Featuring L. P. Suzanne Atkinson, Jake Swan, Pan Bouyoucas, Lynn Tait, Colleen Brown and Patti Grayson
Why do your favourite Canadian authors write the books they write? Let’s find out in this exclusive feature here at The Miramichi Reader.
L. P. Suzanne Atkinson, Author of Mallory Gorman Won’t Be Buried Today: A Stella Kirk Mystery # 5 (March 2023, lpsabooks)
The Stella Kirk Mystery Series sits comfortably inside the cozy mystery genre. Stella Kirk is an amateur sleuth. She partners with an RCMP detective who was her first boyfriend in high school. She runs a seasonal RV park peppered with unusual residents and non-traditional employees. Her park manager is her lover and nine years her junior. Stella’s father has dementia, and her sister is her polar opposite.
Although each book follows the recipe of a cozy, the themes are somewhat darker than expected, based on my professional experience in mental health social work and homecare / long-term care assessment. Book 1 speaks to the issue of childhood abandonment. Book 2 focuses on family love pushed to the extreme. Book 3 addresses the concept of reverting to old habits despite wanting to change, and Book 4 focuses on the paranoia which comes from years of guilt.
In Mallory Gorman Won’t Be Buried Today: A Stella Kirk Mystery # 5, I wanted to address issues which confront the frail elderly—those with limited cognition and decision-making skills, who may be running out of funds for their care, or who are without familial or friend support. Public versus for-profit institutions and lack of government oversight both play roles in the quagmire of long-term care. I suggest to my readers that in this book, murder may or may not have been committed. They can judge for themselves.
Although traditional cozies, embedded throughout my books are glimpses into the sea of humanity we find ourselves. I reveal human conditions a reader may never have encountered in their day-to-day life.
L. P. Suzanne Atkinson was born in New Brunswick, Canada and lived in Alberta, Quebec, and Nova Scotia before settling on Prince Edward Island in 2022. She has degrees from Mount Allison, Acadia, and McGill Universities. Suzanne spent her professional career in the fields of mental health and home care. She also owned and operated, with her husband, both an antique business and a construction business for more than twenty-five years. She and her husband, David Weintraub, make the fabulous Summerside, Prince Edward Island home.
Website – http://lpsabooks.wix.com/lpsabooks#
Jake Swan, Author of Grantrepreneurs, (2023, Galleon Books)
In the 2010/11 academic year, I moved to Vancouver for my Interventional Radiology fellowship.
I was blown away by how different it was from the East Coast.
Walking across the Cambie Street Bridge one morning, I was nearly squashed by an Italian supercar with a novice sticker in the window, and I got the idea the city might make a funny setting for a fish-out-of-water story about a bumbling, well-intentioned New Brunswicker trying to find his place in a big, glitzy, multicultural melting pot. I wasn’t sure exactly what the story would be, but I kept the concept in the back of my mind.
In 2017, my dad, John, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Dad was a brilliant engineer with a wicked sense of humour. He spent the last decade of his career helping startup companies connect with capital, and he was always joking about how some businesses seemed to be designed entirely around the exploitation of Canada’s vast network of ridiculous grants and subsidies.
I figured that could be the story.
Hoping to give Dad something to laugh about, I started writing Grantrepreneurs. Each week, I would finish a new chapter, and send it to him, so he could read it on chemo day.
He loved it.
I finished the first draft shortly before he passed away. After reading the last chapter, he made me promise to try to get it published, and I said I would do my best, but given that it’s a story that skewers the Canadian grant and subsidy system upon which many Canadian publishers hang their hats, I wasn’t particularly hopeful.
A few years later, Lee Thompson and I crossed paths. Lee should be canonized as the Patron Saint of Literary Lost Causes. Either out of kindness, or naïveté, he offered to publish Grantrepreneurs, and I am eternally grateful.
I hope it gives readers a good chuckle.
Pan Bouyoucas, author of Ari and The Barley Queen, 2023, Guernica Editions)
As a boy and a firstborn, I was my Greek-born mother’s pride and joy. She never refused me anything and only reproached me for spending all my free time in my room, reading stories. “Go out, make friends”, she kept telling me.
Then, at seventeen, I went to college — a mixed-gender college. Not only my mother did not approve of any of my girlfriends, but she also did everything in her power to prevent me from marrying the one I fell in love with. That girl gave me two Canadian-born daughters. And between them, my two daughters had four sons, who are now teens and their mother’s pride and joy.
Any girlfriends? I asked them one day.
Oh, the look my daughters gave me. It brought back so many unpleasant memories that I typed the first page of ARI AND THE BARLEY QUEEN as soon as I got back to my keyboard.
My dearest daughters,
In the course of my recent travels I heard a story that should interest you – mothers that you now are, and mothers of boys. The woman who related it to me, a physician of flawless integrity, nevertheless urged me to be discreet when I set it down. That is why I have chosen to turn it into a tale, a genre that lends itself well to preserving anonymity, of both people and places. I have not however converted the malicious mother into a stepmother. If one did so in times past, to protect the persona of the loving and devoted mother, women writing today would laugh at such a subterfuge, all the more so as many of them have placed the hidden truth of their birth mother at the core of their work. Strangely, their male counterparts avoid the subject, at least in our part of the world. They are not averse, however, to skewering the overbearing father. Why not the possessive mother, then, jealous and devouring? Psychologists would be better qualified than I to answer that question. I am but a teller of tales, and the most I can hope for is that the story I’m about to relate might spare my grandsons some of the excesses of maternal love.
