Words By Whittall

  In the summer of 1980, several things happened. The most important, personally, was my move from Banff, Alberta to Vancouver, BC.  I’d been a chambermaid at a hotel in the resort town and hoped for an office job in the big city.  I bunked with a friend in townhouse in North Vancouver and, armed with a trusty umbrella, took the sea bus across the Burrard Inlet to work every day at various offices as assigned by a temp agency. I should point out that, since I couldn’t type, these jobs mostly involved filing various bits of paper into file folders in various filing cabinets all in alphabetical order. I did know the alphabet. One job involved feeding recipe card-sized pieces of paper into a micro-fiche machine. I sat for hours moving only my thumbs as I fed each card into the maw, imagining, but not actually writing, a novel. I digress. Another thing that happened in the summer of 1980 was the release of the Brian DePalma movie  Dressed to Kill , in which Angie Dickens...