Some Kinda Woman! Stories of Us

"Maybe my story can be a tiny beam of light in a large, dark cave," says Anneke Lucas in the podcast that begins to tell her story, from her book QUEST FOR LOVE. "Elite pedophilia is the world's best protected secret.  

Your eyes cannot help but see what is here: the sight of someone like yourself And then you think: How can this be? Is that really all the time there is left? A chance encounter in the dark winter days of December 2022. A benevolent energy in a hospital room with snaking tubes and mystery signs, the face of a newborn and a lifetime of important people. All gathering for Sebastian. Except for the visitor, who is missing the opportunity to connect.  

Naïve but adventurous, twenty-two years young and fresh out of university, Public Health Nurse Marion McKinnon accepts an assignment for a four day, multi stop, two-hundred mile trip from Williams Lake to Anahim Lake into the vast Cariboo-Chilcotin country of British Columbia. It's December and the first snow has fallen across the land. The year is 1963. The weather forecast: twenty-two degrees below freezing. The view is breathtaking and the roads treacherous. And what if she gets lost? Or skids into a snowbank? In 1963, Marion is on her own in the wild but beautiful country, deep in winter - no cell phone, no two way radio. Just a chocolate bar and a candle . . . and the enthusiasm of her youth.

A flight attendant with 25 years seniority works through the early pandemic. An essential worker with close family ties and lots of friends. Suddenly, her life is upended.

BC author Claudia Cornwall's discovered almost 30 years ago that she was descended from family murdered in the Holocaust by a Waffen SS Sargent named Arlt. The remaining details were shrouded in the mystery of her grandparents' last moments, one historical May day in a forest in Minsk. 80 years after their death, Cornwall received their executioner's first name, his photograph. And many unanswered questions.  

What happens to a robust 49-year old  with Omicron in a BC hospital in 31 days? A Mother's account of her son's care in a British Columbia hospital between November 2021, and a few days before Christmas.

At 19 weeks pregnant, a young Indigenous woman must make an excruciating decision - within hours - to save the lives of her unborn twins. "I remember being so afraid." This story has it all: fear, love, pain and alienation. Courage, community, and resilience. A generous, joyful storyteller.

Forever changed by her two pregnancies, Amanda Snelson tells of the unpredictable and complicated process of 2 births. As part of the discussion around Women's Choice and Roe v Wade, Amanda's story introduces new considerations to the complex picture of individual soverignty over our bodies.

My Mother's Story is a project that encourages everyone to write the facts of their mothers' lives. It's a series of anthologies begun by Marilyn Norry. This is the story of DORIS, told by her daughter, Colleen Winton. My Mother's Story: Gone Too Soon is the latest anthology in the series and is now available.

How would your life be different if you couldn't drive a car? If once a week, a steamship arrived at the dock with supplies to keep you going for the next week? If your husband and the father of your children came home on "The Daddy Boat" once a week? Cynthia Jones Meets The Union Steamship at 1 AM tells of a much simpler time on the Sunshine Coast - when anyone could go out in a sabot and grab a fish with her bare hands, when hospitals were miles from each other, when most lived in float houses by the light of a kerosene lamp.

It's 1980, two days from the summer solstice in the wild landscape of Northwestern British Columbia. Deanna and her husband, Jay Kawatski, tend their food garden carved out of the wilderness in the Ningunsaw Valley when Deanna realizes that their first child will be born very soon. The couple must hike difficult mountain & bog terrain through clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes for more than two hours to their cabin on Desire Lake. Deanna's water breaks and she instantly goes into labour. This is the story of their unattended birth, heralded by a family of loons who serenaded them throughout the night.

We Got One! celebrates moments that, whatever else happens in life afterwards, we have, as artists, in those moments, all the meaning we will ever need.  It marks the Cinderella achievement of having been chosen, of having hit the bulls-eye on the dartboard of current social and artistic reality. We can now stand on the world stage and beam our happiness that we matter.

