For as long as she can remember, Beth has been making books.

“Before I could write or even manage scissors, I tore white writ­ing paper into small pieces, tucked them into an envelope, and, with the rounded fingers of childhood, handed ‘my book’ to my editor father. Later, with blunt-nosed scissors, I built a ‘book’ by cutting out gaily coloured magazine pictures, and, with paste and a metal-handled brush, laid my story in rows on the inside of a dust jacket that, until then, had covered Carl Sandburg’s book Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.”

My own book-making doesn’t go back nearly that far, although once, on a long ocean voyage from Canada to Brazil, I did make an entire deck of miniature playing cards, each back meticulously deco­rated, and a box to hold them.

As a child, Beth not only made books, she wrote poetry too. “The psychologist in me is suspicious of that,” she says wryly. “I don’t think I was interested in poetry as much as I wanted to impress my father.”

Until she was in middle school, if anyone asked, she’d say her dream was to be a poet and a storyteller. Her father, Lorne Pierce, was by then Canada’s most significant books editor, an early and dedicated promoter of Canadian writers and artists, people he often brought home for lunch. Beth got to know the icons of early twentieth-century Canadian literature from her perch on the stairs and, later, from her place at the table: “the crinkled eyes and beribboned pince-nez of the laughing poet, Charles G.D. Roberts; the visual artist C.W. Jefferys, who could talk and smoke, the cigarette never leaving his bewhiskered mouth; Wilson MacDonald, a pioneering vegetarian, emptying walnuts and rai­sins out of his pockets and onto his salad plate,” and “what romance in the costume of Bliss Carman: a wide-brimmed hat, a soft flowing tie and round pantlegs (no steamed edges for him!). I pressed my ears into the tales and wondered if someday there would be lyrical lines penned just for me!”

When she was in grade six, the students were asked to present an oral composition on a subject that inspired them. She chose her favourite poet, Bliss Carman.

“As I started to speak, my voice was confident. My eyes reflected my passion and the pleasure of sharing a corner of my own life. I read Bliss Carman’s ‘An Autumn Song’ that begins, ‘There is some­thing in the autumn that is native to my blood.’”

She continued with “Arnold, Master of the Scud.” A quiet laugh erupted when she read the line that described the schooner: “Snoring down the Bay of Fundy / With a norther on her beam.” She pressed on. By the time she reached “Twelve year old, and full of Satan / As a nut is full of meat,” the class was wailing with laughter. Thankfully, the bell rang just then. “I scrambled for my papers and ran for the schoolyard, each step pounding a rhythm that screamed, ‘I must be queer, poetry must be queer, I must be queer, poetry must be queer.’”

Beth abandoned writing that day. She threw herself into athlet­ics, into fencing, archery, dance, theatre. As an adult, she became the editor of a professional art therapy journal, where she finally returned to words, savouring their shapes and their shaping, but, she says, it wasn’t until she retired that she realized “I was safe and could finally write.”

She took her father’s diaries as her first project. Her intent was to write an account of her father’s impact on Canadian culture from the diaries he kept, one for every year of his adult life. He wrote not only about the mundane details of daily life but also about his evolv­ing vision for Canadian literature. “His entries were narrative. Not the weather. Not point form, like many diaries. A story on every page.” She wrote the book on the same small walnut desk where her father had kept his Remington typewriter and where she now writes on her computer. She wasn’t quite finished when her husband fell ill and died. Only through poetry could she express that grief.

He waited
for the final
blaze of autumn
brushing softly
with his last breath
my fingertips.

Alone for the first time in almost fifty years, her days finally stripped of their urgency, of other people’s needs, Beth’s life veered imperceptibly into its third and final stage.

Kingston, Ontario–based writer Merilyn Simonds is author of 20 books that include literary fiction (Refuge and The Holding), creative nonfiction, including The Convict Lover (a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction), personal essays, travel, literary criticism, and biography and memoir, most recently Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay.

Merilyn Simonds (Leah Feldon)

Excerpted from Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend by Merilyn Simonds. Copyright © 2025 Merilyn Simonds. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend published on Sept. 23.