes things that maybe she wouldn&#8217;t want to write. She often wrote at the end \u201cburn this letter\u201d or \u201cdon&#8217;t let anyone see it\u201d because you\u2019ve got to be careful with letters, right.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: How ironic. A woman who didn\u2019t want her letters read.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: I have a lot. \u201cBurn this letter.\u201d Instead, it\u2019s on the internet. \u201cBurn this letter\u201d because she was talking badly about relatives, which often happens. They had a lot of family feuds.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Wales Home and Automobiles<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: And interesting, she had a huge stress taking care of her own mother, a 92-year-old totally-Gaelic speaker. They were arguing over who was taking care of her, and there was money involved. It isn&#8217;t too longer that in Richmond, Quebec, where these people are from, they started an old age home, and I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if part of the trouble they had with their feuds and problems they had taking care of the mother resulted in the Wales Home because they were friends with Mr. Wales, the tycoon who funded it.<\/p>\n<p>You see some things change and some things stay the same.<\/p>\n<p>She also hated the automobile. The neighbours were all getting automobiles. \u201cMr. Montgomery has an automobile. I don\u2019t want one. They\u2019re dangerous. Who would want one?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of course, she\u2019s saying that because they can&#8217;t afford one so she\u2019s appeasing her husband. And then, of course, what does she do? Any time she gets a chance to get a lift, she gets a lift in the automobile.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s all just a wonderful picture like a movie. Very Downton Abbey. But it\u2019s middle class. Downton Abbey is the rich and the poor but this is the middle class. It\u2019s a totally different thing. The middle class by definition, is insecure. They want to rise up. They want to rise up but they&#8217;re always in danger of sliding down, so the anxiety of the middle class is kind of interesting.<\/p>\n<p>They were well connected, though. That was what kept them afloat, with very good friends, very powerful friends.<\/p>\n<p>So they might have been broke all the time, but with friends like that, it didn&#8217;t matter. So that&#8217;s my favorite character. She was also a feminist.<\/p>\n<p>I also like her because,even though she went to church twice a day as most women did then, she also wrote about dreams and how the dreams were premonitions, so she had a witchy side to her, which is probably some ancient Gaelic thing that filtered down. She talked a lot about her dreams and premonitions, so that\u2019s interesting too.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: What\u2019s interesting when I hear you talk about her, there&#8217;s a few other women that you clearly have no respect whatsoever for. You\u2019re famous for talking about people wasting their lives and being insubstantial. Shopping when a war is going on and things.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Maybe some people were. There are shallow people and hard-working people, and it\u2019s nothing to do with\u2014it\u2019s character, how they were brought up. People generally suffered in silence.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, I know what you\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Social Butterflies of the Times<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: That&#8217;s my husband\u2019s other aunt, who was the first cousin of General MacArthur. My husband\u2019s grandmother was the first cousin of General MacArthur Hardy from Virginia.<\/p>\n<p>They were well-off young ladies, but they were sort of&#8211;their letters. I don&#8217;t see any&#8230;they are not profound people. They were brought up socialites. They were social butterflies. They\u2019re in all the newspapers that they cut it out. So and so visited Saint Louis and was feted by all the right people and she&#8217;s a wonderful ornamental girl. You know the way that socialites&#8230;they were not encouraged to be very deep. These people, because their main job is to find a husband I guess. and nothing else, but it&#8217;s important to have thoughts. I wrote about her in a kind of mock way. Yet it was sure must be unfortunate for them because they\u2019re in a cage.. they couldn&#8217;t and the only thing that breaks them out is some war or something that would stretch and allow them to explore their other power.<\/p>\n<p>They have no kids that\u2019s why I do it. I only make fun of people who didn&#8217;t create any children to make sure that I don\u2019t make fun it anyone&#8217;s grandparents. That\u2019s a point I make too.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Not Bonne Over Here<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: It&#8217;s interesting too. You also did a book about World War I, Not born over here&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: It\u2019s the same family, Not Bonne Over Here. You know why. That&#8217;s a line from a letter from World War I where my husband&#8217;s other great aunt Flora obviously had correspondence with a soldier. You know how they did it. They\u2019re helping the soldier get through. She\u2019s saying she&#8217;s gonna go over and be a nurse and he says \u201cdon&#8217;t come over here. It&#8217;s not bonne over here.