Famous Canadian Authors from Alberta

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Alberta

Henrietta Louise Muir was born in Montreal on December 18, 1849, into a middle class family. When she was twenty-six-years old she and her sister founded a Working Girls’ Association to provide meals, reading rooms, and study class for young women. It became one of the first Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCA) in Canada. Henrietta and her sister also published a periodical titled The Working Women of Canada. It highlighted the terrible working conditions of women in Montreal. The two young women financed these two projects from money they earned as artists.

     Henrietta married Dr. Oliver C. Edwards in 1876 and in 1883 they and their three children moved to Indian Head, Northwest Territories, now the province of Saskatchewan. She continued to advocate for women’s rights and when Dr. Edwards became ill in 1890, they moved to Ottawa, Ontario. There, Henrietta took up the cause of female prisoners. In 1893, she worked with the wife of the Governor General of Canada, Lady Aberdeen, to establish the National Council of Women of Canada. They also founded the Victoria Order of Nurses (VON) in 1897.

     Dr. Edwards was posted as the medical officer to the Blood Tribe in 1904 and they moved to Fort Macleod, Northwest Territories, now Alberta. She wrote Legal Status of Canadian Women (1908) about the legal problems she was trying to overcome for women. Near the end of the First World War, 1914-1918, when supplies and moral were low, the Government of Canada selected Henrietta Muir Edwards, as the only woman to be on an advisory committee on how to bring in stricter conservation measures. This was the first time that a woman had been appointed to review public policy with the government.

     Henrietta joined four other women’s rights activists, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, and Emily Murphy, to lobby the Alberta government for dower and matrimonial property rights for women. They became known as The Famous Five. Henrietta wrote and had her second book published, Legal Status of Women in Alberta in 1921.

     The Famous Five joined together again to fight the Persons Case in the late 1920s. Until then, women did not have the same rights as men to hold positions of political power. The case, officially known as Edwards v. A. G. of Canada, fought for the right of women to be appointed to the Senate. In 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not considered ‘persons’ according to the British North America Act and therefore could not be appointed to the Senate. The women took their appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, England. The council reversed the Court’s decision in 1929 and this opened the Senate to women, enabling them to work in both the House of Commons and the Upper House.

     Henrietta died on November 10, 1931 and was buried in Mount Pleasant Municipal Cemetery, Edmonton. For some reason the memorial erected in her honour lists her death as Nov 9.

William Patrick "W. P." Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, in Edmonton, Alberta. His first ten years were spent on a homestead west of the city where he was homeschooled. His family moved into Edmonton when he was ten and he started school in the fifth grade. His first story won a YMCA contest when he was fourteen. After high school he worked at various jobs in Edmonton, then moved to Victoria in 1967 where he drove taxi and ran a pizza restaurant. Three years later he enrolled in writing courses at the University of Victoria and received his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1974. He moved to Iowa and earned his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978.

     Kinsella’s two favourite subjects for his stories were Indigenous peoples and baseball. While in Iowa, Dance Me Outside, a collection of stories as told by a young Cree boy, was published in 1977. It describes life on a native reserve in Alberta. W.P. returned to Alberta and taught English at the University of Calgary until his writing career took off. In the mid-1980’s, he moved to White Rock, B.C.

     Kinsella won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award for his most famous baseball novel, Shoeless Joe (1982). It was also made into a movie titled, Field of Dreams in 1989 starring Kevin Costner. Another collection of Indigenous short stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, (1986) earned W.P. the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1987.

     Box Socials (1991) combines baseball and life in rural Alberta in the 1940s. That same year Kinsella received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria. In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on reserves were the basis for the 1994 movie Dance Me Outside and the CBC television series The Rez, which aired on CBC Television from 1996 to 1998.

     In 1997, W.P. Kinsella was struck by a car and suffered a head injury. He lost his ability to concentrate as well as his sense of taste and smell. Unable to write his own stories he did keep in the writing community by writing book reviews. He was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and was presented with the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

     In March 2010, Kinsella’s unpublished manuscript, Butterfly Winter, won Winnipeg publisher, Enfield and Wizenty’, Colophon award. They published the novel in September, 2011, fourteen years after his accident.