A magical story of friendship & creativity in a beautiful small town that inspired the creation of all Christmas songs & carols ever written. Two girls, a friendship over the years revisited on a dangerous frozen lake Christmas Eve. With musical backdrop of a jazz vocal quartet from The Sunshine Coast of BC - After Hours. A limited time broadcast / podcast celebrating the light at the Winter Solstice. 

CHRISTMAS IN CORNUCOPIA, the popular winter story about a town so beautiful it inspired songs and stories since 'time immemorial' will be made available as a podcast beginning on The Winter Solstice -- December 21st 2021 through Christmas Day, to celebrate the Winter Solstice and to bring light into our lives at the end of this Year of the Pandemic.   The story toured British Columbia and Washington state to excellent reviews, and was broadcast on CBC national and regional radio numerous times. This recording features beautiful four-part harmonies by After Hours, a Sunshine Coast vocal jazz quartet, singing Christmas favourites in and out as background to the story.

Six Palm Trees is the journey of a family through the emotional landscape of their shared past. Annie Shea, the family clown, provides stand-up entertainment.Annie Shea, the family clown, provides stand-up entertainment. Annie Shea, the family clown, provides stand-up entertainment  at a family reunion, where everyone has gathered to celebrate 24 years of life together.  “Funny and sad, powerful and whimsical, with mercurial mood changes and punchy humour. . . Six Palm Trees is more than a trip down memory lane . . it is a play (about) the price one woman paid to bear and raise 14 children. . . jewel of a play.”                        -The Sooke Standard, Vancouver Island, B.C. “A touching contrast between the comedy of sibling rivalry and the struggle for individual recognition in a large family.”                                     -CHQM - Vancouver

High school graduate Teresa Feeney becomes pregnant from one encounter with a trusted priest Father Sully, who is leading a choir of students in a showcase of songs from the radical hippie production of HAIR. Annie Shea, herself from an enormous Catholic family where abortion is unthinkable, reluctantly becomes Teresa's confidante. When Annie realizes Teresa is going to do what she desperately needs to do, she has to make a decision: Will she stand by her schoolmate and offer support during this dangerous, illegal procedure? 

What if you suddenly discovered that you had a twin?  A person who grew beside you in your mother's womb, whose heart beat right next to your own for nine months. A person identical to yourself, born on the same day to the same mother. Suddenly, your questions are endless: Who are you? Where is she?

Your father - a threat to national security? Imagine when men in heavy boots came to your home, your garden, to claim him.  An introduction to the story of a family, during World War II, living with the abrupt loss and the mystery of their father. 

"This morning, Lisa gave way to an anxiety she'd been stifling the past several weeks. She was afraid if she got behind the wheel of her red Toyota Tercel wagon, and drove onto the highway, she was going to give into the temptation she'd had lately to steer herself into a telephone pole."

Gramma Ester flies from Wisconsin to California to help with a big family wedding in 1976. Flowers, frozen turkey, chocolate groom's cake. Guests fill the church with summer: pastels and hats, ties and shiny shoes. The congregation murmuring, waits. And waits. If the music would just start to play, if the bride would just walk up the aisle on Daddy's arm, everything else would be vanquished into fairy tale.  Finally, our mother: we can feel her slow step as she lifts each foot with all her available life force. How could we be losing her like this? 

A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE = a big Catholic family 1963 in Pasadena. Chapter 7 is set on a warm California night at an enormous event: dinner. Clashing are the noisy and urgent desires of each child in a sprawling group of sixteen. Everyone is famished. And then, there’s the guest. Who represents everything. God, Church, Community, Family. Everyone vying for his attention and approval. Pre-dinner hunger permeating the visceral experience of more than fifteen bodies, a baby with a dirty diaper in the play pen, and the smoking barbeque outside.  And then, decades later, my brother brings me back to that haunting event. 

Before Gramma Ester was Gramma, when she was just a little six- year-old girl, in first grade, she had a crush on a family friend named Walter Gaulke (who was 13 years older). She carried this secret hope in her heart for almost two decades before she could have the moment with her sweetheart that she wished for all her life. And yet that moment quickly passed, and their story was lived and told, as you’ll hear in today’s podcast. 