\u201d He&#8217;s trying to warn her right, but don&#8217;t come over here. He can&#8217;t give the details, right. It\u2019s not allowed, but \u201cdo not come to the front.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So these letters are\u00a0from, actually continuation from\u00a01913\u00a0to\u00a01919\u00a0and they\u2019re wartime letters. So there were no men in their lives.<\/p>\n<p>There were no direct ancestors who went to war. My husband&#8217;s great uncle didn&#8217;t go to war, although he kept complaining that he might have to, and the grandfather didn\u2019t. He already was forty and had\u00a0three kids. There ware a lot of ways to get out of going to war back then.<\/p>\n<p>But they had a lot of acquaintances who went to war. Many many. Some who lost almost all the sons and if they didn&#8217;t lose the sons to war, they lost their daughters to the flu.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a very sad situation. So I have these letters that talk about\u00a0things\u00a0in the context of everyday life, but they&#8217;re more afraid. They\u2019re building victory gardens. They\u2019re worrying about the war. They\u2019re not pro war on any level, at least the father isn\u2019t. He&#8217;s very anti war. He says \u201call the leaders should just get together and work it out amongst themselves.\u201d He\u2019s very afraid of losing their only son.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Homefront Activities in WWI<\/h3>\n<p>There are sad letters from American relatives who write long long, sad letters about how they lost their son, their favorite son. It\u2019s a lot of different letters and then this everyday housekeeping type thing.<\/p>\n<p>But what you see is the women spend a lot of time\u2014this is my husband&#8217;s great aunt\u2014the women spend a lot of time working for the Victory League. They\u2019re helping soldiers. They\u2019re often nursing sisters. There is constantly, during the war, with their works with their own work as a teacher and, she was a secretary at Sunlife, they went and did a lot of volunteering on almost every front. These young women mostly helped soldiers rehabilitate or whatever, and so you see they had a lot of sense of duty.<\/p>\n<p>But by the end, by the end, it&#8217;s over and then when the war ends it\u2019s like oh we\u2019re going to reupholster our furniture. It\u2019s like it\u2019s all forgotten. And they\u2019re worried rate too about the rising cost of food. Is it really went up, especially their staples like butter.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s an interesting picture of a middle class Quebec family because, yes, the conscription crisis is discussed. It\u2019s how they dealt with war in everyday life without being soldiers with just knowing soldiers. It has it all. It has every aspect . So basically, life went on while it happened. Just life went on. They devoted themselves to volunteer work.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Social History Revealed<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: And reading your stories about these women, you do get not just a sense of a history&#8230; So much about what you write about has to do with different people. It\u2019s really important what you\u2019re talking about because you&#8217;re basically trying to show basic daily life, and so much of what we read in history is about the decisions made by a very few, usually white, men that get us into all into this trouble, but you don&#8217;t see the reaction of the entire population.<\/p>\n<p>The advantage of of focusing on women&#8217;s lives and the day-to-day struggle is that you do see the ramifications of every decision on defence on different levels of people.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: It\u2019s looking at the big picture and little picture and it\u2019s social history and women have been left out. Now of course, in the last little while, there has been more&#8230;people have found usually diaries and letters and diaries that tell the story, but they\u2019re story is was completely overlooked on every level.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s why genealogy so wonderful. If you have letters, it&#8217;s always amazing social history. Almost always, except for my husband.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Essay Writing Advice: It\u2019s not about you<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: Even in the cases where you didn&#8217;t have specific letters, what I like about some of your stories is you take a period of time and then your knowledge about what was happening at the time, in part because of the letters, and then you basically extrapolate what what the person in this situation, probably was thinking or doing, and then you take all of these meeting minutes and combine it all together into a story. Particularly you did that very well with some of the stories of the suffragettes.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Yeah, I can. But first I\u2019ll say that I\u2019ve been an essayist for a long time and it\u2019s very important, and when I write for online\u2014I think I was one of the first paid writers on the net, maybe one of the last too\u2014but it&#8217;s important not to be about you. It\u2019s important even when writing genealogy, it\u2019s not about you or your family, because no one&#8217;s interested. You have to actually find where the political and personal meets for someone to relate to it. As you know as a writer, you&#8217;re, not writing self indulgent.<\/p>\n<p>Editors would often say, well at least you\u2019re not self indulgent, because a lot of people I guess. A lot of people can be and that\u2019s not good. Who wants to read that?