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It is hard to find good memoir written by and about people who are not famous. And yet, these are some of the best memoirs to read. They are so much more relatable than celebrity memoirs. This is what inspired me to create Definitely Not Famous, a podcast where I interview memoirists about their stories. My goal with this podcast is to elevate the stories of everyday people who truly are More Extra than Ordinary.
DNF - Episode 3 Transcript
Rebecca:
Imagine walking past a café in Addis Ababa as a soft melody drifts into the street—tizita. The smell of fresh-roasted coffee. The tang of injera on a hot plate.
How did a second wave feminist end up working on gender equity in Ethiopia?
Welcome to Definitely Not Famous: More Extra than Ordinary.
I'm Rebecca Hogue, your show host.
In this podcast, I seek out memoir authors who are not celebrities, at least not yet, and interview them about their books. I share stories that are more extra than ordinary.
My guest today is Marian Dodds author of Tizita — A Memoir of Perseverance and Enchantment and someone who shares my passion for education. She has a background in not only teaching, but also advocacy work. I asked how her background allowed her to end up volunteering in Ethiopia for three years.
Marian:
I started my career as a teacher and then I worked over my career in different sort of lateral positions. I worked three times for the BC Teachers Federation working in originally the one was in status of women program, which as I mentioned in the book the gender equality work.
So I started doing that way back in the early eighties. . I was brought up with an attitude of curiosity and interest in other cultures, having lived in the Arctic amongst Inuit people. So I was always drawn to that anyway, whatever I was teaching as well.
, During my teaching career, I spent summers volunteering in first in Belize and Central America for the summer, working with teachers, helping teachers. And then I was in Sierra Leone. I led the team there for a summer of 92. And then I did a project in Tanzania in 97 with a group of five of us.
So I already had some ex international experience, and I had also, as I mentioned in the book, attended the Nairobi United Nations NGO Forum at the 10 year point of , the decade for women. So I was already committed to all of this kind of social justice and anti-racism work throughout my career, whatever I was teaching.
I also taught at UBC and Simon Fraser University two years each teaching in a teacher education program. So I was very familiar with all of the pedagogy instruction that I was actually delivering as well in Ethiopia. So it all dovetailed nicely with that job, the job placements. I had my background and I also spent nine years as a high school counselor.
So I have a background in education, counseling, advocacy work international cooperation work over the years.
Rebecca:
I grew up in Kitimat, in Northern British Columbia, and went to high school there in the 80s, I was curious if we might have intersected back then. It is rare that I meet someone that knows where Kitimat is! I ask Marian to take us back to the early days of gender‑equity work in the BC Teachers’ Federation—how it changed classrooms, contracts, and leadership opportunities for women across the province.
Marian:
Well, It was a fantastic program that began in I think around 1970 late seventies women teachers advocated for, and managed to establish was in the British Columbia Teachers Federation. So that's for the whole province in British Columbia. Something called the Status of Women program, and that was to work towards gender equality for teachers and for students.
So looking at everything from contract provisions and equality that way, but also what's in the curriculum, looking at what kind, like getting rid of sexism in the curriculum. For example, how do we teach history, for example or any subject matter. And also how people relate to each other.
It was also a program that encouraged women to get more involved in their union and take leadership positions and advocate for contract provisions that would be protecting their rights. That was the, those were the days when we didn't, there wasn't paid maternity leave and those kinds of things. So all of that was all happening within the wider feminist movement in Canada, at that, in that, during that second wave of feminism.
And that program lasted for 25 years and was amazing local Teachers Association would've had a contact person. We had annual conferences, zonal meetings. In fact, when I was on staff coordinating that program from 83 to 86, and I would've traveled to Kitimat Terrace, Rupert, all that area all over BC for that matter, at, for zonal meetings.
Giving workshops, developing workshops, training people to facilitate workshops on all kinds of topics from women's self-esteem to contract women in bargaining and also curriculum, developing non-sexist curriculum. And after that went to Nairobi in 1985 to that women's conference, I also developed a workshop on thinking globally.
And after that Canadian International Development Agency in the early two thousands offered funding for global classroom initiatives. So I ended up working with teachers from all over BC in terms of infusing global perspectives into the curriculum.