I ached for them, and for the nearby ultimate loss I anticipated feeling when they died. But I brushed it aside, because it wasn’t my issue right then. Far from it: we were on opposite trajectories and I was so excited about mine: getting ready to go into the world!

What is it about this story? The benign nature of the tanning salon? The casual event of some man walking in the front door? The front-desk training, Be friendly, smile at the customers?   What was so haunting?The kindness on her beautiful face? Or was it the closeness of his face right up against the cash machine? It was 1995. It happened in our suburban backyard. We had just met Melanie Carpenter on the worst day of her life. Images and stories of her were all over the news. She was beautiful and she was missing, and we couldn't get enough. We prayed to anyone who would listen: Please, please let her be alive!

Sharky died on the same day the pope died, and two days after Terri Schaivo was finally allowed to. Even though, as the Dalai Lama says, we all suffer and are going to die someday, there never seems to be a good day to die. As we slid him out of a shoe box into a hastily-dug hole out in the daisy garden under a dark sky and a pelting spring rain, I imagined that runty bag of cat bones drifting along in Bardo-land with the souls of Pope John Paul II and Terri Shaivo.  How evolved were those three souls? Would they be searching for a couple in love into whose embrace they would be born again?

And out of his comfortable life. It happens in an instant. A deafening clap assaults his ears. It takes a second, but George rallies. He can see he's the only one who has stepped into the intersection, so he must be the one. He puts his other foot forward. 

In 1983, I left my husband, my home, my friends, my family and my country to live with my lover, an artist from Toronto. In the months while waiting for his divorce to come through, we produced a show there, the first Canadian production of LETTERS HOME, by Rose Leiman Goldemberg. It was the story of Sylvia Plath's life from 1950 to 1963, when she committed suicide.  In this production, I performed the role of Sylvia, who was 31 when she died. A week after the show closed at The Adelaide Court Theatre in Toronto, Ted Hughes, Sylvia's husband at the time of her death, now the Poet Laureate of England, was the guest of honour at the 5th International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. At this event, with hundreds of fans in line to get his autograph, I am somehow sitting next to him. How did it happen, after this spectacular coincidence, that Ted Hughes, in an auditorium full of fans, wrote a poem for me on the back of a ticket? This is the story of that night. Of that meeting. Of that poem.

This story features Zoe, a 'spark plug' who works with her father at a used car dealership near Niagara Falls. On this fateful day, Lenny comes to the lot to buy a jalopy. Lenny and Zoe are on the same hockey team -- both dream of following in the wake of other daredevils, who made history trying to outwit the roaring strength  of Niagara Falls.  Who goes over? Who lives to tell the tale? 

It's June 15th, 1963 in Pasadena, California. Yesterday, school let out for the summer. Two weeks ago Pope John XXIII died; today, a Soviet astronaut was launched into space. But for the enormous Shea family, it's the Grand Opening of SHEA FAMILY MOTORS and everyone is there. From pimply John-the-Blimp to Baby Jude to a statue of the Blessed Mother. The twins look green & uncomfortable, their hands smeared with the sugar of doughnuts meant for the customers. Paul & John discover the switch that made the car lift up & down in the bay. Annie wants to sell the shiny new Ambassador to Mr. Krowlakowski. From A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE

"Can you imagine how many kids get left behind at Disneyland every year? There have to be a few of them. Among all those hundreds of cars in the parking lot, there's probably enough to form a club. Maybe the club could be called "The Left Behinds" or "Disney Orphans". How many of the stories could possibly have a happy ending? "The weird part is, when we lost Dominic, it was hours before we even realized he was gone." - From the novel/audiobook, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, by Caitlin Hicks, excerpted here 

Once we understand the astounding lottery of our own existence, how can we acknowledge our infinite disappearance? A story of two lives lived, the music between, and the sound of a mother's voice. 