<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Suffragettes<\/h3>\n<p>The suffragists was interesting. And I knew nothing about it. They didn&#8217;t teach about that in school. I have Canada and All, a history book from everyone in protestant Canada had for forty years, and it has nothing about them. It has a tiny bit on Laurier with a picture. So basically I knew nothing.<\/p>\n<p>What I knew, was a little bit about what I saw on tv like Upstairs Downstairs. The clich\u00e9s off the BBC.<\/p>\n<p>So, from one letter from Edith Nicholson, his great aunt. In 1913, she wrote to her mother and said:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI&#8217;m going to see Missus Snowden speak, but she is not militant and for this, I am very sad.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That line led me to do an enormous quantities of research. Again I think I&#8217;m pretty expert in this. There&#8217;s one other expert. It\u2019s not a subject many people research.<\/p>\n<p>I studied the suffragists movement in Montreal, which is to say not much of a suffrage movement, to understand that actually, in 1908, one of Missus Pankhert\u2019s militants, Miss Sarah Kenny, came to Montreal because she married a Daily Mail reporter. They got in trouble at a rally, where I think Winston Churchill was, and they had to scoot. They came to Montreal and got married. I discover that.<\/p>\n<p>And then her younger sister Carolyn Kenny came in briefly in 1910 and tried to start a militant movement, but the fact was the Montreal suffrage movement was extremely conservative and very much tied up in the English French politics of the day. So they were very careful. And the leader of the movement was a McGill Professor. And many of the movement&#8217;s leaders were McGill professors, male ones. This is a female one, Carrie Derick. She was savvy.<\/p>\n<p>Again, everything in Quebec is different. So the suffrage movement in Quebec was very different. These women themselves were probably for the militants, but they couldn&#8217;t say it. They had to be careful.<\/p>\n<p>So in Canada, the short of it is in the States and in Britain, the suffrage movement was a very broad movement that encompassed working class, all kinds of people, whereas in Canada, in Montreal, it was just an elite group. So Edith Nicholson, being a secretary at Sunlife who had become a teacher at a private school in Westmount, she was allowed to be for the suffragists, but she wasn&#8217;t allowed to join the movement. They didn&#8217;t want young \u201chysterical women,\u201d women with high ideals. They didn&#8217;t want them coming in and having marches. My God, they would have fainted. Actually, it was Carolyn Kenny who tried to start a march from Montreal to Ottawa.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">England\u2019s Influence on Montreal<\/h3>\n<p>So this was very scary to people. So they were also been ambivalent about Missus Pankhurst. Some people just despised her and hated her and actually Carrie Derick and some women really liked her. And one Montreal woman, the wife of a Westmount businessman, she had gone to England and participated in these rallies, where people were fainting from hunger\u2014the hunger strikes.<\/p>\n<p>So there were some underground suffragettes, who were the militant, but most people were suffragists.<\/p>\n<p>And a lot of that was all about getting women out to vote in municipal elections to keep the French faction out. That\u2019s a whole other thing. So it&#8217;s very complicated business.<\/p>\n<p>Because women with property could vote in municipal elections. So they didn&#8217;t really want women to get the vote nationally, but they wanted them to use it at the city level to keep cities clean. You know from vice, and all that.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s a whole complicated business. What we consider feminist today, these women generally weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>The one woman who would be is a Canadian called Denison and she was a full-fledged suffragists in the way we will think of today. She supported herself. She wrote, she was all for the militants, but she was about the only one in all of Canada.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re confused, it\u2019s confusing business.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: I just know that Quebec as a province got the vote later than the rest of Canada did, and I always wondered why&#8230;and some of your work sort of shows that the family compact, which is, I think, still exist today, basically moderated a lot of these kinds of movements.<\/p>\n<p>One of the things that has also maintained in Quebec is the links between family members. This is one of the places where people are very happy to have conflict and live with it as part of their life and family members keep their influence, even if there is conflict in the family. That&#8217;s what I get from reading your work. I&#8217;m no expert in this area, I just get to read you.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: I have one leter from the Nixon letters, it\u2019s from 1917 and they had a noisy neighbour who also spoke her mind. So apparently they&#8217;re about to give women the federal vote in order so that they\u2019ll vote in conscription, that&#8217;s another thing.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\">Richmond Rally<\/h2>\n<p>So, they&#8217;re having a rally in Richmond Quebec and with the MP from federal and the Quebec MP and my husband&#8217;s great grandmother is there because they are all proud of it because they say they&#8217;re gonna give women the vote federally.