When I retired, I thought, I’m not ready to, not, to not to do anything else. I had already done the international projects in summers and I had always thought, what would it be like to do this longer term?
And that's when I applied to CUSO International. the position I was offered was in Ethiopia, which I knew nothing about.
Rebecca:
Marian’s work in the second wave of feminism is definitely more extra than ordinary. Before going any further, I wanted to ensure that I was pronouncing the names correctly; however, that proved to be a challenge. The title of the book Tizita is easy enough, but the name of the town was a little more challenging. Marian explains why.
Marian:
Woldia Some people say Weldiya
vowels are confusing in Ethiopia because the way they write them when it's translated into English. Because let's remember, Ethiopia was never colonized, so it doesn't have any kind of British education system that taught them, English spelling and so on.
So the spelling is quite fascinating and entertaining many times. that's why I had trouble when I did the map, because all those places on the map could be spelled three different ways, and so I just had to settle on one and be consistent to avoid confusion,
Rebecca:
I am very familiar with the challenges with transliteration – that is translating from one language into another – as I visited Jordan on 2009, where they don’t have a standard way to translate Arabic names into English.
The title, Tizita, is also a type of Ethiopian music. Marian talks about the sounds of Ethiopia—the melodies drifting from Addis cafés—and how that music still lingers for her.
Marian:
look, I'm no musician and I certainly am no expert in that music. I just know I love the music. And that was also, as I say at the very first line, is about the music drifting from Addis Ababa cafes, because it's very melodic and soothing, meditative some of it.
That music was just always in the back of my head, and it was so lovely. And it makes me nostalgic when I listen to it, for takes me back there.
Rebecca: Just as music can bring back a flurry of memories, so can smells. Marian shares how the smells of coffee and injera, bring her right back to Ethiopia. Reading Tizita I find the smells, sights and sounds bring me there too, immersing me in her experiences. This speaks to the enchantment part of her sub-title.
Marian:
the smell of coffee, the smell of injera being made where I lived . it's a fermented dough, so it, you got the smell, certain smell, and just all of that comes back for me.
I'm very visual, so a lot of it is with my photographs and the colors, the textures, the absolute beauty of the landscape, really. Evokes the memories for me some of the readers have said to me it's immersive and they feel a little bit of an experience, and I try to convey that experience to the reader of what it's like, the beauty of it.
Because a lot of times tourists might just go, oh, it's so poor and it's challenging here. And the mini buses are very uncomfortable. And there's all these things that annoy people but move beyond it. And you have this beauty of an interaction with somebody on a mini bus that totally random and sometimes hilarious, that you have no idea.
Just if you're open and you're curious and you ask questions and they engage in conversation 'cause they're curious about you, you never know what you're gonna find out. And it's just, that's what I loved about it. It was like fascinating the conversations I'd have with total strangers.
And share a joke sometimes. It was delightful.
Rebecca:
When I asked her about how she got started writing, Marian explains that she has been a writer all her life, and that her writing has taken different forms throughout her life.
Marian:
I've written
all my life pretty well. Whatever I've done. And when I was actually working at the teacher's union, I had it developed a newsletter, got other people to write for it as well, edit it, all of those kinds of things. So I was already quite familiar with the whole process and I've taken writing workshops forever.
And so I journal every morning, every, always, I've got a closet here full of journals going back to 1980 I think it is, in there, in the closet. So I just, that's just my morning practice. So I just write whatever, it's stream of consciousness writing. And so I just carried on with that.
And so as I was in Ethiopia, I was making notes to myself, not, but not with a book in mind. I was just doing these just to process what I was, thinking and feeling and that sort of thing. And I also, before I left, because so many people said to me you better, you better write and tell us what.
What's it like? And I thought I've got an awful lot of people. I can't possibly write personal emails to everybody let alone letters. That was when blogs were a new thing, So I found someone to help me set up a blog. So I have my blogs, so Spider Webs Unite on WordPress, and I really got into it and I loved doing it.
And so then at first it was just to keep people, letting them know I arrived safely and here I am and these are some things I'm seeing. And I posted a lot of photos and oh, it just, the blog just evolved and I began to research things and people would ask me questions and then I'd find out more and focus and have a specific topic.
