The Rural Voice, 1987-09, Page 18Miller's Painting
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16 THE RURAL VOICE
YOU CAN TAKE THE
REPORTER OUT OF
THE CITY ...
I suppose that in more than 15
years of speaking to farm meetings the
topic I'm most often asked to address
is how farmers can change the stereo-
typed vision urban people have of
them. Probably I could have saved a
good many after-dinner yawns if I'd
stood up and told people it was a
hopeless cause and they should get
back to worrying about how to
squeeze a couple of extra bushels an
acre out of their corn and forget what
city people think of them.
The effort is a lost cause because
to change the image that urban people
have you must first change the image
that urban writers and interviewers
have, and that seems to be impossible.
One of the horrors to be avoided by
any writer is supposed to be the clichee,
but the one place where a cliches seems
not only permissible, but downright
desirable, is in dealing with anything
to do with small towns or rural life.
Besides all those years of trying to
bring a little realism to the picture of
farmers' lives, I've devoted the past 13
years to involvement in one of the best
small-town success stories in Canada:
The Blyth Festival. After 13 summers
of success, after hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars spent on advertising
and public relations, after bringing
dozens, maybe hundreds of city -based
reporters and reviewers to see for
themselves, the main result has been a
blizzard of cliches that makes a Huron
County snow squall look tame.
Take, for example, a recent full-
page article in Maclean's magazine
about the plays at the Festival this
summer. It's the kind of publicity in a
major magazine that money can't buy.
And, generally, the reviews of the
plays were quite positive.
But to the rural resident, the
article, from the opening lines on, is
enough to make one cringe: "It looks
like a crowd headed for a church pic-
nic." The article then describes the
audience as "sunburned farmers,
small-town shopkeepers and women
in print dresses." One gets the impres-
sion that they were taking time from
an old-time threshermen's dinner to
take in a play.
Print dresses! All I can say is that
I'm glad I don't have to pay for the
wardrobe many women wear to Fes-
tival shows. While the Festival has
been proud to count many farmers and
shopkeepers in its audience, it also
counts doctors and lawyers and more
schoolteachers than you can shake a
pointer at. While most of the audience
is still local (thank goodness), there
are also visiting English professors
from American universities, actors and
writers who drop in from across the
country, and theatre -lovers who make
special trips to Ontario for the Strat-
ford Festival, the Shaw Festival, and
Blyth. The audience is too diverse to
categorize, yet those visiting reporters
see what they want to see.
Part of the reason is the utter
surprise — perhaps shock would be
a better word — at finding a thriving
professional theatre in a sleepy (it's
got to be sleepy in any story about a
town smaller than Hamilton) village
in Huron County. For years the stor-
ies were all variations on a theme:
"through the corn fields and across
from the hotel." I wonder if the
reporters were surprised to see that
the audience could read the program
without moving their lips.
If urban reporters were as lazy, as
subject to lapsing into cliches about a
racial group or the women's move-
ment, they'd be drummed out of busi-
ness. But when talking about small
towns and farmers, the more cliches
you can crowd into one story, the
better your editor seems to like it.0
KEITH ROULSTON, WHO LIVES NEAR
BLYTH, IS THE ORIGINATOR AND PAST
PUBLISHER OF THE RURAL VOICE.