<\/p>\n<p>Then one woman, the neighbour, speaks up and says \u201chow come we&#8217;re not getting it provincially either.\u201d which is like rocking the boat and saying a no no. She dared say it. My husband&#8217;s great grandma goes \u201cwe were also so embarrassed\u201d because she wasn&#8217;t supposed to bring up that topic. Then the MP said oh it\u2019s because of the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n<p>He blamed the Catholic Church. He just spluttered and said something.<\/p>\n<p>They weren\u2019t supposed to ask that question. Thanks the whole point. So even though she loved Missus Pankhurst and was a died in the wool suffragette, whe instinctively knew that Quebec politics was different and you weren&#8217;t supposed to ask too many questions just come out for rallies.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\">Conscription Crisis<\/h2>\n<p>In my other book, Service into Service, I wrote about the conscription crisis using lots of newspaper articles. Luckily, Google news archives was on a database, so easy to look it up, and so there I was able to decipher the mess of the conscription crisis and the involvement of the suffragettes, including Carrie Derick a Montrealer across Canada.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, they suffragists were mostly Protestants, so the promise was, you can have the vote as long as you make conscription, because the protestants were already sending their kids to war and they thought everyone else should too. So they wanted conscription, so they fought for conscription so that they can get. It was a partial vote, so it is just another complicated business. Only women with close relatives in the war got to vote. A lot of people thought that wasn&#8217;t exactly democratic. And that was the suffragettes.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: So it was really tied to conscription.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: 100%. That\u2019s why we got it. Some people said well, that&#8217;s not great, but at least we&#8217;ll get it later and they did. Other people said it&#8217;s awful. You\u2019re just trying to get through conscription and you&#8217;re using the vote to get it. You\u2019re gerrymandering. It was of great gerrymandering time. There&#8217;s never been a better example of gerrymandering in Canada than that. And that\u2019s all forgotten.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d never read about that, and then even it was the anniversary when I&#8217;d written the book, a hundred years after. I thought media or other people would be interested. No one was interested. I didn&#8217;t see one tiny story anywhere about it. That\u2019s not the history they want to tell.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: I&#8217;ve never even heard of that before.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: There\u2019s an Ottawa scholar who has written a book about it: mothers of martres.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: So many of us have the Two Solitudes story in our head right. The woman in that one, there&#8217;s one woman, the daughter of the main character, basically reports the son of one of the local french families to the authorities, just emphasizing the English French divide. They didn&#8217;t emphasize the religious divides not just language divides.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: The mayor was also French and they were really concerned. There was a lot in there. Not nice stuff under any circumstances, but what can you do, it was a time and place.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\"><i>Radio Drama<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Tracey: You\u2019ve been continuing to publish books and stories on Genealogy Ensemble about that, but recently, you\u2019ve been exploring some fiction in a really interesting way. You did a fabulous narrative about a husband and wife exploring alzheimers. What got you interested in exploring that topic?<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: What I\u2019ve loved since 2006, BBC Radio 4 came on line and I fell in love with it. I was listening to every story they ever had, and they had a lot of money in those days, so there were new stories every day. So I just fell in love with the genre of radio drama. Not that I was a radio copywriter. Some people say it&#8217;s sort of like a natural extension to be a radio copywriter, which is writing ads for thirty seconds, to writing radio drama. Of course, I think it&#8217;s a huge leap. It takes incredible ability. But anyway, so after 2006 it came on or 2008 perhaps, so I\u2019ve been listening for almost ten years. Now they\u2019re cut back and they have a lot of reruns.<\/p>\n<p>So I decided to try it myself. Radio drama. You know, I would really like to do that. If I could go back in time, I would go back to radio drama. There wasn&#8217;t any. There hasn&#8217;t been radio drama in Canada for a while, even though the CBC at once was a world leader, superior to the British. So it hasn&#8217;t been a popular genre, but in England, it&#8217;s still a very popular genre.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the best dramas, some of the best art I&#8217;ve heard in any genre has come from the BBC radio plays. They are just fantastic. Mind-bendingly so. There was one the Idiot, an adaptation of Dostoevskys \u201cthe Idiot\u201d came from that. That among many others. It was just the best thing. It gave me great pleasure for ten years.