From the category archives:

The Find

The Find Shortlisted for a ReLit Award

“Canada’s ReLit Award–founded to acknowledge the best new work released by independent publishers–may not come with a purse, but it brings a welcome, back-to-the-books focus to the craft.” Amazon.com

The Find is one of ten titles short-listed for the 2011 Relit Award (Novel):

http://therelitawards.blogspot.com/

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Lost & Found

It’s with some trepidation that I stuff my suitcase with copies of my latest novel and set out for Lost and Found: In Search of Extinct Species, an Explora International Conference at the Toulouse Natural History Museum. The last time I attended an academic conference was during my research for The Find. The 2005 Symposium [...]

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The Find

A day’s prospecting leads paleontologist Anna Silowski to make an extraordinary discovery in a remote part of British Columbia, but at the same time, the tensions below the surface of her successful career are exposed. Pushed towards breakdown, she finds herself unexpectedly dependent on high-school drop out Scott Macleod, and recruits him to help on [...]

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Coming Undone

It’s unsettling when life imitates art, and a story you have written starts to happen around you. For example, shortly after I finished the Story of My Face, I met the teenage version of my character, Natalie, in a motel swimming pool near Vancouver airport. She was called something else and she was in [...]

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Lifestory

Thinking ahead to an illustrated talk I’ll give in March, I was leafing through a box of research materials for The Find, and came across this image, a detail From The Story of Life by Lorraine Malach. The post card was pinned to my office wall for at least two years while I wrote the [...]

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Book Club

It was because of a woman I met while accompanying some guests on a sailboat tour that I became anxious about the local book club visit I’d agreed to. I started to think how the noun club has two meanings. A group, yes… but also a weapon. I’ll call her Jen: fiftyish, fit, designer spectacles, retired. [...]

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“It’s because of your book that I’m going in for surgery next week.”

I’m sitting in the shade of a Garry oak tree with a group of other parental units, as our children call us these days. Clare, the grandmother of one of my son’s friends, (one of those fresh-faced grandmothers who look five years younger than I do), looks up from her book and turns to me. [...]

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Flight

Readers often ask about imagery: is it consciously or unconsciously created – and the answer is both. For example, the idea of flight, of leaving the ground and swimming in the air is a recurring one in The Find, and in writing the novel I was aware of it, but I was certainly not aware [...]

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Living (Loving) Local

When you live in a vast country – and on a small island which you only leave once in a while – it is hard to tell whether or not your book has reached the bookstores. All I know is that The Find is in my nearest city, Victoria, turned outwards on the shelf, with [...]

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Third Person or First?

Extract from a notebook entry made during the writing of The Find Choices, choices: the writer’s life is full of them. Current example: do I stick with the third person, limited omniscient point of view which should ideally offer me some flexibility in telling the story, or, since I don’t seem to be actually using [...]

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