It was such an honour to be invited by Sheryl MacKay to join her as a guest on her program, CBC Radio North by Northwest, to talk about The Stone Frigate and how it feels to be named as a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.
Our discussion takes place at 1:43:00 on the copied link. If you’d like to listen to a recording of the interview, you can connect to the program by clicking on the title for this journal post and you will be redirected to North by Northwest for May 30, 2020.
Also, I’ve included a cut and paste copy of the link, if you prefer to access the interview this way: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-43-north-by-northwest/clip/7226126-saturday-may-30
This photo with Sheryl MacKay was taken during a pre-covid era visit to her studio last year.
The transcript of our conversation is posted as follows:
CBC Radio North by Northwest
Interview with Sheryl MacKay
The following is a slightly cleaned up transcript of our pre-recorded discussion which aired on Saturday, May 30th, 2020 at 8:14a.m. on the clock. The interview start time is 1:43:00hr on the recording timeline bar. Interview runs 12min18sec.
SM—On Air Talent Sheryl MacKay
KA—Kate Armstrong
SM—Kate Armstrong of Nelson got some very good news recently. Her memoir, The Stone Frigate, has been shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer’s Award. And the book is subtitled The Royal Military College’s First Female Cadet Speaks Out. So as you might guess from that, in this memoir Kate recounts her experience of being one of the first class of women to graduate from Royal Military College. And it was a sign of progress having women accepted, they touted it as a sign of progress, but Kate Armstrong tells quite a story of what it was like to actually be there with a lot of misogyny and a lot of abuse, a lot of bullying from male peers who did everything it seems to get Kate and other women out of the College. I called Kate to talk about The Stone Frigate and asked what led her to write about her experiences at Royal Military College. And actually how she came to be in that first class of women who were accepted at the school.
KA—That’s quite a funny story because I got my glider pilot license through Air Cadets when I was sixteen-years old, and from that moment I knew I wanted to fly. I wanted to be a military pilot. I was hoping to fly Search and Rescue and be a helicopter pilot. So, in the fall of my Grade Twelve, 1979, I borrowed my dad’s car and I drove to Vancouver. I was living in Abbotsford. And I went into the Recruiting Centre and basically said, “Hey. I want to sign up. I want to be a pilot.” And the Recruiters literally laughed at me because they said, “Well, that’s nice but we don’t have women as pilots.” And then they looked at each other, and then they said, “But. Royal Military College is opening up to women next fall”—so that would have been in sync with me graduating high school—“and the first class of women will be going to Royal Military College. And if you go there, that’s the best possible place for you to be because it looks like pilot will open up pretty soon.”
So that’s how I ended up going. I never really set out to want to be at Royal Military College. I really truly wanted to be a pilot.
SM—So there was that moment, like you say, where you had disbelief, like, this is out of your possibilities all together, that being met with that wall, and then, “Well, there’s this one possibility.”
KA—Totally. And the funny thing is, I was so stunned. I was seventeen-years old and I couldn’t believe it. Even then, I knew the rationale behind it, but I was like “What? How can I not be allowed to be a pilot as a woman when you trained me to be a pilot when I was sixteen-years old?” (chuckles)
SM—(laughs) Explain this.
KA—Yeah. And so when I got to RMC, I thought, okay, it’s the law—I was so naïve, I was completely politically naïve—and I thought, okay, it’s the law that we can be here so, we’ll be welcome. And that is the furthest from the truth. And when I say that, I’m still really loyal to Royal Military College, which will sound strange, because I had a lot of really fantastic experiences there, and the reason I wrote my book is because I should have been allowed to have those experiences without having to put up with the other stuff I had to put up with, the stuff that I had to put up with were things like being stalked in first year and second year, like severely stalked, by senior cadets who were in positions of power over me.
For all of us, for all of the women, there was a constant barrage of, you know, name calling and derogatory comments and just always being treated like that we were weaker, and less than, and that, you know, men were strong, women were less. That was really frustrating for me. I kept on trying to prove that they were wrong about me. And, um, I think the term gaslighting makes the most sense for me, that I was being told over and over and over, me and the women that were there, that I was physically, and emotionally, and mentally inferior…
SM—Hmmm.
KA—…and at first, I didn’t believe them because I had a strong personality and I was an overachiever in high school, but by the time I graduated, I truly did feel like I was incapable and a loser. Which is kind of devastating, in retrospect, because I had to rebuild, you know, some of what I had lost.
SM—And at the same time, I mean, I read your book and I look at what you physically, alone, aside from any of the bullying and the systemic problems, just the physical demands of that program that you met time and time again…
KA—mmmhmm.
SM—…and to come out feeling like a failure, it seems so contradictory.
KA—Yeah. And there’s a couple things, a few layers of that for me. When I was at Military College, it was 1980 to 1984. I don’t remember every hearing the term sexism. Right. Or P.T.S.D. Those things didn’t exist…
SM—Right.
KA—…but when I look back, it was like I was in a goldfish bowl and the water was sexism. And, um, I couldn’t even study. I’m honest about that in my book and that’s one of things that I really hated writing about (laughs) because I couldn’t study. I would sit and stare at my pages, and then reread the paragraph, reread the paragraph, and the information, it was just so difficult to get it to go in. And that’s not my usual way of being.