For example coffee is very important to Ethiopians. It's one of their biggest Export crops, but it's also very important to the culture. So these coffee ceremonies that people have these rituals of, the whole thing of coffee, washing it, roasting it and then grinding it.
And then using frankincense as well. And then making the coffee in a special pot and serving small cups. Three, three small cups of coffee per round I thought this is really interesting to people. Even when tourists come, that's one of the first things they wanna know about because it's talked about a lot in the things you'll read.
Ethiopia is where coffee originated. So there, I just threw in all that and people were interested and got a good response. So I just kept going and I began thinking what would my audience like? To know. And that's how I just kept going.
And I think I did 96 blogs over the three year period. And what I did in 2016 is when I came home in 2013 the story just kept, living in my head. And I wanted to read my blogs from start to finish instead of, on a blog, you're reading it backwards. If you have to go through it, it's tedious to go work through it.
Rebecca:
Marian’s writing about Ethiopia began with her journal and then her blog, which was well researched. She took advantage of having access to locals, interviewing and collaborating with colleagues to ensure that her posts were accurate.
Marian:
Once I found out that's where I was offered a position, I got all the books I could here from the library and started reading all about Ethiopia's, fascinating history and culture.
And then I just kept going with that. And as I said, like I pick a specific topic. For example, it was the Adwa Day. Adwa Day is a national holiday to celebrate the Battle of Adwa, where Ethiopians defeated the Italians who were trying to colonize them. And this is a national holiday. It's very important and people are extremely proud that they stopped the colonizers.
I wrote a story about that and I interviewed a couple of the men in my class. Also about the downfall of the Derg, which is another holiday where the military coup that ousted the last Emperor Haile Selassie the Derg that took over was a brutal regime.
And so when they were finally ousted by guerilla fighters that came from the north, that's another national celebration. '
Maybe half a million, maybe a million people were killed during that time. So I interviewed some of the men in my class who were young men at the time, and integrated some of their stories into my blog about the downfall of this. I said, here we are. We've got flags flying everywhere. It's the downfall of the Derg day.
And so I wanna know more about it. And so then I worked with the history teacher instructor at the college I was working at then to get him to validate, give me information to make sure what I was saying was accurate. So I was working in collaboration often with people, consulting with them and asking them.
Rebecca:
Marian not only created a blog, after she returned to Canada she created a picture book that included the blog posts and hundreds of photos of her time in Ethiopia. But she felt something was missing.
Marian:
And I thought, okay, but there's more to this story. There's much more to this story. Like what? Like when you're doing a blog, as you probably know from your own experience you're not you're not telling the whole story because that wouldn't really be appropriate in a blog - what I call the existential underbelly.
Like what was really going on in many cases. I thought, but there's a story to be told here of what it's really like to do this kind of work because people who haven't done it maybe have kind of romantic notions of what this is and they don't. See the reality on the ground of the challenges that you face and the mistakes that you make and the deep learning that occurs from these kinds of experiences.
And so that's why I felt compelled to do it.
It's taken me seven years to finish it because I wasn't pressuring myself with time. I just kept going to see where it would take me, because as I did it, I could see the plot unfolding. I could see the interesting parallels of things that occurred during those three years. It's chronological makes sense that way.
But it's so fascinating because I dipped back into my old journals and I thought when did that fellow get fired? Oh, perfect timing For the story. And it's true, that's when it happened. But those kinds of things I couldn't probably have just remembered, but I had those things to access. And the other, I have a massive collection of 30,000 photographs that I took.
fortunately in Ethiopia, people like it when you take photographs. Of course I never took a picture of someone that didn't want one taken, but everybody, mostly they wanted to pose for me. And I tried not to get them just to pose, but to take more candid shots. the camera was a tool to communicate in many ways with people, especially children.
When they would wanna have their picture taken, then they'd look at them and we'd have a dialogue. So those are the kind of things that I had as resources to tap into as I worked through it.
Rebecca:
This is another interesting parallel with what we discovered while in Syria and Jordan. One of my favourite photos is of kids jumping in front of the camera.
As writers, when we write our first draft, it is long, often way too long. Even our second and third drafts can be too long. So what do writers do when they feel they cannot cut anymore? They reach out to an editor.
Marian:
It just gradually evolved to the point where then I thought, I need some more help with this.
