The Personal, The Political, and the Public

By

Jim Foulds

Remembering Elizabeth Kouhi       

When my friend, Betty Kouhi, died in January I couldn’t attend her funeral because I was (and am) in Portugal. Similarly, last November I was in Cuba when her family and a small gathering of her “young friends” (mostly teachers and writers now in their seventies and eighties) met to celebrate her 100^th birthday. In ways I can’t define, I profoundly missed being there. I felt I had let myself, our mutual friends, her family and Betty down. It left a hole somehow. Elizabeth Kouhi was that most complex of human beings -- a poet and a genuine Christian. While being fully aware of their flaws, foibles, weaknesses, and their dangers, she really did love the world, human nature, her friends, her family, and Nature. She not only meant well; she lived well. To paraphrase Arthur Miller, ‘Tribute must be paid to this woman.’

She was the first recipient of the Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop Kouhi Award, named by her fellow writers in her honour and established to recognize “outstanding contributions to the literature of Northwestern Ontario.”  She had an unbelievably huge and positive impact on my life. And on the lives of many others.

I first met Elizabeth Kouhi in mid-winter of 1957/58 at Tom and Dusty Miller’s small house on North High Street. I was a beginning teacher at Lakeview. She was teaching in Raith. I wanted to become a writer. She already was one.   

Just as Morley Callaghan and Hugh MacLennan proved in the 1930s and 1940s you could live and write about Canada and be a writer, Elizabeth Kouhi proved you could write poetry and stories about living, laughing, loving, and experiencing tragedy in the hard, unforgiving landscape and climate of Northwestern Ontario and get them published. She did it while raising a family, holding down a demanding full-time job teaching, by quietly by getting up to write at five in the morning. She had some ten titles to her credit -- poetry such as Round Trip Home, Naming, North Country Spring, and Growing Masks; and children’s fiction such as Sarah of Silver Islet, No Words in English, The Story of Philip, Escape to White Otter Castle. My own personal favorite is Trick or Treat by the Railway Tracks.  The images in the poem about her grandfather as a peddler in St. Petersberg stick in my mind 25 years after I first read it.  She also wrote a history of the Association for Community Living.      

Both Betty and her husband George were totally authentic human beings. That is, they genuinely were what they appeared to be. There was no artifice in them.  She was devoted to her husband, her family, the organization for Community Living, her religion, her writing, and her very wide variety of friends.

She and George were also convinced democratic socialists. I will be forever grateful for the enormous help she gave me translating some of my NDP literature into Finnish and campaigning with me on the back roads of Lappe, during the 1970s and 1980s. She would say things like, “Oh, don’t bother with so-and-so. He’s a died-in the wool Conservative,” or “You should see Mr. ____. He is the former communist Store Owner.” She chuckled at the contradiction of the capitalist of the small community being a communist. She once said to me, casually, “Stalin was the greatest betrayer of the working man there’s ever been.” It came so unexpectedly, I had neither the knowledge nor the wisdom to respond.

By some miracle less than a decade after I first met Betty I found myself as the founding head of the English department at Sir Winston Churchill High School. I was lucky enough to scoop her from the Northwood staff to get her to teach the first Creative Writing Course given at the high school level in the Lakehead. Lucky me! Lucky school! Lucky students!  Those heady days with Betty as part of the dynamic growing English department at Churchill were some of the happiest of my life.

George and Betty Kouhi had a cabin at Warnica Lake which was a place of inspiration and refreshment. After my second hectic year in politics, they lent it to Judy and me for a week. It was one of the few places in Canada where I could get away from the phone. I have images to this day of one year old Andrew in diapers, and the serenity of a loon calling across the lake.

One last unforgettable anecdote.  Our children Andrew and Michael were in elementary school by this time. Judy and I were going out to dinner at the Kouhis’. Andrew who must have been in Grade 7 or 8 asked us where we were going. When I replied that we were having dinner with “George and Elizabeth Kouhi,” he was quite incredulous.

He said, “Elizabeth Kouhi!!!? You know Elizabeth Kouhi? You know Elizabeth Kouhi, the author?”

“Yes,” I was proud to say, “I know Elizabeth Kouhi, the author.”

But  Judy and I were far more fortunate to know Betty Kouhi, one of the most tolerant Christians and one of the most human of human beings we have ever known.