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Well I remember when Peter Gzowski, when his show was on, there were a lot of radio dramas. Stuart Mclean made his mark on that. There was also a mystery series I used to love and I think that that ended up creating Murdoch Mysteries, because it was very close to that and by the same writer.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: The British admit that the Canadians were better at it. I have a number of books by British writers that say that Canadian radio drama was A number 1.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: I\u2019m looking forward to your podcast exploring that side of things. I am exploring profiles, but we definitely could use some more radio drama. Your initial example of that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: You mean my little reference on Genealogy Ensemble.com\u2014I just produced it myself. There were no actors and then direct them. When I worked in radio, I wrote the ads and there were people there who were very creative and they would after hours use the facilities to put on silly little radio dramas, radio comedies usually, that often played on the tv. These people went on to work on in writing shows, but I wasn&#8217;t that creative. I wasn&#8217;t part of that group, so I didn&#8217;t get to do it.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: You sill have time. I think it was fabulous.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Thank you very much. You know. I feel that way too. You still have time. Why should you stop trying to do something? What do you want to do or learn something. I\u2019m all for it and I still have time.<\/p>\n<p>But I need to get my husband on board because he\u2019s a technician and he\u2019d be able to help me, but he\u2019s not that keen. Imagine that. It\u2019s me.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Well, he\u2019s also relatively newly retired, so he might be in that honeymoon retirement stage where you don\u2019t want to do much from what I\u2019m told.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: He wants to hammer. That\u2019s all. Hammer floors and hammer things. He doesn\u2019t want to work in what he used to work in, that\u2019s tv editing. He doesn\u2019t want to do that.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I\u2019ll figure out a way and besides there are so many devices and apps so there will be something that will be idiot proof so I\u2019ll be able to use it.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Well I&#8217;m looking forward to it and I\u2019ll definitely link to that show, the radio drama that you wrote, in the show notes because I think it\u2019s worth hearing. It made me&#8230;what I liked about it is it pulled us into the moment of people dealing with these kinds of issues like most of your stories do. You&#8217;re very good at pulling us into a particular moment in time.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Creating Fiction from True Anecdotes<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: Well, I took it from one anecdote where my father\u2019s grandfather woke up one day and looked at his wife and said \u201cwoman what are you doing in my bed?\u201d and it\u2019s been a family myth. Funny, but not funny because you\u2019re got Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>And then I could use\u2014because my own father got Alzheimer&#8217;s\u2014so I got first hand experience. So I tried to use that kind of experience to figure out how it she they might have felt. Like she&#8217;s me. How I felt with my father is how my character feels with her husband. So confused and upset. Depressed and trying to laugh at the same time because you have to keep your self sane.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s why I think, maybe I achieved something good there, because I had experience with it.<\/p>\n<p>And plus you get to put in geology information. That&#8217;s why try to &#8230;All the genealogy information is in there. While they&#8217;re talking, I&#8217;m explaining what I have learned, from the internet usually, about these ancestors that I knew nothing about. My father probably knew nothing about, except their names. So that&#8217;s interesting too. These ones specifically were in Cumberland.<\/p>\n<p>So I try to do that\u2014mix the story with the information. But I think I&#8217;m better at the information. It\u2019s hard to write a good story. It\u2019s hard to be a storyteller, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: It is. That is the big challenge of it. I&#8217;m also a researcher type writer. Telling the story is the first point or people don&#8217;t get the rest of it. I just think that that&#8217;s a craft that you just have to develope for your entire life.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Growing through Genealogy Ensemble<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: It&#8217;s it&#8217;s a wonder. Some people are naturally good at that side and they\u2019re not so good at the research side. That&#8217;s why our group&#8230;Actually we should like a little bit about our group. It\u2019s so invigorating to have so many different&#8230;we\u2019ve got nine women with very different skills all connected together. We meet once a month. Can you talk a little bit about how you feel about that group?<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: As a writer you\u2019re told to take a lot of courses, so I\u2019ve been in quite a few writing groups. I\u2019ve never been in one like this. One where everyone is so talented, but actually where they grew, thanks in large part to you and Janice, the leaders, how they grew in their writing.