I had already written 157,000 words. That's too many words for a book. So I found an editor who, was the first person that read the entire manuscript because nobody else had seen it, in my workshop pieces at SFU, but just little small vignettes. And she read it and it was fantastic because she said to me no, no, I really think this is a story worth telling.
And she had some very concrete specific suggestions about how I could cut it down a bit. And that was so helpful. I started revising it, chopping things out and. Tightening it up a lot. And I, over the years too, I've taken a lot of other writing workshops just to hone the craft and I have a writing group and so forth.
Rebecca:
It isn’t always obvious, at least to the writer, how a book should be structures. Editors that have the special skill of understanding structure are known as developmental editors. A developmental edit was Marian’s next step.
Marian:
I was struggling with how to break it into chapters. So I hired a developmental editor about, three years ago, and she spent a month on my manuscript and she was invaluable. She chopped 20,000 words from it for me, and she jigged it in chapters that she felt were logical.. There were a couple of things she took out that I ended up putting back in. But mostly I agreed with what she had removed. And then I went on a vacation to Belize for three weeks and I stayed in this one place for a week.
And I did nothing but chop. I just cut and cut. I was merciless, and now sometimes I think, oh, too bad I left that out. You can't put it all in. So then in the end, it's 98,000 words. That's what this book is.
Rebecca:
Marian was writing about a culture that she lived it but it wasn’t her culture. She wanted to ensure that she didn’t misinterpret anything or write anything that is incorrect – that is where a sensitivity reader comes into the writing process.
Marian:
I also then got two Ethiopian sensitivity readers. That's who were my experts on Ethiopia. The first one was someone that I had worked with, and he was great, but I didn't, it wasn't quite as much as I needed and I wanted to find an Ethiopian woman lawyer because I talk about the Ethiopian Women and Lawyers Association, and I got three names from a lawyer friend here, and, who had worked with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association with the Canadian NGO. And this one woman said to me, I think you should speak to this man that lives in Vancouver. Now he's, he would be the best person to do this job for you. So I didn't know him at all, and I met him for coffee and he's amazing.
And he was a judge in Ethiopia for over 20 years. He's a lawyer and he and his wife and adult daughters, young adult daughters, have now moved to Canada. And so I paid him to be a sensitivity reader and also to advise me if there was anything I was saying in the book that might be legally an issue, like in terms of, somebody might object to something.
And so he did all that for me.
Rebecca:
Once the manuscript is ready, it is time to send book proposals out to publishers. This is where the waiting begins. After you submit a proposal, publishers can take months to get back to you – and some never do.
Marian:
And I then wrote a proposal, did a whole proposal thing, and sent it to seven different small presses in Canada that I thought might be interesting.
I got three rejections and ghosted by four of them But the process of writing a proposal was really useful too, 'cause it helped me hone my messaging and also clarify for myself what I was really trying to say. So it wasn't a waste of time, but I did, it just delay me because I was waiting, six months to a year to, to find out.
I thought this is a hard sell to a small publisher in Canada because they are looking for the book that's gonna make the money. These days it's such a difficult business to be in.
And this isn't a story that's gonna be a headliner. It's a quiet, smaller story that would appeal to certain people, but it's not going to be a mass audience book, I guess you would say. And so I thought. Give up, you're just gonna have to do it yourself. And that's when I decided, last January, a year ago, I signed a contract with FriesenPress to do it, which had been recommended to me.
And it has a pretty good reputation in Canada, has produced many thousands of books very professionally. And another friend of mine who was also CUSO memoir writer that I'd met online through CUSOs alumni she had published hers in 2023 with them, and she could give me some tips and advice. So I decided to sign a contract with them.
And then I started in, I think I uploaded my manuscript at the beginning of March. And then nine months later, it's a book.
Rebecca:
Now that Tizata has been published, I asked Marian about her next writing project. Are we going to get to hear more about her time growing up in the Canadian arctic?
Marian:
when I was nine years old I was living with my family on Toronto Island. My father was running the meteorological office, training office there, but my parents had been to the Arctic before I was born, and that's why I wanna write that other story because I have amazing writing that my father and my mother did about that time period, including the ship journey from Montreal, 37 day journey that my mother took.
