A Story Of Salterton, About The Book

If you think that much-reprinted classic, Leaven of Malice, knocked the socks off the literary establishment, then you are going to clasp Salterton to your bosom! Like that old country song about following your man from job to job, Salterton is Rose DeShaw’s account of stumbling over horror in the mundane as she mistakenly plans a quiet, normal, life of work and raising a family, while her husband pursues an academic career. Would she have followed, if she knew his goal was prison?

How do you deal with running an official hostel for teenage runaways across Canada without any training? Where do you go to learn the antiquarian book business? Can such a bookseller survive in the marketplace? What made her take this book training into prison? Will the beatings, stabbings, hangings and beheadings behind bars, change her family life forever? Why would she, church-trained and obedient, ever join a picket line around a prominent cathedral? How would this change everything, forever?

Salterton is the journey of a naïve young mother finding the pitfalls and potholes in the institutions of academe, church and state, or as she puts it, ‘town, gown and joint.’

Yes, the name, Salterton, was given to the prison capital of Canada by beloved author, Robertson Davies, who changed the labels on other prominent institutions in that city, as well. All his terms are used here. DeShaw has reason to believe that at least some of Davies’ account of the town was not fictitious at all.

It begins way before she hires a prostitute to babysit the children, gives her family whistledrills to keep them safe in a predatory downtown, hires a burglar to move the family, throws self-proclaimed book collectors out of her shop and spins a national column as hippie designate, with Arnold Edinborough and Reginald Stackhouse.

In short order we find her springing the Dewey Decimal System on a crew of semi-literate convicts, deep in the bowels of a federal penitentiary where all the good guy’s weapons, are miles away at the front gate.

“Yep, the universe is using us for target practice,” she says more than once as work engulfs her husband, while her past and present connect in insightful ways.

What do you do when the universe doesn’t play fair, when the life you have mapped out, drops off the cliff before your wings are ready? DeShaw, the daughter of a church-obsessed arsonist and a Darwinist prospector, begins to sort out a life.

Salterton is the result of that sorting, though earlier bits have been published in anthologies and in the national press, including her column, DeShaw’s World, and in the Globe and Mail’s Facts & Arguments, essays.

One of these essays was reprinted by the United Church of Canada in a year-long reading series. Most recently, a third was included in a textbook on communications, published by Oxford University Press.

Two of her mother’s arsons are dealt with graphically in a short story included in Cottage Country Killers published by General Store Press, when they were still a commercial operation. Some of the prison experiences, in an altered form, appeared in the Globe and Mail in the nineties. 

Her account of picketing the cathedral was a front page story in the local Independent Voice in Kingston, Ontario. She and her husband also appeared in the National Film Board documentary, The Choirmaster. Many of her letters on the topic were printed in the Kingston Whig Standard, (labeled The Evening Bellman, by Robertson Davies).

Why did both Davies and DeShaw feel the need to use other terminology for the institutions and even individuals singled out in this high voltage pocket of Canada? Emotions run high, the undercurrent strong in such a peculiar place.

Davies saw its literary potential when he used the strange little town of Salterton (Kingston) as a setting for his classic trilogy. Living up to its reputation, the place rises in wrath as its seedy dealings are revealed. The award-winning playwright, Judith Thompson set Crackwalker here for the same reason.

We follow DeShaw through her teen hostel, group home, bookselling and publishing days, during which she manages to gift us with what is really a handbook for establishing a flourishing business in the gathering, marketing and ethics of out of print books.

Things heat up as we move on through the seventies magnet that was Rochdale, never before told encounters with the unlikely pairings of Northrup Frye, Hugh Garner and Roger Caron, how she found a way to get even with the long deceased, Bulwar Lytton and what happened across the street from her bookshop, as Margaret Trudeau partied with The Rolling Stones.

Whether making a compelling argument for her husband’s case in the Ottawa Citizen, or in a special writer’s edition of her city’s paper, launching a witty defence of Kingston being dubbed, The Literary Capital of Canada, DeShaw ‘writes extremely well.’

Brick Books: A Literary Journal, calls DeShaw’s style, ‘beautiful,’ going on to say that her personal essays are ‘very engaging and skillfully written.’ “Rose DeShaw was and still is my favorite writer, She writes with grace,” says a subscriber to the Anglican Journal while another reader asks to see her columns in reprint.

Compelling Summating Paragraphs

There has never been a book about what happened in The Choirmaster, though author Judy Steed (Our Little Secret) and Professor Donald Swainson, (200 Years Of Tradition) have very briefly touched on the topic. Salterton not only IS that book, but it takes you in, makes you care about the families, one in particular, whose lives were changed forever when ancient secrets were laid bare on the front pages of the local paper for months on end. The two journalists who reported these events were recognized with the highest national awards.

For years, outsiders have wanted to know what really went on at the much-picketed cathedral, the subject of daily tours and pamphletted fame, a mini St Paul’s and one of the highlights on a tour of the limestone city. Finally they have some answers in this writing that provides a key reference on the topic in lively readable prose.

Synopsis

A woman explains why her life experience has been like holding a picnic on an active volcano.  Most of all, she illustrates what the cartoonist Wiley meant, when he said, ‘The formula for humour is tragedy plus time.’

No illustrations are planned though some are available. In particular, a note written in crayon on lined yellow paper, the younger son proudly telling his grandmother he had joined the choir. The book runs 405 pages and is 116,209 words.