Making Room for Misfits

Ken Weber has had an illustrious career. Most In The Hills readers will know him for the 27 years he spent contributing stories about Headwaters history, and his long-running puzzle page. However, that didn’t even begin until after his retirement as a professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Education and Institute of Child Study, where he published many academic textbooks, and was a pioneer in the field of education for special needs students.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Weber also published the Five-Minute Mysteries series, seven books each containing about 40 brief cases of murder and mayhem, all designed to be solved in about five minutes. A particular hit in Japan, the series has gone on to sell more than five million copies worldwide in 20 languages.

Weber retired his In The Hills column in 2022. Now, at age 86, the prolific writer has published his first novel. Set over four months in the fall of 1951, When Misfits Meet draws together a wide collection of characters in the fictional Ontario village of Halbstadt. City boy and newly hatched teacher Owen Hesch arrives to much curiosity from the locals. His assignment is experimental both on his part, and that of the school board. Owen isn’t sure village life is for him, and the school board isn’t sure about what was then an unheard-of concept: special education.

Today there is a whole lexicon of terms used to describe special needs students, like autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia and Down syndrome. In 1951 such terms were unknown, especially in small rural schools. What clinical terms there were – the discriminatory slur “mongoloid,” for example – fell out of favour in the years following.

The students in Owen’s class are trying to pass Grade 8, though many are well into their teenage years. As we get to know them, we see that while each has challenges – and some quite profound – they also have strengths and abilities waiting to be unlocked. We come to see their humanity and beyond their special needs.

The book is a highly readable and entertaining look at how we all have ways we don’t fit in, and how we can be embraced by the community nonetheless.

I sat down with Ken Weber in the backyard of his lovely Caledon home to talk about When Misfits Meet.

JEFF ROLLINGS: You’ve had a long career publishing non-fiction, and the Five-Minute Mysteries series was a series of short fictional stories. But this is your first long-format novel. What inspired that change?

KEN WEBER: Yes, if you count the schoolbooks I’ve written, this is my 52nd title. The truth is, I just wanted to see if I could write a novel. Enough people have read it now and convinced me that I’ve succeeded, so that makes me feel pretty good. But at the time that was the main motivation.

JR: Was there a moment when the whole thing gelled, or when you knew you had a story?

KW: There was a moment when I realized I had a basic outline. I knew I wanted to set it in a country village because that’s where I grew up. And I wanted to place it in 1951. There were two reasons for that. One was that I wanted the village to be a character itself as much as the people in it. And given what villages are like today, with the internet and paved roads and cell phones, they’re really variations of a city without the noise. Villages in those days were really individual and unique. 

The second reason was that I wanted to make a point about the evolution of special education, because that was my academic career.

JR: How would you describe that evolution?

KW: Not to be arrogant, but I think it’s fair to say I was one of the founders of special education in Canada. I was the founder of the Special Education department of the University of Toronto Faculty of Education, and I spent a lot of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s travelling across Canada, talking about special ed.

When I was a young teacher, in the early ’60s – I started in high school – I thought that teaching was the most fun you could have with your clothes on, and just loved it. I don’t think young teachers today have that same experience, and I wanted to make a point about how interesting and how much fun it was to teach special kids at a time when there was very little interference. In the modern education system, there are so many administrators, so many regulations and policies, not to mention so many experts. Advocacy groups have their hands in too. And everybody talks about funding as if it’s the answer to everything.

In my experience, the first step to addressing special needs is a combination of goodwill and common sense, and that’s got to have the teacher at the centre. When you’ve got so many administrators and so many experts and so much policy, the teacher gets moved to the periphery. In my book, the teacher, Owen, who’s the main character, is pretty much on his own with these so-called misfits, these special kids, so he has the opportunity for creativity and there’s room for common sense and goodwill.

Everybody assumes that for a special needs kid there has to be a program or a special method out there somewhere. But the whole notion of a special needs child is just that: special. That kid may fit into a general category like, say, autism, and a program may have a general view of what can and should be done, but for anything to succeed for that particular kid, it takes the teacher who sees him or her in school every day, and I was hoping to make that point in the book. 

JR: What part of the book was the most fun to write? And the most challenging?

KW: That’s an interesting question I haven’t thought about. I think the most fun was dealing with the women, dealing with Owen’s love affairs. I would have the same problem making a decision about which direction it will go as he does at the end of the book.

As to challenging, the thing that’s so different about writing a fictional novel is you really have to create a world, and then get into it. My other writing always had borders. There were facts I couldn’t alter and I often had to make academic arguments. And there was a limited audience. With a novel you have a wider audience and you want everybody to be pleased. I think the hardest thing wasn’t getting into the world, but at the end of the day getting out of it and coming back to my family. I really have to give them thanks. My wife Cecile, particularly, was very understanding.

Still, you have to get into the world because once you’re in it, stuff happens that begins to make sense. You know, you’re writing something and an idea occurs to you because it would be only natural for this character to behave that way, because they have become people you know. 

When Misfits Meet is available at BookLore in Orangeville, and online in both electronic and paperback formats. Weber will be donating all income from sales of the book to the Bolton and Orangeville food banks.