Today I welcome Neill McKee, whose memoir, Guns and Gods in My Genes, which walks the through 400 years and 15,000 miles of an on-the-road adventure, discovering stories of his Scots-Irish ancestors in Canada, while uncovering their attitudes towards religion and guns.
Writing about your own family and history can become sticky. We all have the stories we want to tell... but maybe not everyone wants them to be shared. Did you run across any reticent family members, or those who preferred some stories be left in the shadows?
I began in 2013, after I retired from my 45-year career, to research and write two 200-page documents on both my fathers' side (the McKees) and my mother's side (the Neills). I collected stories, photos and dates from many cousins. One Neill cousin, to whom the book is dedicated, provided me with a lot of the American history she had found, including the Mayflower connection. She had never proved it or put it together though, just different finding is email messages. I sent out drafts of these documents for comment, corrections, and more stories. (Through my work as an international development communication expert, I knew that pretesting is important.) I put last appendices in these documents on my living cousins (my generation) and their families that could be updated easily. Then, in 2016, on the McKee side where there has been more division in my father's generation, I organized the renovation of our 2nd great-grandparent's tombstone and the ceremony and family reunion in Chapter 1. (I continue to manage the email list and news updates for both sides of the family, almost all in Canada, from New Mexico.)
The point is, by doing these documents and the celebration first, I probably took care of most disagreements. There still may be disagreements about versions of stories that were passed on, like how the death of my grandfather McKee happened on that hay wagon in 1933, which is described at the end of Chapter 2. There, I took my Uncle John's side of the story against my father's. I did not check with my siblings in this case. I used my memory and imagination to try to understand why my dad was such a cautious driver. Since he passed away in 2007, I couldn't ask him. Anyway, that's the job of a creative nonfiction writer, I believe.
You focus on your ancestors and their relationship with guns due to your own early experience hunting, which left you not-so-in-love with gun culture. Of course, gun ownership can quickly become a hot topic. How did you go about writing respectfully on something that can be so divisive?
This is true. In fact, one brother and his sons in Ontario are great hunters and don't like some of Canada's gun control laws. By doing this book, I hope to educate gun lovers on the evolution of how the people of North America have brought guns into their cultures, and the big difference between Canada and the US. In an earlier draft, I had quite a different last chapter. I read two good books on the history of the 2nd Amendment (Winkler, Adam and Waldman, Michael in the Suggested Readings p.332). But writer, Gayle Lauradunn and libertarian neighbor, Charles Rolison, both of whom endorsed the book in the inside front cover pages, commented on that chapter and advised me to change it.
Disagreements over the true meaning and evolution of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is too baked into present social division in America, and I am not an expert, so I decided not to go there. I'd focus instead of the tremendous difference between Canada and the US, two countries with similar gun ownership per household. I quote the mass shootings toll in the US in 2019 and mention the statistics, at the time of writing, in the US in 2020, which turned out even worse than I mentioned on the bottom of page 286.
The Supreme Court's 2008 decision on making the 2nd Amendment an individual right, does not prohibit stricter gun control laws, like Canada's, and the majority of American's want it. It will happen with time. As I mention on page 287, “America, a relatively young country, is behaving like a grumpy old man, when it has so much more potential in the modern world.” The Constitution really needs to be revised in so many ways, in my humble opinion, after reviewing thousands of pages of North American history.
Genealogy is endlessly interesting... mostly to those of us who actually do it. Telling a riveting tale of finding that 1836 tax return that itemized how many cows your gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather had might not be so entertaining to everyone else. (I know the feeling. I've combed wills to find out what happened to someone's hairbrush). How do you take such a niche topic and bring it to a larger audience? *Did you mean "not"?
I only included two tables (2 and 7) on my ancestor's wealth, at the time of their deaths, to further the stories I told, and those were placed at the end of the book along with the genealogical tables, so as not to break up the continuity of the narrative. I wanted to write a book with wide appeal to anyone interested in genealogy and history, or searching their own family's roots. I decided to do it on the theme of "guns and gods" and by "gods" I mean different interpretations of religion - largely Christianity - in North American history, and my discovery of some "godly" ancestors in my genes, as well as a real "rowdy man" and some who killed and enslaved Indians in New England in the 1600s. So, I believe focusing on a theme or a couple of themes is important. There are a lot of family stories that I left out. They were entertaining but not part of the themes I chose. (Note that the number of cows or a hairbrush could be part of the larger theme a writer chooses. There may be important stories behind them.)
This story is obviously of a personal nature. Do you have any plans to continue writing? Or was this a one and done?
Since 2015, after I moved to New Mexico, I have been writing three memoirs. My first came of in 2019, Finding Myself in Borneo https://www.neillmckeeauthor.com/finding-myself-in-borneo.
It has won three awards. The second is Guns and Gods in My Genes. Simultaneously, I have been writing a memoir on my childhood and youth in a small Ontario town, and university years, by the working title of Kid on the Go! Memoir of my life before Borneo. (See description below.) I hope to release it in mid-2021. Now I have started writing a memoir with the working title of Memoir of an International Filmmaker: My Travels After Borneo. It's a good theme to write on while Covid-19 is still locking us down. When we are able to travel again, I hope to write some travel memoirs on the American Southwest and Rocky Mountains. There's a lot to write on here, as mentioned in the last few pages of Guns and Gods in My Genes.
Kid on the Go! Memoir of my life before Borneo is Neill McKee’s third work in creative nonfiction. It will be a prequel to his first work in the genre, the award-winning Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah. In this short book, McKee takes readers on a journey through his childhood, early adolescence, and teenage years, while growing up in the small industrially-polluted town of Elmira in Southern Ontario, Canada—now infamous as one of the centers for production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Each chapter is set to a different theme on how he learned to keep “on the go” to escape the smells coming from the town’s chemical factory and other pollutants, including manure from surrounding farms. McKee’s vivid descriptions, dialog, and self-drawn illustrations, provide much humor and poignant moments in his stories of growing up in a loving family. In a way, the book is a travel memoir through both mental and physical space—a study of a young boy’s learning to observe and avoid dangers; to cope with death in the family; to fish, hunt, play cowboys; to learn the value of work and how to build and repair “escape” vehicles. The memoir explores his experiences with exploding hormones, his first attraction to girls, dealing with bullying, how he rebelled against religion and authority and survived the conformist teenager “rock & roll” culture of the early 1960s, coming out the other side with the help of influential teachers and mentors. After finally leaving his hometown, McKee describes his rather directionless but intensely searching years at university. Except for an emotional afterword and revealing postscript, the story ends when he departs to become a volunteer teacher on the Island of Borneo—truly a “kid on the go!”