CORNUCOPIA begins with "In everyone's life, there are magic times!" and traces a child's love for ice skating back to a moonlit moment on a dangerous frozen lake on Christmas Eve. An ode to creativity, in a town that was so beautiful that Christmas carols and stories were inspired by its magnificence 'since time immemorial', the story reaches back into the hologram of childhood, where best friend Marnie loved drumming, but was not encouraged by her family to play. Both girls become women as the town changes and they follow their separate fates, only to be reunited on the same dangerous, frozen lake of Christmas Present. Also heard on CBC national radio.

Preview of our special broadcast of Christmas in Cornucopia, on Monday December 21st, all day. This story which has toured British Columbia and Washington state, and celebrated on CBC national radio, will be available for download for 24 hours at caitlinhicks.com/wordpress/podcast and wherever you find your podcasts. An ode to creativity & the distant hologram of childhood. 

An everyday interaction with profound reverberations. An almost-missed opportunity. Life, circumstance, death. How do we find our meaning? 

Annie Shea, 12 yrs old trapped in an enormous Catholic family in Pasadena, California in 1963. In this excerpt, Annie & her sisters Madcap & Clara visit Bee Bee. Just yesterday, Bee Bee gave birth to a baby girl, and was pressured to sign adoption papers. Now she desperately wants to see her newborn. Annie is sent to scout the nursery and meets a couple who meet their child for the first time. 

Chapter One of A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, the award-winning debut novel written by Caitlin Hicks.  Reviews here: https://www.caitlinhicks.com/wordpress/reviews-for-a-theory-of-expanded-love/

A parent disinherits his beloved child. Or so the child believes she is beloved. Where does it begin, the decision to punish someone irrevocably? How forms this secret betrayal of forever with lasting,  public consequences? Where does it begin, the chain of events that bring about a reversal of fortune? A denial of love?  In this podcast, "Exit, Stage Left", a daughter looks back to understand why her father cut her out of his will -- and finds instead, the person she has become. 

How can you capture the life of a man? Especially the patriarch of a family with 14 children and 42 grandchildren. It's in the DNA, it in the details!

What a relief, my father is still alive! Of course, I forgive him everything. 

My enormous family. My ailing father. In the midst of a trip to France & Italy and an opportunity of a lifetime for my artist husband — with news coming in via email daily from my siblings — "he’s going to die"  "he’s better!" "he’s had a setback" — I struggle to decide: Should I cut our trip short to be present for my father’s final moments? Or follow our destiny to fulfill the invitation to exhibit at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games — and hope he lives through the night? On trains, buses, planes and taxis, memory and meaning bring past and present together.    

The patriarch of an enormous Catholic family turns 88 with children & grandchildren celebrating him. Details of a family still intact just prior to the family's demise are captured through the lens of one child, returning after years of absence. "Here, as long as the rules were obeyed, the world was kept at bay. 'Say grace, stack the dishes, don't forget to say 'Eternal Rest''.' As if we were still children, as if we, too, were safe from life's inevitability, and the universe still in its rightful order. . ."

In 1961, an enormous family crowds into their VW bus to go to Disneyland. In the midst of the magic and chaos, the sixth child attracts a moment of attention from her mother, a moment that lasts the distance of galaxies.    SEASON#5: A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE

Meet Karissa Williams, a resilient woman who loses a baby at 13, and gives birth at 15 while trapped in an abusive relationship with an addict & drug dealer. When she tries to escape through suicide she is literally saved by her child. She marries a ‘great guy - he doesn’t beat me’ - and gains more than a hundred pounds. Soon she  loses her self-respect and her mother to cancer. Finding a way through it all, Karissa discovers her own strength  and in the process empowers women to live their best life possible. An inspirational story. 

A journey towards an awareness of racism: On the night of the assassination of RFK, and through the eyes of 17-year-old Annie Shea, a Catholic high school white girl from a conservative family, who sneaks out to volunteer for Robert Kennedy's campaign for presidency, we see her awakening to the racism all around her,  invisible to her until this fateful trip in the back of a police car. Annie has fallen in love with a talented black dancer and singer named Lucas who stars in a local production of HAIR, and through her love for him, we see a glimpse of what it means to be black in Los Angeles in 1968. The excerpt is taken from KENNEDY GIRL, a new novel by Caitlin Hicks.

