After retiring as principal of O’Donel High School, Michelle Clemens wrote a play, Showdown, which won an Arts and Letters Award and was staged as a reading as part of Persistence’s Theatre‘s Year of the Arts Festival, is filming a documentary on the creation and installation of the Armine Gosling statue in Bannerman Park (another Persistence project), and just published her first novels The Girls of Belvedere. (Both Showdown, which follows the intense NAPE labour actions of the early 1980s, and Belvedere, about three sisters sent to the St John’s orphanage in the 1940s, are inspired by the life of her mother, Marian T Clemens, neé Oates, 1940-2020). Full disclosure – our friendship with Clemens goes way back as we meet to discuss how she’s hit the ground running.

I feel like you just burst out of the gates of your retirement with all this creative energy – in more than one field.
Yes, and I think for me in that way, COVID was a bit of a blessing because I retired in 2019, and just as I was getting the small renovations done and things painted, COVID had me slowed down and go okay, what am I going to do? And because of that, I had the lspace to write and to investigate film. So it’s like, hmm, what are we going to do with all of this creative energy? And I saw a notice on the NIFCO website that said, does anybody want to do a film? I was like, okay. So I showed up to the first 48 hour film challenge as an actor and then took off from there.

I’m also your friend, so I’m going to talk to you as your friend.
No problem.

So one thing I loved about your play, Showdown, was just thinking about your mom. And The Girls of Belevdere, that’s also inspired about your mom’s story.
Yes, it is.

Tell us about your mom.
So mom was born on the Southern shore, to a smallish family. It was only four of them. And her mom died when she was eight. And there were two younger sisters and a brother. So when her mom {Rita Coady) passed, she went to Belvedere Orphanage. Her sisters went to others until they all became of age, because the orphanage didn’t take kids before they were six and could start school. And so Mom spent the next eight years, till she was 16, at Belvedere. Now, mom was always a spicy lady. You know, she always had a powerful will of her own, apparently very much like her father. And she was the kind of leader of the family, looking out for her two sisters while they were there. 
So she wasn’t one of those young women who was easily turned into a fine young lady, shall we say, that society insist that young women become. She was always feisty and always very determined. When she finished at Belvedere, and she took up work as a nurse’s aid. And then, of course, like a lot of women of her era she got married and married another orphan [Ralph Clemens]. So the two orphans came together and made this family.

How did they meet?
Through a friend of a friend; they went to some dances and things like that. And my father’s very quiet, as you know. So I think that my father had no choice but to get married [laughs] I think my mother decided, you’re my husband, and that was it, it was going to happen.

I remember her talking about being working in the case room at St Clare’s and the women coming in, in labour and like, putting out their cigarette and having a baby. And lighting up again.
Different days, for sure. And I guess much more of a directness and, you know, and she never had much of a filter. And for her, that boldness paid off, because she did get involved with the union at St Clare’s. And she very quickly became a Shop Steward and then Chief Shop Steward, and a big advocate of other workers and did a lot to get equal pay for equal work and to navigate for women who wanted to go to work in untraditional roles. She would take on anybody, whether it was the head of the hospital or an administrator, no problem. She had no fear of people in authority. So I guess in some ways, working living in Belvedere Orphanage gave her that, the sense of fearlessness, and that no one else was going to tell her what to do.

Can you contextualize what was going on, the pressures on the union at that time?
Well, the 1980s were really hard, it was a time of a lot of economic challenges. The unemployment rate was over 20%.

I remember when I was in grade 7 my teacher telling us that we would never find work in Newfoundland.
Absolutely. To me the same thing. And I remember that mom and dad weren’t the only ones that had a mortgage on top of a mortgage on top of a mortgage. People were really just barely making ends meet.  So when NAPE started to strike in the early 1980s, [A Brian] Peckford was premier and  the executive council got very tied up in this, because it was really battle between them and the union headed by Fraser March. They were really at loggerheads and it became so entrenched – this wasn’t going anywhere. And so they brought in Judge Gordon Seabright and each side had an arbitrator or an advisor, and that’s what it took to get these two parties together, to resolve the strike.

Did your mom consider that a success?
Mom wasn’t a chief shop steward at the time. Now, was our house the kitchen table for lots of negotiations and lots of plans? Absolutely. But it was in later strikes where mom had a very active role on the picket line and organizing. [In the play] I of took that major strike, because that was a fundamental strike action for the right to strike. The government was trying to say, well, you have to have 50% of workers and you can only strike in this way at this time with this discussion model in place. That was a really powerful, powerful time, and I took some of the experiences I saw. It was actually the 1990s when mom was much more active on the picket line, and much more in a higher leadership role.

Overall, how did she feel about that kind of work?
She loved it. She very much loved it. She saw the Union as a great place for women to be able to go into leadership and to do training and to give them very specific voice. She was advocating for herself, but the union represented all women too, right? I know there was a case where a woman had applied to be a utility worker. And it was like, no, women don’t get to be a utility workers. And she was like, hang on now, this is not a big leap, to think a woman can be a utility worker. And the pay was like $3 more an hour. Breaking all those barriers about what women could be seen to do was really important to her. She had a number of really big cases like that in trying to re-see gender roles because she hated gender roles.

When you were growing up, when you were a young adult, did you think someday I’m going to write mom’s story, or is that something that came to you later?
She was always great storyteller, and she sat and told those stories over and over again. 
And as I started to do an English degree at MUN, she used to say, now, when you start writing, putting that university degree to work, you can get my story down. When she was in her 70s, I really encouraged her to try to see if she could get some things on paper. But she didn’t get very far. And I think for her,  it became difficult to remember the details. She’d gotten older, and I think she’d buried a lot of it.

Photo credit: Bridget Rickets.
Join us next week for Part Two of this conversation. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)