Use Your Words
Sorry, no Writing Wednesday this week –I had some good ideas, but didn’t get myself organized in time. But I realized that in the last few weeks of Wednesday videos, I’ve shared a few interesting pieces of writing-related news that might have been missed by people who read my blog but don’t watch my videos. Of course my dream is that EVERYBODY is watching my videos but I do understand that not everyone has the time or bandwidth to click on a YouTube video every week. So I decided to use my (written) words and write a post bringing you up to speed on some of my news:
1. A Sudden Sun has been accepted by Breakwater Books for publication in the fall of 2014. Again, I’ve talked a lot about this book project on the vlog and probably a lot less here in written form, but this is the novel I’ve been working on for the last year. It’s a historical novel about two women, a mother and daughter, who are separately involved with the campaign for women’s votes in Newfoundland in the 1890s and the 1920s. It’s about a lot more than that, but that’s my thumbnail sketch. I’m very pleased to have a third Newfoundland historical novel coming out with Breakwater, a publisher I’ve really enjoyed working with over these last few years.
2. The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson is now available as an e-book. This novel about the woman best known to literary history as Jonathan Swift’s friend “Stella” was published by Penguin Books Canada in 2006 but has been out of print for a few years. You can now get it for Kindle at amazon.com, amazon.ca and other Amazon stores, and will soon(ish) be available for other e-readers as well. This book was my first serious foray into writing historical fiction (my book about the “other” Esther, the Biblical queen, was released before this one, but written later). While The Violent Friendship never got the wide sales in print that every writer hopes for, I have had a lot of readers tell me they loved it over the years. If you like historical fiction woven around the lives of real women who lived in the shadow of great men, you should check out my book! Here’s the link for Amazon.com in the US but you can find it on any Amazon site, I think.
3. Upcoming event to talk about That Forgetful Shore. Years ago when I first began writing That Forgetful Shore, I asked my cousin Jennifer, whose parents owned the old family home at Coley’s Point, if she had the collection of postcards that had belonged to our great-great-aunt Emma Morgan — the postcards that had initially inspired me to write the novel. Much to my amusement she delivered them in a cardboard box on which her mother, novelist Bernice Morgan, had written in Sharpie marker: “This is valuable stuff — from Coley’s Point — will make a novel or an art exhibit one day.” She wasn’t wrong. Not only did I write a postcard inspired by those novels, Jennifer now has a display of prints on exhibit at the Red Ochre Gallery on Duckworth St. in St. John’s, inspired by those same postcards. On Wednesday evening, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. she and I will be giivng a talk at the gallery about the postcards and how we used them in our work. I’m really looking forward to this event!