Pan Bouyoucas is a Montreal prize-winning novelist, playwright and translator. He writes both in English and French, and his novels and plays have been translated into several other languages.
Lynn Tait, Author of You Break It You Buy It, (2023, Guernica Editions)
For years, I was satisfied writing single poems about various topics. Then, I began to meet personalities that led me to research Narcissism and Dysfunctional Personality Disorders. Our only child, Stephen, died at the age of 29 from a fentanyl overdose. My mother, who’d been a problematic woman all her life, who’d kept my paternal family and their history from me, was suffering from Alzheimer’s and would soon pass away. I was dealing with health issues. I lived in a world without personal closure, as most of us do.
There was Covid. There was the craziness of social media. So much pain happening not just privately, but on a global scale. I observed so much chaos, as well as pockets of kindness, friendship, beauty and love. I come from a generation where we were taught to remain silent, yet there was so much to say. I wanted to explore my own anger and negative emotions. Concerned about how people might react to the subject matter, I read and listened to other’s stories of grief and illness, their difficulties dealing with toxic parents, spouses, colleagues, and friends, many of them alone in their anger and sadness; not having anywhere to put these feelings and not interested in revenge. I wrote this book because I was out of patience; and though I felt betrayed by individuals, groups and a world I’d trusted, I refused to be a victim, didn’t need to hate, but felt a need to push back. I wrote this book because it was the right time to tell my stories; to write narratives readers could relate to, or at least laugh about. Thus, You Break It You Buy It was born.
Lynn Tait is a Toronto-born award-winning poet and photographer residing in the land of the Anishinaabeg people, now Sarnia Ontario, where she lives with her husband Robert. Her book You Break It You Buy It is available through Guernica Editions and local bookstores. She’s working on her second book of poetry titled The Realm of In Between.
Colleen Brown, Author of If you lie down in a field, she will find you there (2023, Radiant Press)
If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is an exploration of what can happen to a life story when one plot point carries too much gravitational pull.
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. The book captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews that contain the family’s oral history and tell us who she was.
I was inspired to write the book because of my work supporting spoken word artists at Vancouver Poetry House. I am not a performer and could not emulate their work, but I was internalizing methods of structuring embodied first-person narratives by watching spoken word artists on stage.
At the core of the book is an ambivalence. The first coherent sentence I wrote was, “…because the spectacle of her murder overwhelms the entirety of her perfectly human and unremarkable existence, I lost my mother as a way of creating meaning. ” The book is driven by a desire to express and cleave my mother’s life from her death.
I am the youngest in the family, and my memories are really compilations of my siblings’ experiences. I interviewed them to gather stories about Mom and to remind me of where my thoughts of her actually came from. I also included an essay my sister Laura graciously donated to the cause that she wrote about Mom over twenty-five years ago.
Colleen Brown is known primarily as a sculptor. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there is her first book. Colleen created visual artworks related to the book at the Ranger Station Gallery. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver and an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has participated in exhibitions and events at Western Gallery, Bellingham; Shelfed, Vancouver; Hedreen Gallery, Seattle; Airbnb, Seattle; and The Apartment, Vancouver. Brown is the recipient of a 2016 Portfolio Prize. She is an Artist in Residence in Maple Ridge, BC.
Patti Grayson, Author of The Twistical Nature of Spoons (2023, Turnstone Press)
In the end, I wrote this book because the characters refused to give up on me. But there was also a circuitous beginning. Unlike my previous works which had most often originated from a narrative nudge, The Twistical Nature of Spoons emerged from more nebulous promptings, steeped in theme and structure, rather than story. Prior to its inception, I was working on a different book—one that focused on a love triangle and a house that resembled a teapot. I abandoned its multiple chapters and began to contemplate this novel, which eventually came to be centered around a mother and a daughter, with a spotlight on some rather unique spoons. Was kitchenware the link? Only coincidentally…
When I fishtailed away from that earlier attempt, I asked myself the question: What is it that you really want to write about? The answer was definite—I wanted to explore the realm of artistic endeavour, and I wanted to imbed that in a more complex structure than any of my past efforts had produced. As I contemplated what that would entail, false starts and earnest meandering ensued. I harkened back to my early roots in theatrical training, and delved into research from a wide variety of sources—excerpts from Milton’s Paradise Lost were pondered alongside Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats.
With a host of bizarre elements intermingling, I eventually wrote an opening scene that stuck. A young woman, at work in a bar, meets an enigmatic stranger. I knew immediately that I wanted to follow Ina wherever she might lead. Her daughter, Blisse, was soon eager to have her own version of events represented, and so it began . . . A novel about artistic endeavour? Yes. One with a twistical structure? Check. But, also a story about family and untruths, love and secrets.
Patti Grayson’s published works include a short story collection, a novel for younger readers, and two adult novels. She has been nominated for several awards, including the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Apart from her fiction writing, she has enjoyed stints as an actor, puppeteer, copywriter, and school librarian. She lives near Winnipeg.