Starting off in Montreal, in the Hudson Bay supply ship called Nascopi, all the way up the St. Lawrence, through the Stright of Belle Isle, around Labrador, up past Ungava Bay and down to the other side of Arctic Quebec, where my father was working as a meteorologist. And that's where they got married.
And the next year they went to Arctic Bay on the tip of Baffin Island. My parents really loved the North and the Inuit people that they lived amongst.
So they have these wonderful stories. But, so then my dad, got this job in on Toronto Island. Where that training station was. But then what happened is the Federal Department of Transport, was planning on moving it to the suburbs. By then, I had two brothers, I'm the oldest.
And my parents, what I was told was they said, we're not raising our kids in the suburbs. We don't want that. So my dad applied for a job as a Northern Service officer with Indian and Northern Affairs, the federal government, and got posted to Baker Lake, which is in the geographic center of Canada, you could fly to Churchill, Manitoba, and then go north.
It's now part of Nunavut. Then it was the Northwest Territories.
So then I was nine. We lived in Baker Lake, and then we also lived in Arctic Quebec in Fort Chimo now called Kuujuak So I have these really vivid childhood memories of what it was like. Again, in these tiny little communities. Baker Lake only had 440 people. And again, I have all this resource material because there were these anthropologists, two summers there, and one of them published a book through McGill University.
It's even got a map of the whole community, all the houses, a census, all these details that I would never have an as a 9-year-old know about. But I also have stories that my mother wrote about starting an an Inuit handcraft cooperative.
So these are the kind of things I don't have a structure for this book because it's not like a chronological memoir and it's my parents' stories from the early days plus my childhood stories. I have to figure out a structure for it, but I have so much material. So that's my next project.
Theme: Responsible Travel
Segment 28 — Tourists
Rebecca: For those of you thinking that this book makes you want to visit Ethiopia – something I wish I could do, but alas – I ask Marian for some practical advice.
Marian:
what advice I would have for someone that's just going there as a tourist. I show that in the situation where a friend, a Vancouver friend came to visit me and she said should I bring pens and things to give to the children?
And I said no, don't do that. And, she says to me, now I know why you told me not to. Because tourism, as we know has many bonuses in terms of learning across cultures, but it also has some very harmful impacts. And one of them is child labor. And you know it when kids are kept outta school because their parents are desperate and the kids are begging this is not helping a country develop.
to hand out trinkets is just encouraging that. So I would say leave those at home. Instead, try to make a real human connection with, a few individuals keeping in mind that if you're a tourist ,they're seeing you as a tourist and they, this is business exchange in a way. So it's looking at how do you cut through that and just make a real connection with a few people, and that can be done, I think, by being less talkative and more observant and listening and then asking questions and saying, oh, tell me more about this. If you're touring a site, say the churches in Lalibela, and say, can you explain to me more about this painting?
And they're thrilled because you're going below, below the surface to get a little less superficial understanding of their culture. in my experience, everybody's very proud of the culture and wants to share it. And so that's a way to make a connection.
No culture is static and there are hierarchies within a culture and there are a lot of well-educated people that have more privilege themselves within the country. you can't paint everybody with the same brush, but in terms of children begging that's a real bottom line for me— not enabling that, but being kind about it too.
'cause they will pester you where there's a lot of tourist coming and tour guides and tourists are, handing things out, that kind of thing, then that, that encourages it.
And there's a zillion, very interesting scam. I write about the dictionary scam in Lalibela. People are smart. They wanna separate you from your money and they'll figure out ways to do it. And it's not helping them build their economy.
Rebecca:
Since her story takes place between 2010 to 2013, she has captured specific moments in time. As I understand it, much has changed. As she says, no culture is static. Since 2018 a new government is in power, the dam she mentions has now been completed and rapid development is occurring. At the same time, ethnic conflict in some regions has caused foreign governments to deem certain regions unsafe for tourists to visit.
Marian:
But it's a great place to visit if it's safe. There's many places that are not advised for tourists to go to. Hopefully that'll change. I feel very privileged that I had the opportunity to see what I saw at that time.
Rebecca:
Thank you Marian for sharing your More Extra than Ordinary journey volunteering in Ethiopia. I’m looking forward to also reading about your family’s adventures in the Arctic.