Featuring Adelle Purdham, Sam Chaiton, Mandy Eve-Barnett, and Alice Fitzpatrick
Adelle Purdham, author of I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself (Dundurn Press, November 2024)
At 28 years old, halfway through my second pregnancy, I was told that my baby would be born with Down syndrome. Without the knowledge or experience to fully understand what that meant, I held preconceived notions of disability in my head and—I was devastated. I stepped calmly out through the doorway of my former life into the dark night of the raging storm and disappeared into grief’s firm embrace— however briefly. I’m now embarrassed to admit my first worries for my daughter’s life were: How will we tell people? and What will people think? I’m the kind of person who turns to books for answers to life’s questions. Surely, another mother had been through this experience and could help guide my way? Shortly after my daughter’s birth, I visited my local national bookstore chain. I was dismayed to find there wasn’t one single book about Down syndrome in the store and, when I later searched online, no memoir written by a Canadian mother like me even existed. The lack of books felt like a rebuke, like nobody cared. The absence of literature on the shelf told me all I needed to know about how we value those with disabilities in our society.
The process took me ten years—my first attempt at a complete memoir slid quietly away in a drawer—but a writing certificate and an MFA in creative nonfiction later, I finally wrote the book I needed eleven years ago.
I wrote the memoir-in-essays I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself to trace the pathway of coming to understand my own ableism, the ways I valued certain ways of being over others. (Remember my first question after the diagnosis: What will people think? Well, spoiler: I was people.) I wrote I Don’t Do Disability to make myself as a mother, a woman, and a writer—and my daughter with Down syndrome—seen. “Why are we reading” Annie Dillard wrote, “if not in hope of beauty laid bare?” I wrote this book to share the beauty I have found in parenting my daughter with Down syndrome.
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Adelle Purdham (she/her) is an educator, parent disability advocate, and the author of the memoir-in-essays, I Don’t Do Disability And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself (Dundurn Press, 2024). Adelle’s essays are finalists in several creative nonfiction contests, and her prose and poetry appear in literary journals, anthologies, magazines, newspapers and online. Adelle lives in her hometown of Nogojiwanong (Peterborough), Ontario, and teaches creative writing at Trent University.
Sam Chaiton, author of We Used to Dream of Freedom (Dundurn Press, September 2024)
I love writing. It’s a way for me to understand the bigger picture, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” as Joan Didion succinctly put it. For the longest time, I didn’t know what my next writing project would be. My partner suggested memorializing my life story because it was so unusual. She said it would make a fascinating memoir.
“The world needs another memoir?”
“From you, yes,” she said. “But I don’t think you have the necessary ego to write it.”
I disagreed. “It’s something else I’m lacking …”
She looked at me quizzically, and I was unable to articulate what it was.
The raison d’être of this book made itself known on Easter Sunday ten years ago, the day that Rubin “Hurricane” Carter died. I was one of the Canadians who helped free the Bob Dylan-celebrated New Jersey prizefighter, who “coulda been the champion of the world” had he not spent twenty years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. I’d written a bestselling book about it with fellow Canadian Terry Swinton. We had moved to New Jersey and, though not lawyers, reinvestigated his case, and wrote the factual portions of the federal court briefs that resulted in his freedom. The book became a basis for the Norman Jewison film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington in an Oscar-nominated, Golden-Globe-winning performance. In the film, Liev Schreiber played me.
On hearing about Rubin’s passing, the need to write arose with an insistence I was unable to ignore. I asked myself: was there something still to be written, something I hadn’t said in Lazarus and the Hurricane?
I sat down at my desk, a blank notebook in front of me. Before I knew it, several pages were filled. Of the ideas I noted down, most seemed to apply to my parents, who had also been unjustly imprisoned. My mother and father were concentration camp survivors, both having been prisoners in Bergen-Belsen. But unlike Rubin’s story, which had come to be known world-wide, their stories remained hidden. Their internment also included a period in Auschwitz, a fact I had only recently learned, years after their passing.
The memoir began to take shape when I asked myself why, despite being eager to delve into Rubin’s history, I assiduously avoided my own. I realized there was much I needed to probe, including why I disappeared from my family for nearly two decades. How had my parents’ Holocaust experiences — and their silence — factored into that rift? And what role did my work to free the Hurricane play in my ability and drive to unearth family history from the depths of obscurity and expose it to the healing light of day?Writing We Used to Dream of Freedom became a voyage of self-discovery. Loss was its origin; curiosity, its impetus; distance and time, its opportunity for clarity.
