Welcome Erin Handy to the Rossland Telegraph family
By Andrew Zwicker
I first ran into Erin at the small, wooden, cramped and awfully uncomfortable desk that is the media table in Rossland city council chambers. Having seen her name in bylines and read her work in the Trail Times among other publications I knew she was good at what she did. I feel it’s safe now a few years on to say that when I saw her scribble down some notes during council I’d quickly snap into action feeling like I must have missed something and would take a note of my own.
I’m now proud to welcome Erin to the Rossland Telegraph’s writing team and look forward to working with a writer of her talent in covering Rossland’s news. I can also now rest easy with a sense of security that if I missed taking down a note somewhere, she’s surely got it in her notepad.
Please help me in welcoming the newest staff writer back to Rossland and to the writing family that is the Rossland Telegraph.
I’ll let her take it from here in her own words. Welcome Erin,
Andrew Zwicker -editor
She’s smart, tiny and a little mean. Constructed mostly of vanity and vinegar – and I mean that in an admiring way. My grandmother is approaching 100 now, and we’re all reasonably sure she’s immortal. But just this last few years, she’s begun to forget things. Nothing important – the old grudges are slow to go, as are the memories of the really good times.
I trekked up to see her last year in Flin Flon, Manitoba, a place reminiscent of Trail (big ‘ol smelter, terribly kind people), where I learned that the really good times were, in fact, the early 1930s. For all you parallel-drawers out there, please understand this has little to do with the state of the economy, and everything to do with the quantity and quality of male attention. For my grandma, as she tells it, was something of a “sweater girl” (large breasts, tiny waist, the world hasn’t changed all too much) and the toast of some kind of Canada-wide mineral rail-trail.
I told her I lived in Rossland.
“Oh, Rossland!” she said, beaming, and launched into a million stories about the bustling (and attentive) city she remembers, some unexpectedly (delightfully!) risque. It was a bit of magic, finally something tangible in common. We sat and talked for hours. There’s a point here.
Rossland is a place that gets a hold on people. I moved away last year, missing some particular city things: late-night coffee and brie, sidewalks and streetlights, big libraries and the ability to wear heels without also sporting a sturdy helmet. We’ve always been restless types, my husband and I, so it took a while to identify that weird new feeling as homesickness. We turned around and came back. It was an expensive experience, I don’t recommend it as an epiphany-seeking mechanism, and there still aren’t any damn sidewalks, but I’d like to thank the first smiling folks I ran into on the Centennial Trail for giving me a sense of peace and place I haven’t had for the past year.
It’s really great to be home. I’m grateful to the Telegraph for offering me a small place on their news team, and am looking forward to sharing (and sharing in) the stories of a little city worth remembering.
Hope to see you soon,
Erin Handy
