On June 22, 2013 while the Old Man River was rising and the rain was pouring down, local author Jane Harris was embroiled in a storm of her own, fighting for her life as her second husband attempted to kill her.
But though Harris was rendered homeless for the second time in her life and suffering from severe brain injuries as a result of the attack, don’t call her a victim.
Harris just released her book “Finding Home In the Promised Land,” which not only chronicles her personal story of abuse at the hands of her second husband, but outlines her battles with the “poverty industry,” and explores how Canada handled the poor in the country’s formative years.
“I hope this book will open up a discussion about homelessness and poverty,” she said.
According to her media release “Finding Home in the Promised Land” is the result of Harris’s journey through the wilderness of social exile after a violent crime left her injured and tumbling down the social ladder toward homelessness — for the second time in her life — in 2013. Her Scottish great-great grandmother Barbara’s portrait opens the door into pre-Confederation Canada. Her own story lights our journey through 21st Century Canada.
“I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, though it really was a high price to pay,” she said.
Harris was at Chapters in Lethbridge, for a book signing, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015.
Harris combines her own harrowing tale of homelessness and abuse at the hands of her ex husband, who had mental issues of his own to deal with while exploring how Canada has historically helped the poor in her new book “Finding Home in the Promised Land: A Personal History of Homelessness and Social Exile. On her journey, she also explores the life of her great great grandmother and her family immigrating to Canada from Scotland in pre-Confederation Canada.
She covers a lot of ground in the 140 page book, plus extensive footnotes and bibliography, touching on her own family history, the history of poor houses and workhouses which gave those down on their luck shelter and work and helped them get back on their feet and her first hand experience navigating the “poverty industry” bureaucracy of today.
“I probably have enough information for two books,” she said, adding her publisher helped her trim down the manuscript to the 140 pages.
Finding Home in the Promised Land is her second book to be published by J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing. The first, Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Little Secret, was published in 2010.
Her description of her abuse is unflinchingly honest as it is heartbreaking.
She struggled to write the book while coping with being essentially homeless while dealing with a brain injury resulting from almost dying at the hands of her ex-husband, bill collectors, lawyers and being forced to sell her house because of her ex-husband's actions.
She did a lot of research into her family history, which was made easier by the fact her great, great grandma, whose photo is on the cover of the book, came from an an upper class Scottish family, so there were plenty of records available about her life.
She became interested in her family history and poor houses while researching her previous book “Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Little Secret.”
“I found I had some questions about my great-great-grandmother,” she said.
“I researched it in the same way I studied eugenics,” she said.
Harris said she inherited her great-great grandmother's toughness which allowed her to keep her head held high while being forced to deal with bureaucracy.
“My great great grandma Barbara’s story explains what things were like in the nineteenth century, while my story goes into what it is like in the twentieth and twenty-first century,” she said, noting her great-great-grandmother's upper-class upbringing and headstrong attitude and stubbornness meant she wasn’t willing to accept bureaucratic nonsense and runarounds, a quality which Harris said she shares.
She said writing the book was a cathartic experience, though due to brain injuries resulting from her attack, she had to send the book to her publisher in shorter chunks.
“That’s all I could physically do at the time,” she said.
“I wanted to tell this story because most people who went through what I went through can’t,” she said.
It worked out.
She did a book reading and signing in Whistler at the Whistler Readers & Writers Festival 2015 at end of October, which went well.
“I was thinking about it on the two and a half hour ride to the airport in a limousine with best selling author Linden MacIntyre. A year ago I was homeless and now I’m in a limousine in Whistler, ” she recalled.
“I’m not an angry person. I’m not a victim, I don’t think I’m powerless. People tell me I am brave and courageous to write my story, but I don’t think of it like that. That was the choice I took,” she said.
Her frustrations dealing with aid agencies inspired her to research into what makes them work.
“These so called help agencies are really a business and people are just statistics,” she said. She utilizes a variety of sources to examine the poverty industry in depth in the book.
“When you have nothing left to lose, you do whatever it takes,” she said.
A version of this story appears in the Nov. 18, 2015 edition of the Lethbridge Sun Times