     Kinsella spent the last years of his life in Yale, a small village along the Fraser River northeast of Vancouver. He had suffered from diabetes since the 1980s and in failing health he opted for the assisted dying provisions of Bill C-14. He passed away on Friday 16, 2016 at 12:05pm.

lets see

Putting A Puzzle Together vs Mystery Writing

Putting A Puzzle Together vs Mystery Writing

My daughter and son-in-law gave me a one-thousand piece puzzle for Christmas. It has been years since I’ve put a puzzle together and I thought it would be fun. However, as soon as I dumped out the pieces on the table I realized that putting the puzzle together would be much like me writing a mystery novel.

     First, the big pile of pieces is like the big mishmash of ideas, clues, scenes, characters, and settings that make up the notes I have for my mystery. Before I can start the puzzle I have to turn all the pieces upright so I can see their colour, just as I have to sort through my notes when I start my novel. I have to decide where in the story my book begins much like I have to decide how to start my puzzle. I can outline my novel as some writers do or I can jump in and start writing. With the puzzle, I can find all the outer edge pieces and put them together or pick scenes of the picture and find the colours to match.

     I decide to start with outer edge and I sift through the pile to find them. I return the rest to the box. As I work on the edge I have to go back through the box to find edge pieces I missed, just like I have to go through my manuscript and find where I have missed adding some important information or missed putting in a misdirection.

     Because of the way they are cut, it is hard to decide if a piece is part of the outside edge or if it is a regular piece. Just like writing, is that a clue or a red herring?

     With the puzzle I know at the beginning what the end result will be because of the picture on the box. Sometimes when I start my mystery, I know the ending, however sometimes the characters say or do something that I hadn’t planned on and I am left trying to figure out how to get them out of a situation or how to diffuse something they have said.

     I learned that there are various names for the parts of a puzzle piece: loops and sockets; knobs and holes; tabs and slots; keys and locks; even outies or innies. Sometimes it is frustrating to try and get knobs to fit into the holes. The colour looks the same only the tab doesn’t fit correctly into the slot. Or the pieces lock perfectly but there is a slight difference in colour. If one doesn’t seem to fit in a spot, I have to match it somewhere else. That is the same with my writing. Sometimes I come up with a good line or a scene only to find that it doesn’t suit where I want it and I have to find a better match somewhere else.

     When I get stuck with trying to figure out where my story goes next, I can work on a different section in my novel. In the puzzle if I can’t seem to make a scene come together I can go to a different part and work there. Every puzzle piece is tailored to go with the rest to make the picture just like every clue, every scene, every red herring has to fit into the story properly.

     What is frustrating to a puzzle solver is finding that one or two pieces are missing at the end. This is true for the reader of a mystery. All the clues have to be pulled together, the red herrings explained, the mystery solved, and the murderer caught. I can’t leave any pieces out.

     And the last thing I realized about how putting puzzles together and writing mysteries are similar is that both of them are an excruciatingly slow process for me.

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The Bay of Fundy

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I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband, Mike, and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.

Today I’d like to describe our stop at the Bay of Fundy situated between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Bay has the highest tides in the world and was formally designated one of North America’s seven wonders of nature in February, 2014. (The others are Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Mount McKinley, the Everglades, and Yosemite National Park).

 

 

 

 

 

       From Moncton, NB, we drove south on Route 114 to Hopewell Cape and the Hopewell Rocks arriving in the afternoon. It was low tide so after we paid, Mike accepted the cart ride offered while I decided to walk the trail to the Rocks. I arrived at a viewpoint overlooking the ocean floor and the reddish rock structures.  Mike and I took the stairway down to the floor and wandered out among the tall formations. The ground was surprisingly solid with a few muddy areas.

       The Hopewell Rocks were originally a massive mountain range that was older than the Appalachians and bigger than the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Over millions of years the range wore down and after the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, water seeping through cracks in the cliffs eroded the sedimentary and sandstone and separated the Rocks from the cliffs. The incoming and outgoing tides have eroded the base of the rocks at a faster rate than the tops and that has caused their unusual shapes. Those shapes and the vegetation growing on top have given the formations their nickname of the Flower Pot Rocks.

