How participating in The McMaster Discovery Program helped abuse survivor Peggyanne Mansfield find her voice as a writer

Through all the ups and downs I have wanted to write a book about my life – not for glory, but for all the survivors who struggle every day of their lives. A book where I include many of the harmful and shameful things I have done as a survivor. Not a book telling that I have found the path. I have not. It is a jagged, rough, uneven journey. It is real and we are enough as we are. There need not be shame in the things we have had to do to survive.

(Peggyanne Mansfield, from My Life in Pieces)

Peggyanne Mansfield was “powerful,” “glowing,” “strong” and “a real presence.”

She was a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother. She was a passionate advocate for women, for affordable housing, for mental health supports.

She had no filter and always asked the hard questions.

Peggyanne, who almost everyone remembers by her first name, was a survivor of abuse, wretched neglect and systemic indifference. She experienced addiction, homelessness, suicide attempts and trauma within the mental health system.

But she was also a published author – and the story of how she went from an abandoned and victimized child to a strong advocate for herself, her family and for others is one that’s partly tied to a unique program at McMaster and a caring professor.

Mostly, though, it’s about Peggyanne and her steely determination to live better, to be better, for herself and the ones she loved.

Peggyanne died of cancer last year, but she left behind enduring echoes of a powerful voice.

I had to do a lot of work on my judgments about professors and McMaster students. They were not the arrogant academic people I had envisioned. I knew early on that I had the backing of the professor and the student support team. The program was amazing. I learned so much on so many levels. We had an event to show off our projects. I was nervous but I loved it. (My Life in Pieces)

The McMaster Discovery Program is a free, university-level non-credit course aimed at folks who have faced barriers to postsecondary education. Depending on who’s teaching in any given year, themes have ranged from rebuilding community following COVID-19 to an interdisciplinary exploration of water to an investigation of how past pandemics have affected Hamilton.

Held on Saturdays, the program provides a free lunch and support with transportation and childcare to make sure classes are as accessible as possible. Participants in the course are further supported by a team of McMaster students, who can provide advice on navigating the McMaster campus, getting connected with classroom technology and researching projects.

“In a class like that, people can be shy about being in a classroom – they’ve all had different levels of schooling, much of it not very positive,” says Daniel Coleman, the first professor to teach in the program, which started in 2011. “In my class, all of the students devised their own creative project in response to the theme, which was ‘Voicing Hamilton,’ and what they came up with would blow your mind.

“I met Peggyanne in the second year of the program – and I remember it vividly.”

Peggyanne applied to the Discovery Program nervously, but full of excitement, says her granddaughter, Jennie Lukas. After all, Peggyanne hadn’t had much formal schooling. Her childhood had been full of abandonment, neglect and abuse. But through years of hard personal work that included therapy and extensive reading, she had developed an ability to share her story with whoever was listening.

And while she was open about her experiences from the very start of her participation in the Discovery Program, it was in her written work, reflecting on her experiences as a child and young adult, that Coleman saw she had a very real talent for writing.

“She knew how to suggest pretty terrifying scenes in her life without going into  lurid details – she knew how to signal the severity and extreme events without making her writing feel sensational or exploitative,” he says. “I couldn’t believe her capacity as a writer – so I told her she obviously had a gift, and SHE said she’d always dreamed of publishing something.”

That’s how it began.

I remember Daniel telling me I was a writer. I thought that was nice of him to say. He believed it. I did not. (My Life in Pieces)

Over coffee at the William’s Fresh Cafe down at Pier 8, across the street from the co-op where she lived, Peggyanne shared with Coleman that, because of the trauma she’d experienced growing up, she had some attention deficit difficulties. They made it hard for her to develop any kind of continuity in her writing, which she felt was too fragmented to be publishable.

OK, said Coleman. Send me what you do write, and I’ll keep it in a file. When you have a few pieces, we can take a look at what you have.

The result was a series of short pieces written over several years. They stretched from Peggyanne’s early childhood, through abuse and addiction and trauma, and followed the progression of her life as she became a mother, worked through healing, became a grandmother, then a great-grandmother.

She shared messages to other abuse survivors and wrote about how scary it felt to apply to the McMaster Discovery Program. She reflected on the importance of finding stable housing and a sympathetic counsellor to the ongoing recovery of her mental health.

By 2020, Coleman had compiled 35 pages worth of her writing into a rough order. While there were undoubtedly many, many more words to be shared, doctors found cancer in Peggyanne’s lungs and liver in May that year. She went into treatment, fighting all the way.

She died on July 16, 2020.

This year, A Memoir: My Life in Pieces appeared in the 13th anniversary edition of the Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine – an issue devoted entirely to pieces about Hamilton. The magazine was produced in partnership with the Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts, which is co-directed by Coleman and fellow McMaster professor Lorraine York.

“She would have been so excited to see her memoirs published – but she still would have doubted herself,” says Lukas. “Until Daniel told her she was a writer she really hadn’t thought of herself that way – but she’s so eloquent in the way she writes about what’s essentially a horror story. I wish she had been able to see it.”

Both Coleman and Lukas see Peggyanne’s influence continuing, through her writing and because of  who she was.

“Writing was her way of having a say over what she’d gone through, and an act of generosity to others who had similar experiences,” says Coleman. “What a process of giving oneself agency in the course of a life – especially when her trauma was that her agency kept being taken away! It was amazing for someone who was so disempowered for so much of her life to find her voice after so many years.” For Lukas, her grandmother’s voice speaks across generations.

“In the future, when I talk about Nanny to my daughter, I’m going to say she was a strong f—ing woman who didn’t put up with anyone’s s–t,” she laughs. “I got that from her, and that’s how I’m raising my daughter – who’s a firecracker. You don’t have to guess what she wants, because she tells you.

“As women, we need to be strong, and Nanny was very powerful. She was my rock and my support.”

My hope is that in writing about my journey it might help one survivor discover that they can do the painful work needed to rescue themselves. It is work and it is painful. If my journey can reach one survivor to let them know they are not broken, it will give my life more meaning. That a survivor might come to the place of knowing there is nothing wrong with them, that they, that we, are normal. (My Life in Pieces)