Walking with Beth

“I used to look for love and happiness, understanding and security. What am I looking for now?” (xv) Merilyn Simonds asks so in her most current introspective novel, “Walking with Beth” released on September 23rd. Crafted with almost flash prose pieces, musings, the reader accompanies Simonds through her reflections and ruminations on life and health during her walks with centenarian friend, Beth Robinson. Spanning the timeframe of three years of weekly walks and the fabric of life during Covid, Simonds invites us into the intimacy of two aging women. Also, she takes hold of the reader’s imagination and propels them to confront death.

Published by Random House Canada, “Walking with Beth,” is a poultice, a soothing balm for those seeking solace in the wake of illness and aging, as well, a gentle mentoring for those next in line. Organized into four sections titled, “One Hundred and One, Seventy-One,” “One Hundred and Two, Seventy-Two,” “One Hundred and Three, Seventy-Three,” and “And Counting…,” “Walking with Beth” is comprised of over 246 pieces of encounters and teachings between two women.

Beth became an almost mythic figure to me throughout the reading, and yet, Simonds’ depiction of her friend grounded Beth in an immense glow of humanity and graceful mortality. “Beth is Elizabeth Pierce Robinson, born in Kingston, Ontario, on July 22, 1920, a child of the final year of the Spanish flu pandemic” (xiii). Beth had raised a family in Toronto and also had worked in Montreal as a professor of art therapy. She retired to Lower Beverly Lake in eastern Ontario where she had spent summers as a child and where she and her husband had built a house. After her husband died, she moved back to Kingston and resides there now. Simonds had just moved to Kington from North Bay in the trajectory of a second marriage. It does not fully matter when the two women met, only that the bond and friendship that has grown between them over the years has carried the two women into the older unknown stages of life. Beth has written two books, “My Journey to One Hundred” (2023) and “Please Write” (2015). What resounded with me was Simonds human portrayal of Beth grieving the loss of her daughter and the two women facing mortality and aging eloquently and honestly together.

Merilyn Simonds has written twenty books. I first encountered Simonds in her novel, “The Holding” (2005). I was immediately drawn in to the plotline of “The Holding.” Margaret, her mysterious background and trajectory to reside in the Canadian wilderness stirred me in her connection to plants and her discovery of traces of Katharine, a settler woman who had lived on the same land a century earlier. In entering Katharine’s world through journals, I was further confronted with the hardship and adversity that Margaret faced and endured. Second, I encountered Simonds in “The Convict Lover,” a non-fiction text published in 1996 by Macfarlane, Walter & Ross about the true story of a young woman in early 20th-century Ontario who secretly corresponds through hidden letters with a prisoner in the nearby Kingston Penitentiary. “The Convict Lover” was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. It is compelling to me that in 2017, Project Bookmark Canada installed a plaque on the site of the former Kingston Penitentiary rock quarry to honour the place of “The Convict Lover” in Canada's literary landscape and the impact that Simonds has had on her community. Further, she is the founder and first artistic director of the Kingston WritersFest as well as being a juror for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Simonds literary legacy and community connections have deeply enriched the Canlit community and beyond.

Simonds is poignant in articulating that Beth, her friend, is her “last guide into the future” (10). That phrase was how I was led into the depths of “Walking with Beth.” In sediments of thought that felt chipped away and laid out carefully for the reader, I walked also with Simonds and Beth in one of the most terrifying elements of a writer’s life, not being able to control the ending of your own story: “I am a writer. I’m used to determining the plot. What confounds me about dying is that I will have no say in the end of this story” (162). An important work for us in negotiating our own mortality, this text gives voice to aging and identity for women, a necessary voice for our Canlit community. In the text becoming an external voice and space for readers to congregate to, what we are guided to understand is not that we need to walk in another’s footsteps, but that we are not alone in life and these bodies.

Thank you to Merilyn Simonds, Random House Canada and River Street Writing for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!