Writing is Healing: The Untold Love Story of Larry Loyie and Constance Brissenden

By Laura Mushumanski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

(ANNews) – This story began in 1990 – when Constance Brissenden was teaching a creative writing class at the Carnegie Learning Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. At first she noticed there was a man that would occasionally attend her classes. She later found out that this man, Larry Loyie, spent a lot of his time travelling to learning centres and conferences engaging in literacy activism. This became the start of Loyie’s writing career.

“Nothing you ever learn is ever wasted,” shared Brissenden. “I directed Larry’s play, the focus of the exhibit at UBC (‘Writing is Healing’). I got my Masters degree in theatre in 1972 working with plays and playwrights…Fast forward here I am… Larry comes into my class, we get to know each other, we start to go out, turns out he wants to write this play.. Guess what… I’m a director. The stars aligned…. he gave me meaning to my work, and I gave him these skills to help shape his play and direct it.”

The writings of Larry Loyie are currently on exhibit at the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia.

Ora Pro Nobis, Pray for Us, the play that was directed by Brissenden and debuted in 1994, was based on Loyie’s residential school years. As Brissenden reflected fondly of Loyie’s determination, she shared, “ It takes a lot of guts, but nothing is ever wasted because all the things you got…That’s what Larry found, that writing opened those doors [for him] to meet so many people, encouraged so many people, expanded his own horizons. And for a person who had approximately a grade six education from St. Bernard Mission Residential School in Grouard, that was huge. What amazed me, he didn’t say ‘well, can I do this?’– he just went and did it.”

The couple went on to write books on topics that were not being written about in many communities, especially in the Indigenous community. The book, The Gathering Tree (2005), is an uplifting and educational children’s book about HIV with a First Nations storyline. At the time of its publication the conversation around HIV was foreign, where a lot of topics Loyie wrote about were bringing light to heavy conversations through his gentle, honest, warm, and compassionate spirit.

“From his residential school experience, Larry lost contact with his family members, and it wasn’t until he was disabled and separated from his wife in his 50’s that he started to heal, and he did it in a very conscious way through writing. That is what the exhibit is about,  Writing is Healing.  He wanted to write since he was 12 years old in Residential School…He cried a lot, especially when he was writing about his traumas.”

Everything that Loyie walked with was behind his writing. Throughout the 24 years Brissenden and Loyie spent together, one thing stayed the same ­– how teachings from Larry’s grandfather echoed into how he walked in the world, and the world he shared with Brissenden. “About a year after we have been dating, Larry said… ‘everyday I wake up and the first thing I think is, I am going to be good today.’ That is what his mosom said, ‘it is important to be good…it is not easy being good’. …You will see there is an echo in Larry’s books, he’s remembering what his Elder’s said.”

This untold love story, of how two people passionate about writing came together over a 24-year partnership and went on to deliver more than 1,600 presentations in schools, libraries, conferences and festivals across Turtle Island, sharing their love for literacy and the importance message that writing is healing.

Larry Loyie, with Constance Brissenden, created ten books published in multiple versions. As Long as the Rivers Flow won the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction and First Nation Communities Read award. Residential Schools, With the Words and Images of Survivors is an award-winning national history about the residential school system. Three of Larry Loyie’s popular memoirs are published by Indigenous Education Press in Young Man, True Stories of a Cree Childhood (The Moon Speaks Cree, When the Spirits Dance and Goodbye Buffalo Bay). When the Spirits Dance, A Cree Boy’s Search for the Meaning of War is a rare book on how war affected Indigenous families with drama and humour.  For more on these and other Larry Loyie books, go to www.goodminds.com, Indigenous Education Press publisher and book distributor.