 

 

 

       Due to the tides the Rocks are covered in water twice a day. Some visitors are able to see the high and low tides in one day but since the next high tide would be at night, Mike and I found a place to camp and returned to the Rocks the next morning. There is approximately six hours between low and high tide and the entrance fee covers a return visit to enable visitors to see the Rocks during both tides.

       Again, Mike took his ride and I walked. I reached the viewpoint and the change was astonishing. Just the tops of some of the rocks showed, the rest being under water. The tides can reach a height of 16 metres (52ft), which is as high as a four story building, twice a day. I walked down part of the stairs but the rest was blocked off to the public because they were under water. High tide is a good time to take a kayak tour and three kayakers were paddling around the formations.

 

 

       Seeing all the water and the partial formations, it was hard to believe that just the day before I had walked on the floor of the bay. It was an amazing experience.

Lucy Maud Montgomery and Prince Edward Island

 

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan

 
I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.
       I have decided to write about the scenery, attractions, and history of my country. This post is about Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The Confederation Bridge connects Borden-Carlton, Prince Edward Island, with the rest of Canada at Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick. It is the longest bridge in the world that crosses ice-covered water and was completed in 1997 at a cost of $840 million.

 

 

     We paid our toll and drove the bridge over the 12.9 kilometre wide Northumberland Strait. We headed to Green Gables in Cavendish in the Prince Edward Island National Park. One of the most famous writers in the world was from Prince Edward Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874 in New London, PEI. Her ancestors came from Scotland in the 1770s and her grandfathers were members of the provincial legislature for years. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Lucy was 2 and Lucy spent a much of her childhood with her maternal grandparents on the Macneill homestead in Cavendish. Her father moved west in 1887 and remarried. Lucy joined him but felt out of place and soon returned to PEI and her grandparents. She also spent time with her extended family on her mother’s side and her paternal grandfather.
     However, her grandparents weren’t very affectionate and Lucy felt lonely and isolated. This led her to reading an abundant number of books and using her imagination to write her own stories. She started with poetry and journals when she was nine years old and had her first poem, On Cape Le Force, published in the Charlottetown Patriot in November 1890. She started writing short stories in her mid-teens. She first published them in local newspapers then sold them to magazines throughout Canada and the United States.
     Lucy studied to be a teacher and began teaching in a village school in the late 1890s. She was also writing and selling her works so that when her grandfather died in 1898, she was able to leave her teaching position and move in with her grandmother. Between then and 1911 she wrote and sold poems and stories and also worked in the post office on her grandmother’s homestead.
    Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908 and was an instant bestseller. She got her idea from other novels written by women like Little Women and from a story she read about a couple who had arranged to adopt a boy but were sent a girl. The book sold more than 19,000 copies in the first five months and was reprinted ten times in the first year. It is still in print after more than a century. Lucy wrote two sequels, Anne of Green Gables: Anne of Avonlea (1909) and Anne of the Island (1915) plus five more Anne books over her lifetime. She had a total of twenty books, over five hundred short stories, and one book of poetry published before she died in 1942.
     In her private life,  Lucy had many suitors over the years and became secretly engaged to a distant cousin named Edwin Simpson in 1897. This ended with she began a romance with a farmer named Hermann Leard. Leard died in 1899 from influenza and Lucy threw herself into her writing. Lucy married a minister, Ewen Macdonald, after her grandmother died in 1911 and they moved to Ontario where Ewen had a parish. They had two sons, Chester and Stuart, and a third one who was stillborn. They moved to another village in 1926 and then, after Ewen was admitted to a sanatorium in 1934 and he resigned his parish, they moved to Toronto in 1935. Ewen died in 1943.
     The Green Gables House has been restored to match the descriptions in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. I toured through the historic site, seeing the exhibits in the Green Gables house and strolling the Haunted Woods and Balsam Hollow trails that were mentioned in her books.

     Prince Edward Island also boasts have Canada’s smallest library. It is one room with shelves of books along the walls and a table and chairs in the centre.