White, Catholic high school senior Annie Shea, who sneaks out of her enormous Catholic family to volunteer for Robert Kennedy's campaign for President in 1968. In this podcast, Change Gonna Come, it's the day Martin Luther King Jr. is murdered. At the Wilshire Boulevard offices of KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT campaign, Annie begins her awakening to the powerful racist forces that drive white society in 1968.

The year is 1983. Meet Karen, a successful commodities trader at The Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the mistress of Sam, a high-stakes market maker and billionaire trader in the S & P 500 pit. Meet Dorothy, Sam's wife, and the mother of their twin daughters. These two women are the last guests at a lavish, decadent party at Dorothy and Sam's home. They play a cat-and-mouse game of discovery and betrayal until Dorothy must place her trust in Karen - and rely on her - in a life and death situation.  In this podcast we meet Karen, and learn about an incident when she was ten that turned her life upside down. We are introduced to Dorothy in a quiet moment of realization, a subtle acknowledgement that her life has already changed profoundly. Both women experience these moments, after which nothing will ever be 'normal' again.  This episode is part of a theatrical production called JUST A LITTLE FEVER, written by Caitlin Hicks and produced by Third Coast Theatre in Toronto, Vancouver and at The Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons on The Sunshine Coast.

Here is Gertie!, the the most 'outrageous' character I have written and performed, other than the pivotal moment in Six Palm Trees, when Annie Shea accuses her father in front of the entire family. Gertie is outrageous because she speaks the unspeakable. And she's good with it. Gertie! is not for everyone. Listen at your own risk. You may choose to be offended. You may laugh. It's not always easy to have your thinking challenged by someone else's life experience.  

This podcast tells the story of the last moments of a mother’s life and how she saved her child in an unexpected moment of kismet and courage. It’s the sorrow and hope in the hearts of thousands of people one day, at the end of World War II, when they were asked ‘give us the best you have – give us your children’. This monologue is part of Singing the Bones, the international, touring theatrical play and feature film of the same name. http://fatsalmon.ca/themovie/about/meg.html In remembrance of the 75th anniversary liberation of Mauthausen forced labor camp on May 5th, 1945.  Celebrating the liberation of Holland by Canadian forces during World War II.  Other podcasts in the series can be found here: https://www.caitlinhicks.com/wordpress/podcasts-some-kinda-woman/ Music from this podcast was written by Cameron Smith and was used in the film, Singing the Bones. Gif/ Illustrations by Gord Halloran http://www.gordonhalloran.com    

These are the words of Pixie Daly, a lovely woman who lived her life here on the Sunshine Cost and had many friends until she died in her nineties in 2011.  Her stories touch on the early days: one road, no cars, being a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital, fishermen lost at sea, frozen lakes, the perils of long distances between logging camps,  hazards of fog when everyday you travelled by boat. A "marvellous regatta", a nurse lost for 24 hours, and -- an unforgettable character named Gladys -- and her husband, the Pig Man.

There are few moments in life when we're privileged to witness the open window to the universe. Birth is one of those moments - when the line between life and eternity is thin and permeable. When, without words, we can feel the bigness of the universe and the connectedness of absolutely everything. When anything can happen. When every detail matters. This podcast "The Window to the Universe" is taken from my theatrical play SINGING THE BONES, which toured internationally and was later made into a feature film that screened around the world. http://www.fatsalmon.ca/themovie/home.htm

How can you know the person you love? No matter how close, there are still mysteries and secrets — hidden things that can reach up and steal someone right out from under you. The following is a true story. A nurse falls in love with a man in uniform. And marries his best friend few months later. She works at Essondale Mental Hospital, during World War II, at a time when people who caught syphillis, died of it. Before the antibiotics came in. Just after the tranquilizers became available. When many of Essondale’s residents were not mentally ill at all  –  rather simply disabled, recovering from rheumatic fever, post traumatic stress, or retired prostitutes, too sick with sexually transmitted diseases to continue working.