When I received a Manila envelope from Herizons Magazine today I knew what I would find. That did not diminish the excitement, enjoyment of seeing one of my portraits in print. I remember my first one sometime in 1976 for a Vancouver travel magazine that featured my cover of a Mayan ruin in Yucatán. Since then I may have had at least 300 covers and countless two-page spreads and full bleed pages. But that excitement always seems new.

This time around it was about a portrait I took of Jane Rule some years ago for Books In Canada. I wrote about being scared of facing this woman and how she won me over here. I have been told that this portrait became Rule’s favourite.

That the envelope containing the magazine, also included a check (a strange event in this day and age!), was even more thrilling.

But the biggest thrill was reading (yes we photographers do read) the interview of Rule by writer Keith Louise Fulton in 1993 that had this:

Keith Louise Fulton: Are there problems writing fiction that includes lesbians, when literature has left out lesbians’ life experiences? Did you try to make your own audience, or were you just having to deal with the dilemma of being understood?

Jane Rule: I wanted to be clear. But I also didn’t want to be interrupted by being concerned about people misreading my work. I didn’t want to be distracted. It’s easy to be silenced or to cater in wrong ways, and I thought my job is to make the worlds I see as clearly as I can. If people come of good will, they will be welcome. But I am not writing books for my enemies. I’m not writing books for anybody but me. I mean, it’s the function of the spider to spin the web, and I had to make a world I could live in. And I think that’s the basic impetus to write – Because there isn’t a found world. I don’t know, but I think I was stung into writing and required for life to write, to make a world I could live in.

Jane Rule's Brownies