Eganville – When she was a little girl on the farm in Brudenell attending a one-room schoolhouse, Johanna Zomers recalls there was a great deal of excitement in the community when a young teacher came into the classroom bringing with her the vibrancy and excitement of the changing world of the 1960s.

“In Grade 3 we got a young teacher and she was like an exotic character from another world,” she said. “We lived in a very insular place. The outside world was very 1960s but we did not have any of that. Now as I got older, I realize what an astonishing contrast it was.”

This recollection forms a large part of the background story for “Miss Pringle’s Mini Skirt” which is the latest Stone Fence Theatre production on stage this summer. It centres around a young teacher coming to a rural one-room schoolhouse in Renfrew County in the 1960s. It celebrates the rural way of life Ms. Zomers is so familiar with and which readers of her award-winning column in the Eganville Leader so enjoy. There is also a close tie-in with those columns in how this play came to be.

“Ish (Stone Fence Producer Ish Theilheimer) had said a couple of years ago we should do a play on the reminisces in my columns,” she said. “Those seem to get the most response. So last year we decided to do the play.”

As the ideas for the play took shape in conjunction with Mr. Theilheimer and Kathy Eisner, the focus was on the teacher who moved to teach at a school on the Opeongo Line.

“I had an image of her as a young modern girl in a pink mini skirt,” she said. “That opened up the idea of the contrast with the school inspector and the priest.”

Part biographical, part fiction, it draws very much on her recollections and some of the anecdotes will be familiar to readers of her column.

“We had the school inspector and the parish priest,” she said. “We had a lovely Irish priest, Father Holly.”

Set around 1963, the play brings in the realities of the era and the contrast of a new teacher wearing the latest fashion of mini skirts with the isolation of the young students, many of whom had not been exposed to new ideas.

“There is one scene when a student comes to school who has seen the Beatles on television and they have a small transistor radio to play the music,” she said. “Others had not heard this before.”

Coming Full Circle

In many ways, the play for her is coming full circle in her literary career, for as much as it draws on her columns at the Leader, for which has won provincial awards in the Ontario Community Newspaper Association annual competition, it also harkens back to her first foray in journalism right after graduating from Opeongo High School.

“I wrote a story on Madonna House and I submitted it to the Leader,” she recalled.

At the time she was living at Madonna House, which was a very literary community. She was a young woman looking to stretch her wings and she found at Madonna House many young people like her. However, she realized many in the area had very little idea about what Madonna House was about, so she wrote her first article. Her submission was 2,000 words and at first, she heard nothing. Then, unexpectedly then Leader Publisher Ron Tracey showed up at Madonna House to take some pictures to go along with the story and she realized she was a published writer.

She never looked back.

Following this, she moved to Ottawa, went to journalism school and film school and did an internship at the Ottawa Citizen. She quickly realized human interest stories were her forte.

“When you grow up in a small town you realize most of it is people centred. It is like living in a soap opera in a good way. It is endlessly changing and dramatic,” she said.

Her career continued in news and to this day she remains a newshound fascinated by the news. During her career she made documentaries, wrote a book and has more recently focused on poetry, short stories and playwriting. She wrote a novel inspired by the Brian Smith murder in Ottawa and has a sequel planned. Recently her work has been published in Ireland and England and some short stories will be published in Ireland this month.

“The things I write about – family, rural life, death, village life – they are still of interest in Ireland,” she said. “In Canada we have ignored the life we live in these small towns.”

But for Ms. Zomers, her roots remain deep in the Ottawa Valley and her nurturing for these writing skills comes from her growing up years as the daughter of Dutch immigrants who settled first in Brudenell and then in Grattan Township.

“There is a fascinating storytelling history in the Ottawa Valley,” she said. “The only other place I can think of like this is Ireland where there is a strong written and verbal storytelling tradition.”

For inspiration she frequently looks around the Ottawa Valley and many times the recollections of her childhood.

“The hard part is narrowing it down to a major story,” she said. “There are so many sidelines.”

Stone Fence

Her collaboration with Stone Fence goes back many years, but this play is especially personal.

When she started thinking of stories for “Miss Pringle” she realized how fortunate she is to have the memories of the time of the last one-room schoolhouses in Renfrew County. Her first year in school would have been in 1959.

“I have all these memories of how amazing it was to go to school,” she said. “We had no television. We had very little influence from the outside world.

“I did not speak a word of English and the first thing I learned were some Polish curse words,” she said.

Her earliest teachers were Mrs. May and Mrs. Ryan and then her very own “Miss Pringle” arrived as the young teacher who brought in the excitement of the outside world and the newness of the changes happening outside the hills of Brudenell. Her respect for the teacher in that school and at the later one-room school she attended in Grattan are immense.

“I think of that teacher teaching Grade 1 phonics and also teaching Grade 10 Latin,” she said. “As students, you were learning everything.”

Most of the play was written in Europe where she spends the winter, not in an “all inclusive” resort but in an apartment in Spain or staying at hostels. She did most of the writing on a tablet or her phone which was quite the challenge.

“Writing a play when you are travelling on planes, trains and automobiles is difficult,” she laughed.

There were consultations back and forth to Canada with Mr. Theilheimer and Ms. Eisner and the play took shape.

“The songs are a collaboration. I make a bunch of lyrics,” she said, noting Mr. Theilheimer and others add the music and make the lyrics fit.

The spirit of collaboration continues to the directors since there are two for this play – Shirley Hill and Sarah Wright – who can share the load. The end result is marvellous, she believes.

“I was blown away when I saw the kids starting to rehearse,” she said. “You would swear they had all grown up in a one-room schoolhouse.”

However, this is not the school of 2024. They dance a polka and play games in the schoolyard. They do show and tell and are kids from the 1960s all over again. There are stories of threshing and chicken killing, Christmas concerts and visits from the dreaded school inspector.

“I am loving how it is showing up on stage,” she said.

Part biography, part fiction, all fun, the story of Miss Pringle makes her smile and as it ties in the past with her present columns in the Leader, she hopes others will enjoy it as much as she does.

Tickets for Stone Fence Theatre can be found at https://stone-fence-theatre.square.site/. There will be seven dessert-theatre performances in the summer and five performances in the fall, all at the Rankin Culture and Recreation Centre.