Ruth had recently retired as a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto and, at 62, was determined to make just as successful a career out of poetry. She was erudite, vibrant, cosmopolitan, and a Rhodes scholar. At that time, I had taken only a few college courses and had spent most of my adult life raising my children in a northern rural community. At one point she called me an autodidact, and I had to ask her what the word meant. But this didn’t faze Ruth. In those first few days, intimidated by her worldliness, I tried to avoid her, but she seemed to have found something in me worth paying attention to, and her indomitable, generous spirit and her absolute candor and ebullience had her phoning me regularly once the program was over. I will be forever grateful.
Sometimes Ruth would phone because she was feeling anxious about not writing or publishing as much as she’d hoped, but by the time she’d published her final book in 2018, she had published six trade books (one of which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award), several chapbooks, had co-edited a number of poetry anthologies, been part of collaborative book projects, and edited I Found it at the Movies, a collection of poems inspired by film. Her production level seemed, if anything, to speed up as time passed. Between 2014 and 2018, she was publishing, by my count, one trade book or chapbook each year.
While we kept in touch by phone, for many years we also managed to meet up in person, sometimes in Toronto, or St. Peter’s Abbey, or New York. We would return twice more to the Banff writing programs together, and she would come to northeast BC several times to visit and to read. I held my inaugural poetry salon in 2011 when Ruth came to launch a new book, and Wayne built her a podium still known as Ruth’s.
Ruth loved fashion – she would tell me that if her dissertation students asked for advice in defending their PhD, she would say, “Wardrobe, wardrobe, wardrobe.” Once, my daughter and I went to an opera at the Lincoln Centre in New York with Ruth. I had nothing suitable to wear, so Ruth lent me one of her outfits along with her John Fluevog shoes.
Twenty years my senior, I would often tease her that had we been the same age and met when we were young, we wouldn’t have been friends because I would never have been able to keep up with her. It was probably more truth than joke.
Ruth introduced me to prosecco and whenever I have something to celebrate and, sometimes, even when I don’t, I buy a bottle. Whenever I do, I salute Ruth.
Distinguished scholar, magnificent poet, film buff, world traveler, lover of opera and theatre, delighting in each and every day’s potential, most generous friend, and so much more, is gone. But I have only to think of Ruth and her vitality, her generosity, her ebullient love for life and I feel her presence. Salut!
Donna Kane is a writer who divides her time between Rolla, BC on Treaty 8 Territory and Halifax, NS in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people. She is the author of four books of poetry and a book of nonfiction.
Photo credit for Donna and Ruth image: Wayne Sawchuk
