Sometimes push comes to shove — back
October 2011
GRAFTON — Grafton resident Janet Irvine has written a book she hopes will be talked about — especially among teachers, parents and students.
When PUSH Comes To Shove Back tells the story of how Jeremy torments Matt, an easy target whose strategy for dealing with the situation is to avoid it as much as possible. The tables turn when Jeremy becomes the target himself, of the school's biggest drug dealer. Circumstances throw Jeremy and Matt together against this student and the forces behind him, which threaten the larger student community.
Chapters alternate among Jeremy's and Matt's points of view and the traditional third-person telling, with prose written in short easy-to-read notebook-style chunks.
A talented former student of Irvine's from Cobourg District Collegiate Institute West, Jon Beasley, did the cover and inside illustrations. The cover draws on the love for military things, which one character has.
Irvine strove to develop each character fully, to explain the circumstances of his life. One of them, for example, has a father who is a bully.
"There's a tie-in between bullying and terrorism. They are defined almost the same way, except it's an individual doing it instead of a country or people," she said.
"I played with that whole theme of manipulation and bullying, and tried desperately to make the characters not black-and-white — because bullies are people and have problems and have backgrounds we don't know."
By contrast, the teachers and police officers in the story don't necessarily come through as heroes, since it is written from the point of view of a student and so many young people are predisposed to see them as adversarial to some degree.
"I dealt with a lot of kids in trouble, teaching special ed and in my role as acting vice-principal," Irvine says. "I was always involved in at-risk programs. You get an appreciation for some of the bullies who are around and why they are there."
Irvine has heard that as many as one in five students has to deal with a bullying situation of some degree, from the clumsy catcalling that can be laughed off to vicious, sustained campaigns that provoke suicide.
She called upon more than her own expertise to make the novel realistic, such as consulting her 13-year-old grandson. Her daughter, who has worked in group homes, had helpful advice.
"She would say, 'On page such-and-such, nobody says that,' and, 'These characters are not believable if you don't have them swearing.' "I had a problem with that, because I wanted it to have a wide audience, but she was right."
Irvine even called the police to see how they might realistically handle the kind of situation that develops late in the book.
When PUSH Comes To Shove Back is self-published through AuthorHouse press.
"You get to the age where you are not interested in playing the publishing game," Irvine shrugged.
Though she never submitted it to a mainstream house for publication, she did enter the self-published book in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. She got some good reviews and had the excitement of watching it remain on the list through the semifinals and again through the quarterfinals.
As there were more than 10,000 entries from around the world and 250 left on the quarterfinals list, Irvine figures that puts her book in the top 5%.
This is not the first book Irvine has begun. She previously started work on a non-fiction book, a serious look at Alzheimer Disease and what it does to families.
"That is still in progress, but it takes a lot to write that kind of book when your family has been through it," she said.
"When I was teaching, I always thought I would like to write a novel. I started (When PUSH Comes To Shove Back) as a diversion from my real writing, and it just took off. I enjoyed the characters that began to develop, and it got finished."
She had three objectives with the book: she wanted to write something kids would want to read, something that would go off the book shelves into eager hands; she wanted to produce a well-written book; and she hoped the book would serve as a catalyst to spur adults and kids to talk about bullying.
While kids are averse to discussing their own experiences with bullying, Irvine explained, it might be helpful if parents and kids could discuss the situation in relation to a fictitious kid and what he could or should have done in different instances.
"That kind of conversation can be very helpful," she said.
"We see so many suicides and shoot-ups in the headlines, but there are an awful lot of kids who just suffer through the torment and don't talk about it. I wanted (the book) to be a reason to talk."
The result is a book that is enjoyable for young teens (though her 11-year-old granddaughter has read and enjoyed it), but her real target audience is teens, teachers and parents.
Irvine hopes to be able to do readings and workshops on the topic for both young people and adults. Meanwhile, copies of the book are available at a number of retail book stores (including The Avid Reader).
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