Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #13

Featuring Wendy McGrath, Sean Paul Bedell and Heather McBriarty.

Why do your favourite Canadian authors write the books they write? Let’s find out in this exclusive feature here at The Miramichi Reader.

Wendy McGrath, author of The Santa Rosa Trilogy (NeWest Press)

Broke City is the final novel in the Santa Rosa Trilogy, which includes North East and Santa Rosa. It is, what I term, working class prairie gothic. Working class voices and stories have been largely silent and untold in this country’s literature. Broke City resists this silence and draws from my own background. As a child growing up in north east Edmonton, I dreamed of becoming a writer and artist. I often felt that my life, my neighbourhood, and my city was not ‘literary’ enough to write about. Broke City tells the story of a family through the eyes of child-narrator, Christine. Broke City, and the other novels in the Trilogy are set in a working class neighbourhood and magnify the voices of the people who live there.

When I was working on the Trilogy, I wanted to research the working class prairie gothic genre and was surprised at the lack of research defining it as a distinct sub-genre in this country’s literary canon. I wanted to change that, not only by adding my own writing to the canon but contributing to research in the area. This year I completed a Masters Degree in English from York University and the title of my Major Research Project was—Hauntings on the Prairie Gothic Horizon: As For Me and My House, Halfbreed, and Widows of Hamilton House. I remain committed to telling working class prairie gothic stories through my fiction, non-fiction, and poetry and it is my hope that readers not only recognize my work as working class prairie gothic but also re-examine other works of prairie literature through a gothic lens.  

Sean Paul Bedell, Author of SomeWhere There’s Music (Now or Never Publishing)

trigger warning: suicide. 

When I worked as a paramedic, a co-worker and friend of mine died by suicide. The full reasons are unknowable, but the cumulative trauma of emergency calls must have contributed. At my co-worker’s funeral, the image of his teenage son is a permanent memory for me. He was immeasurably sad but exuded a deep pride for his father. The son, on the threshold of young adulthood, wore one of his father’s suits. The oversized suit was hemmed up to fit him specifically for the funeral. Pick a metaphor– a lot to grow into, tough ‘shoes’ to fill, the man of the house now….

I wanted to pay tribute to that memory; the vehicle was fiction. I hope the scene I created to honour my friend and his son is respectful and warm. I added a glimpse of a medivac helicopter for dramatic effect, but that occurred in real life too. Both of them would appreciate it.

To balance the grief and sadness, I included fun things for a young man facing the world alone – music, wild parties, questionable but cool friends, a spark of romance, road trips, and chances to define himself. Somewhere There’s Music is a coming-of-age novel where a young man suffers losses and must connect with his older brother to survive in his frightening, new reality.

I have been honoured to serve as a paramedic and firefighter. Writing this book has been a catharsis – part exercising my own demons, part revealing a private world shielded from people who aren’t first responders.  I’m never sure if a story has impact. From the many readers I’ve spoken with, I’m glad I wrote this book – for me, for them, for all of my co-workers.

I wrote Somewhere There’s Music to provide a message of courage. I pointed to the future and assured a suffering young man that somewhere there’s hope. 

Heather McBriarty, Author of Amid The Splintered Trees (Crow Mountain Publishing)

Sometimes a happy ending is necessary. After spending a year eyeball deep in the First World War, tracing the faint path of a darling young man who didn’t make it home to the girl he loved, I desperately needed to write him a happily-ever-after.

My grandmother was only seventeen when the First World War began. She saw her school mates don uniform and set off to Europe. She spent years volunteering on the home front, mourning her young man, and eventually learning to love again. My grandfather, whom she married in 1919, was enrolled in medical school in 1914, and stayed there on the advice of the recruiters. He would not escape the war’s effects, though, as he volunteered as a young medical student to treat the victims of the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

We are at such arm’s length from wars these days that it is easy to forget how the “Great War” impacted the lives of everyone, of those ordinary citizens who walked away from their ordinary jobs, their parents, friends, the women they loved, to assume a murderous task killing other men. And now when we are so aware of PTSD, we don’t often stop to think of how traumatic that experience was for men woefully unprepared for a war that was, arguably, the most brutal and bloody ever fought, before or since. How did the women at home cope; how did those men survive it?

It is that experience, those stories, I wanted to tell. A young man comes home from years at the Front, not without physical and mental trauma. A young woman dives into the misogynistic world of medical school and the devastation of the Halifax Explosion. I set them on separate paths in a world turned dangerous and deadly, to try and find their way back to each other, resulting in my novel, Amid the Splintered Trees.