My novel A Garden in the Wilderness is currently being printed in Ottawa and will soon be on its way to Victoria. If you want a copy hot off the press, come to the Well at 821 Fort Street on March 21st and I will sign one for you. If you can’t make it then, I’ll be at First+Metropolitan United Church chapel on March 26th.
I can’t wait to share this exciting culmination of the dream I have had ever since I was a child reading Little Women. I was going to be Jo and write novels and have them published. I wanted to give other people the thrill I felt when I read Jane Eyre and David Copperfield.
The dream has been deferred so long that I now have to write historical fiction in order to be relevant. A Garden in the Wilderness is set in 1795 in Nova Scotia. It tells the true story of my ancestors John and Susan Dean and their eight children as they struggle to make a life for themselves in the hostile conditions of the New World. It speaks to the immigrant experience even today.
We none of us ever get quite what we expect when we set out on our journeys.