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Sam Chaiton, the middle son of Holocaust survivors, is one of the Canadians who helped Rubin Carter gain his freedom. Co-author of the international bestseller Lazarus and the Hurricane, he is portrayed in the film The Hurricane by Liev Schreiber. A founder of Innocence Canada, Sam lives with his partner in Toronto.
Mandy Eve-Barnett, author of Malgraf’s Dawning (Independently Published, August 2023)
To understand why I wrote Malgraf’s Dawning, you need to understand that as an English expat now living in Canada, I’d grown up with ancient history for a good part of my life (nearly fifty years – but don’t tell anyone!) Castles, churches, mansions, and stone circles were the norm for me and I learnt about settlements, battles, and invasions as far back as 500,000 years. That is a lot of history and having the ability to visit numerous preserved sites added to the connection to it. As a British person, it is second nature to know these facts and to regularly be inside a 12th century church for a wedding, or baptism. So, when the idea for a fantasy came to mind through three writing prompts, I decided to set it in Medieval England. It’s the old adage ‘write what you know’ – right?
This third novella is actually the prequel to the series, and was written to take a deep dive into the character, Malgraf. She is a pivotal force in the previous fantasy novellas of the Rython stories. As the catalyst for the sorceress’ plots in The Rython Kingdom and Rython Legacy, I felt her story should be told. I wanted to answer the questions of how and why she became a dark magical being. In the other novellas, we see the malevolence of Malgraf without understanding her motivations and back story. And, of course, I could include a ferocious ‘villain’ which is always fun.
Interestingly, I’d initially only considered writing the one fantasy novella, The Rython Kingdom, however, the second novella, Rython Legacy, was written purely due to reader requests.
The impetus to write my dark characters life story and her development into that darkness only came about after a New York radio show interview concerning the previous stories. A few weeks later, it became clear to me that Malgraf was ‘short changed’ so to speak. She was the evil force war was waged against, which in truth was understandable, but where did she come from, and why was she the way she was?
As I mused over her actions, I considered what would make someone so angry, so evil, and so vengeful? When did she change from child to malevolent witch? Who were her parents? Was there something different about her even as a child? Did she have assistance in becoming so powerful? The more I questioned, the more Malgraf answered me in my mind. She urged me, as only characters can, to tell her story of darkness, loss and pain. She wanted to be understood and I granted her that wish. You may think she had a choice, but read it and see.
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Mandy Eve-Barnett is an Edmonton Best Seller multi-genre author writing children’s, YA and adult books. She has ten books published (the eleventh July 2025) and has stories in multiple anthologies, she is also the Secretary of her local writing group, the Writers Foundation of Strathcona County, and blogs at www.mandyevebarnett.com.
Alice Fitzpatrick, author of Secrets in the Water (Stonehouse Publishing, June 2024)
I initially set out to write Secrets in the Water, the first of my Meredith Island Mysteries, to explore the fragility of memory and how we tend to mythologize those people who are no longer with us. However, when I was a third of the way through the first draft, I realized I was also writing about my own family. Like my protagonist Kate who lost her father before she was born and her aunt when Kate was just three years old, loss has been a constant in my life.
My Polish relatives lived under Communist rule which might explain my father’s secretive nature. My dad rarely spoke about his past and the people to whom I was related. It seems strange to me now, but he never even told me their names. My Polish grandfather went missing at the beginning of World War II. Was he imprisoned, killed, or hiding? All I know is that he never came back.
As for the British members of my family, only one month after the birth of his son and while my mother was three months pregnant with me, my uncle Terry fell asleep at the wheel, rolled his car down an embankment, and bled to death. Twenty years later, his son, my cousin Terry, with whom I spent many summers in England and Wales, had a falling-out with our grandmother and cut off all contact with the family for fifty years. In a story worthy of a romance novel, my grandfather fell in love with my grandmother when he heard her sing at a concert for World War I servicemen. At the time, he was engaged to a close friend of his sister Marie. Following his heart, he broke off the engagement to marry my grandmother. Soon after, Marie exiled herself to the Isle of Man.
Thus it’s little wonder that at its heart this book is the story a woman seeking to reclaim her family’s lost history. Other authors write crime fiction because it allows them to set the world straight, to bring justice to victims, and order to chaos. But for me, it’s the need to understand what happened and why. It’s a search for that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, for only then does the picture become complete.
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Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed various short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and has recently retired from teaching in order to devote herself to writing full-time. She is a fearless champion of singing, cats, all things Welsh, and the Oxford comma. Her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire inspired the creation of Meredith Island. The traditional mystery appeals to her keen interest in psychology as she is intrigued by what makes seemingly ordinary people commit murder. Alice lives in Toronto but dreams of a cottage on the Welsh coast. To learn more about Alice and her writing, please visit her website at www.alicefitzpatrick.com.