SM—Right. But you were in that traumatized state by the whole situation.
KA—Yeah. And if you’ve ever had something happen to you that just gets under your skin and it makes it hard to think of anything else, so it was like a daily onslaught of that.
I remember working with my editor, she said, at one point she said, “You know what. This is too much. You have to trust the reader that they’ll read it and you can show them a few times of what you were experiencing, and they’ll get it that that’s an ongoingness.” Because she said, “I’m finding it exhausting to read how bad it was.”
SM—(chuckles) Just to read.
KA—(laughs) Yeah!
SM—Let alone be there.
KA—(laughs) Her thing was, she got through first year and then she said, “Ugh. And then I wanted to quit.”
SM—(laughs)
KA—(laughs) Then I said, so did I!! I wanted to quit after first year too!
SM—But you didn’t.
KA—No, I didn’t.
SM—Why?
KA—I think the tagline that I’ve attached to myself for that is: I wanted to quit when I was winning, not when they were winning.
SM—Hmmm.
KA—It took me a while to figure it out that there were only 32 of us, and over 800 men were there. We were in the lowest, like we were recruits and first years. And so, we were at the bottom of the food chain, really. And if, (sighs), they had the ability to make our lives miserable, and if we left, then that would be the end of the problem of whether or not women could endure.
SM—Hmmm.
KA—And so, once I kind of figured that out, toward the end of my first year, I was actually offered to go to train as a pilot and it was such a hard decision for me, but I decided to stay and finish RMC because I knew if I left, no one would care why I left, I would just be a statistic that I couldn’t do it.
SM—Right. So you felt that obligation. That responsibility.
KA—I did. All of us did really. And statistically, there were about, by the time we graduated, I think we started out with like 800 recruits all together in those three Colleges, and we graduated, um, 227?
SM—Oh my goodness.
KA—And from the women, they started us with 32 and 21 of us graduated.
SM—Kate, you mention that you have such an affection, still, though, for The Royal Military College. When I read the book, it’s hard sometimes for me to understand that, aside from some of the close connections you made with people there. Why do you think you still have that feeling?
KA—I think the easiest way for me to answer that is, to answer the question, would I recommend RMC to a young woman today?
SM—Mmmhmm.
KA—Because I do get that question. It’s a frequent question that I receive, and it used to make me nervous because it was confusing for me. Because we went through so many amazing experiences together. I just had a zoom call with ten of my Frigate classmates (chuckles) from my class, on Tuesday. We still stay in touch and we’re still friends. So when people say, would you ever recommend for a young woman to go now, I’ve come to understand now that that’s not a decision for me to make for anyone. And I didn’t write my book to be a dream killer for young women.
Royal Military College is hard for everyone. It’s very difficult to get accepted and it’s even more difficult to graduate. So it’s a huge decision to go there. But there are things that you can get from going there that, basically, you can’t get anywhere else. But what’s not right is that young women need to consider being willing to face bad behaviours and sexism and possible trauma in order to chase their dreams.
SM—Hmmm.
KA—And so what I’m really interested in, is the behaviour change so that it doesn’t have to be a question a young woman has to face.
SM—Now, you were invited back last fall, right?
KA—Yes! It was for the Young Memorial Lecture on leadership. It was unbelievable. It was an amazing experience that I did not expect. When I was writing the book, I was grieving because I thought, “This is it. I’m persona non grata at RMC.” But I was so, (sighs), adamant that I wanted to tell my experience and tell my story.
The Commandant, right now, is Brigadier-General Sébastien Bouchard and he read my book, and then he said, “Enough is enough.” He started handing it out to senior officers and telling them, “You need to read this.” And he also wrote a letter, an editorial letter, to the College newsletter supporting The Stone Frigate. So then the Principal, Dr. Harry Kowal, he invited me back to come and present the Young Memorial Lecture on leadership to the Class of 2020.
So, it was pretty incredible, um, and I’m still just blown away by the cadets at RMC. They’re just unbelievable, like, amazing young people. AND they still come from the cultural biases that we have, you know, like simple prejudice gives way with new information, but chronic prejudice remains entrenched and unbending no matter what evidence comes to light. It’s so complex and it’s so much work for us to make progress. It’s like a microcosm of society so there are a few people that are bullies who really wreck it for other people around, and they make it difficult for people who have different values to stand in their values. So Royal Military College is like that, just like a corporation.
I look back now and honestly can’t believe that I was so frightened to write it.
SM—Are you glad you did?
KA—Yes. Beyond, beyond glad. And to have the nomination for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize is just complete icing on the cake.
SM—Thanks for your time on this. Good to talk to you, Kate.
KA—Oh, thank you, Sheryl. I’ve just really enjoyed being on the show with you. Thank you for having me.
SM—Kate Armstrong in Nelson. And yes, she has been shortlisted for The Stone Frigate, her memoir, for the Kobo Emerging Writer’s Award. And I had a note from Kate that as of yesterday the audiobook was released on Kobo and Kate says, “I narrated it myself back in November and it was very surreal to hear the audio sample of my own book, read by me.” Kate Armstrong in Nelson. The Stone Frigate is the title of her memoir.
I love CBC Radio. Thanks for hosting me Sheryl. It was really fun to be your guest.