Cape Breton Island

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Cape Breton Island

 I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.

       I have decided to write about the scenery, attractions, and history of my country. This post is about Cape Breton Island.
       The Canso Causeway connects Cape Breton Island to the mainland of Nova Scotia. The rock-filled causeway is 1385 metres (4345 ft) long and has a depth of 65 metres (213 ft) which makes it the deepest causeway in the world.
       The Fortress of Louisbourg is situated on the east shore of the Cape Breton Island and well worth the visit.
       In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht was signed and France ceded its claims to present day Newfoundland, the Hudson’s Bay territories in Rupert Land, and Acadia (Nova Scotia) to the English. France kept what is now Prince Edward Island, the small islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon as well as Cape Breton Island. The settlement of Louisbourg was founded on the east side of Cape Breton Island in 1713, and between 1719 and 1745 the French built a fortified town. With its several thousand inhabitants it grew into a thriving and busy seaport in North America and was a key trading and military centre for the French in the New World. It was the base for the profitable cod fishery of the Grand Banks since salted and dried fish was an important food in Europe. The value of the settlement’s dried cod exports in 1737 was eight times higher than the value of the fur trade during the same period.

 

       In 1745, war was declared between France and Britain and the English launched an attack on Louisbourg. While the harbour was well defended, the low hills around the fortress provided cover for the attackers. The residents of the fortress held on for forty-six days before being captured. However, three years later the town was given back to the French by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
       A second attack occurred in 1758. There was no strong French navy to defend the town against the 16,000 troops and 150 ships and after seven weeks it was again taken by the English. They occupied it until 1768. Eventually, they decided that it should never return to being a fortified French base and they destroyed the fortress.

       Although the site was officially commemorated more than a dozen times with monuments, plaques, and cairns, it remained mainly forgotten and neglected until the 1930s when a museum was built and some of the streets and ruins excavated. In 1961, reconstruction began on one quarter of the fortress aided by the Government of Canada. First the area was excavated with the ruins of more buildings and walls being found as well as millions of artifacts. Since then streets, buildings, and gardens have been recreated so it looks as it did in the 1740s.
       The Fortress of Louisbourg is the largest reconstruction project in North America.
       I took a tour bus from the parking lot to the fortress. I visited with the guard at the entrance and began my tour. I walked up and down the streets of the fortress and toured through the buildings seeing the household furniture and goods of the period. There was an ice house where ice was placed during the winter and used during the summer to keep food cold so it wouldn’t spoil. I watched the fife and drum escort the cannon firers up the hill to the cannon and watched it being fired. I listened to the soldiers talk about their daily lives. I checked out the gardens and watched women doing embroidery. Throughout the site were interpreters in period clothing able to answer all questions about the fortress and its history. There is a long list of activities to do such as firing a musket or cannon, sampling some rum, learning a dance, or being a prisoner of the day.

       For those who want something to eat there are restaurants serving 1700s fare and a bakery from which you can buy a loaf of bread.
       From Louisbourg we drove the Cabot Trail, a 300 km (186 mile) scenic highway that took us through lovely villages, beside the ocean, up into the hills, and through Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The trail was named after John Cabot, an Italian explorer who landed in what is now Canada in 1497, and was completed in 1932.

 

       Alexander Graham Bell had a summer residence Baddeck. Now there is the 10 hectare (25 acre) Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site which includes the Alexander Graham Bell museum.

       In Dingwall we visited the Tartans and Treasures Shop to find the Donaldson tartan. They had the MacDonald tartans in skirts, ties, vests, and on mugs and glasses but not the Donaldson tartan. I read a write-up there about Henry Donaldson who was one of the garrison at Edinburgh Castle 1339 to 1340 so the name has been around for centuries.

       Though not on the trail we stopped at Glenora Distillery in Glenville which is North America’s first single malt whiskey distillery. The whiskey made there smells and tastes like scotch but cannot be called scotch. That name is reserved for whiskey made in Scotland.
       There is a restaurant and bar that offers half ounce samples of the whiskey and I had my first, and last, taste. Even though my heritage is Scot, scotch is not my drink.