<\/p>\n<p>Then once they grew in their writing, they started to express their own personalities unabashedly. So you get so many different styles. So some people are&#8230;like Lucy is so creative because she&#8217;s a creative person coming out with a new way to say something- and it\u2019s just wonderful. Sandra always does perfect stories that mix the big picture with the little picture, the political with the personal. But she\u2019s very succinct, and that\u2019s because of her business background I guess. I try to do that but I go on and on and on.<\/p>\n<p>I find that every month when I read the stories, I just enjoy them all. They\u2019re all fantastic social history. Marian who wrote about her time in the RAF in the sixties. Fascinating. I didn&#8217;t know about that. I didn&#8217;t know that girls were not just running around with miniskirts and go go boots, but some of them were actually entering the military and learning life skills that will help them have jobs the rest of their lives. That\u2019s fantastic.<\/p>\n<p>I learn so much and I love learning, right? Writers tend to want to learn a lot. So I&#8217;ve learned so much and it\u2019s all interesting. I think everyone should be interested.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><b>Future of History Writing<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: Well, and because all of us are such strong writers now, every week you have basically a bunch of different stories&#8230;all of them are historical, we\u2019re all obviously history buffs, but they&#8217;re so different. Some people are exploring fiction. We\u2019ve had poems. We ve had &#8230;we have some beautiful&#8230;.Then just the asides. Barb is one of the women leaders in DKG and we\u2019ve been hearing about her experiences. You just get the many different facets of what being a woman in Canada today is. I just think that\u2019s fascinating as well.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: We\u2019re totally enriched. We\u2019re enriched and\u2014okay, there\u2019s lots of info on the Internet but this group has totally educated each other. We\u2019ve enriched each others\u2019 lives with funny stories and interesting anecdotes and I never knew that. I love it. What a great way to learn. What a great way to grow. To have a club like we have.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Because we\u2019re sharing our stories every single week on the Internet as well, we\u2019re actually working on what it means to try and express things that are very important to us personally in a way that will encourage other readers to be interested as well. So I think, we\u2019re part of a wave of new history writing.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: That might be true. That might be exactly true. My books are used\u2014it\u2019s not everyday people who read my books. No one cares, but academics who use them. I\u2019ve seen them in reports and all kinds of things cited. That\u2019s who uses my books. It isn\u2019t that they don\u2019t think of them as useless because she&#8217;s not an academic. They actually find them interesting. So the same with all our stories. People will use our stories to build up their bodies of knowledge. No question.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: And people who are just looking into trying \u201cwhat do I do with my family history research\u201d by trying to turn it into a story, you become a better researcher more than anything else.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Genealogy in Schools<\/h3>\n<p>Dorothy: And you\u2019re invested. One of the reasons this group has grown so much is that people are really invested in their stories. If every student were as invested in their stories as we were, everyone would come out of school a great writer. We care about it and we work hard on it.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Part of it is trying to connect people with something that they care about first and then getting them to write about that. That&#8217;s not necessarily easy to do.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Yeah, it\u2019s very hard. Genealogy writing is perfect for that. It\u2019s ideal. And I think they have explored in schools having kids write about their ancestors. To mixed results I guess. No time either.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Actually the hundredth anniversary of World War I helped with that a lot. I saw some fabulous research projects coming out of schools, because people took on individual soldiers or a classroom would take one particular unit or something. I&#8217;m hoping that that kind of historical classroom management continues because it certainly has been interesting to read as an outsider.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Yeah, that would be interesting. You\u2019d have to get it on the curriculum.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Family Essays and Satire<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey; Before we get to my final question, which talks about you as a Canadian, was there anything about your body of work that we didn\u2019t get to discuss, because I know that you\u2019ve done a lot of things that I might not be familiar with.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: No we did well.