A Burnaby writer’s memoir, 30 years in the making

Although children’s author Ellen Schwartz has lived and played in Burnaby for over 30 years, she recently released a memoir that looks back at the decade she spent living off-grid in the Kootenays.

In Galena Bay Odyssey: Reflections of a Hippie Homesteader, Schwartz reflects on her time spent homesteading—living self-sufficiently and sustainably off of the land—the lessons she learned from nature, the challenges she faced, and how she transitioned from the wilderness to city life.

The original manuscript for the memoir was written more than 30 years ago while Schwartz was getting a master’s in creative writing at UBC shortly after her homesteading years.

“This book stayed in the filing cabinet for 30 years, and periodically my writer friends would ask me, ‘When are you going back to the Galena Bay book?’ and I just didn’t know what to do with it. And then, about five years ago, I had an idea to restructure the material and write it thematically rather than chronologically. So that’s what I did, and it really felt right,” Schwartz shared.

The memoir traces Schwartz’s journey to Galena Bay, which is located on the north edge of Selkirk Valley, and the time she spent there with her husband Bill and, later, her eldest daughter Merri. The family worked hard to figure out how to make a living, raise a child, and occasionally face bears.

Schwartz reflects equally on the highs and lows of living off the grid, including a portion that spoke about her use of cloth diapers with her daughter without having running water.

“I was a nut when it came to the diapers,” she laughed. “If I had to do it over again, I don’t think I would load the dirty diapers into a backpack and snowshoe half a mile to the truck so I could take them into Revelstoke and wash them in the laundromat. I might find a better way, an easier way. But at the time, it was really important.”

After their decade spent homesteading, Schwartz’s memoir follows the couple’s move to Vancouver in 1980 for a job. They settled in Burnaby after Schwartz finished her degree at UBC.

Despite being back in a big city, the couple didn’t give up their love for nature.

“We wanted to buy a house, and we began to look, and we found this house in Burnaby and the Deer Lake area,” she said. “Nothing remarkable about the house; it’s a 1950s bungalow, but it's a block away from Deer Lake Park. And so that's our daily walk. I would say it's kept us alive all these years just being so close to the park and being in the woods, around the lake, and on the trails.”

For Schwartz, Burnaby is not only a hub for green space but it’s also moving towards goals that will help make it a greener city as a whole.

“One of the principles of the strategic plan for Metro Vancouver is to build urban hubs around transit centres, and Burnaby has probably been the most progressive city in the Lower Mainland to do that,” she explained.

As an avid environmentalist, this method of building provides something for her in the city that she could never have in the Kootenays: not having to rely on a vehicle.

“The disadvantage of living in a rural place like that is that you’re really reliant on a car. People are spread apart, towns are spread apart, whereas here things are closer to hand, and if Canada is going to have the growing population that it does, then it makes sense to have dense cities where services are readily available and people aren’t so reliant on cars,” she explained.

Public transport is just one of the many ways that Schwartz has continued her environmentalism in the city, transposing some of her homesteading skills into her city life.

“I started using cloth grocery bags in the ’70s. I’m using the same cloth bags now that I was then. Obviously, we have a house, houses are energy consumers, and they emit a certain amount of pollution. But we grow a garden, a big garden, and we eat from the garden all summer, and I preserve some of it for the winter. We're lucky to live within walking distance of a lot of services that we need, so we don't use our car that much. We recycle, and I do practically all of our cooking from scratch,” she explained.

In both the beginning and ending of her memoir, Schwartz brings up the idea of changing the world, and I asked her if she felt that she had accomplished this.

“I think that I've changed the world in a couple of ways. A very, very small one is having the experience in Galena Bay, in opening my eyes to ecology and the environment and thinking about the Earth in a way I never had before and never would have if I hadn't had that experience,” she said.

She also highlighted that raising environmentally and socially conscious children is another way that she feels she’s changed the world, and finally, changing the world through her children’s books.

“I think that by writing children's books, I'm kind of reaching into children and hopefully opening their eyes to the world, to feelings, and issues and humour and tragedy, to what life is made of,” she explained.

Schwartz is still a writer and has writing groups across Burnaby. She has stepped back from previous teaching roles at Douglas College but continues to teach adult writing for children through Culture Chats, a New West program.

Schwartz’s books are available through Indigo and Amazon, and she will be speaking at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts on Aug. 20, and will later be a part of a memoir writers panel through Burnaby Public Library on Oct. 4.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Schwartz travelled to Taylor, but in fact, she travelled to Revelstoke, and that she bought an 1850s home, but it is a 1950s home. These have been corrected.