<\/p>\n<p>When I first started writing for the internet in 1997, I wrote family essays. I used to write movie reviews from a kid\u2019s point of view and family essays. Then that parlayed into work for Chatelaine. I did both humour essays and both \u201cstatistic anecdote\u201d essays. I prefer doing the humour ones, they\u2019re easier. They\u2019re easier in that I like doing them so I work on them while I upset somebody. And then you see the lonely freelance writer without insurance. I got myself in hot water a couple of times. Half the people love it and half the people, oh my gosh.<\/p>\n<p>So, I don\u2019t do it. I did a little bit and then I stopped. So humour essays. Another thing I used to write were satirical essays. I convinced Chatelaine or Today\u2019s Parent to write satirical, but they don\u2019t go over well here because people don\u2019t understand satire. I\u2019d write something I\u2019d think was funny&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: They thought it was true. Oh no..<\/p>\n<p class=\"western\">Dorothy: That\u2019s why they are reluctant to print satire without writing satire over the front page so people get it. Then they get people all mad at them. So, I used to like that. You have to be versatile, Tracey, to be a freelance writer, especially in Quebec. You have to be versatile.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Yeah, that\u2019s just the nature of the beast too, it\u2019s true. Actually, my husband says that there should be a satire meter or an irony meter, so that people actually know what it is they\u2019re reading.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Johnathan Swift\u2014off the charts. It\u2019s very weird when you think about it. I wrote for Salon.com too. I wrote some satirical essays there and should have continued. I had a chance to continue with them, but I was in a bad space. I didn\u2019t want to deal with the American taxes.<\/p>\n<p>That was around the 2000s. I was very prolific then because my kids were old enough so that I could get some work done.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s basically it. I\u2019ve done everything in writing because I have too.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: I hope you\u2019ll also explore that in future as well because you\u2019re definitely the comedienne amongst us.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Oh I\u2019m not alone. Mary has a droll sense of humour. It\u2019s more subdued but she\u2019s funny.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: It\u2019s always entertaining too.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Dorothy identifies as Canadian<\/h3>\n<p>Tracey: The final question as you know is \u201cdo you consider yourself a Canadian and if so, what does that mean to you?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: I do. I consider myself a Canadian. Although I grew up I had a British father, a French Canadian mother, I didn&#8217;t identify with either of those groups.<\/p>\n<p>I just I was a Canadian. On my street were people from India and Colombia, all kinds. It was kind of a mixed street for some reason in Snowden, and so I got to meet people from all over.<\/p>\n<p>My classes was I would say mostly Jewish, and Greek, all kinds of people, so we were just Canadians.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Expo \u201867<\/h3>\n<p>It was also the era of Bobby Gimby and Expo 67 where patriotism was, especially in the schools, was being promoted. I still get chills when I hear that Canada song. We used to sing \u201cCA NA DA. One little too little three Canadians.<\/p>\n<p>Then there was Expo \u201867, the best year of my life. I spent more time there than at school. My teachers said I could. It was amazing. Twelve is a very impressionable age, so I got stamped with that kind of Canadianness&#8211;Centennial Year Canadianess. So I have to say I am. That\u2019s why I feel that I\u2019m Canadian and nothing else really.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Thank you very much. I really appreciate exploring your body of work with you and I look forward to seeing you at the next writers\u2019 group meeting.<\/p>\n<p>Dorothy: Yes, see you then. Thank you.<\/p>\n<p>Tracey: Thank you for listening to unapologetically Canadian.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\">Select Membership Available<\/h3>\n<p>Please consider supporting our podcast for $2.99 U.S. per month by joining <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mixcloud.com\/TraceyArial\/select\/\">Mixcloud Select<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Select listeners get early access to podcasts and additional episodes every month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Dorothy Nixon for a great far-reaching conversation about Canadian history, the suffragettes, a freelance writers\u2019 life and growing up in Montreal during the Expo \u201867 era. Books &nbsp; Links Links we mention in the interview follow. Dorothy on Genealogy Ensemble A stranger in his bed radio drama Biology or ambition? Montreal Movie Mysteries [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1028,8,893,17],"tags":[1165,1162,1166,1163,1164,1161],"class_list":["post-20437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-entrepreneur-adventures","category-history-worth-remembering","category-unapologetically-canadian","category-writing","tag-anecdotes","tag-edwardian-montreal","tag-essay","tag-expo-67","tag-fiction","tag-suffragette","post-wrapper","thrv_wrapper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20437"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20480,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20437\/revisions\/20480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyarial.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}