Family matters

I spent much of my early teen years yearning to differentiate myself from my family.  In a smallish town, as one of four sisters, it was hard not to be recognized as a girl with the "Phillips" look.   I got used to people stopping and doing a double take, or talking to me as if they knew me when I'd never seen them before.  "No," I'd say, "I'm not THAT sister."  At family reunions, I liked looking around at my cousins and seeing my own features mirrored. But much as I admired my parents, my sisters, my aunts and uncles and my cousins, I wanted to make my own place, my own life, my own identity.

When I took off to university in Ottawa and then to teach as a volunteer in Lesotho, Africa, no one recognized my family connections.  Success! I thought.  I was only me.  My family was a quaint background story, but I was making my own way.

They say that it's healthy for teens to search for themselves and be willing to take chances to create themselves.  That's why the frontal lobe of teen brains is underdeveloped.  (That's the part that controls impulse and risk, that sees consequences.)  If we knew what might happen, would we ever do what we do as teens?  I look back with stunned surprise at my willingness to do dumb things just for the thrill when I was 17. I'm also somewhat stunned that I survived it.

I'm glad I took some of those chances, and that I went off and found out what I could do by myself.  But now I'm also immensely grateful for being a part of something bigger.

My family gathered last weekend for a reunion at my sisters' beautiful log cabin in the forest.  We barbecued trout, we swam in the lake, we bushwhacked through the woods on walks, we rode bikes down long dirt roads. We talked about the fun and irrational things we did when we were young. And through it all I felt the draw of family.  We are close in age, and as we became adults, people have had an even harder time telling us apart.  But we are quite different in many ways.  While we share values and early experiences, we have also gone our own ways in the world, and each of my sisters has shaped the clay of our family into their own sculpture of who they are.

And now I love these photos where we look the same.  Family matters.

False Narrows

False Narrows, Gabriola Island

I live on the edge of a Salish Sea passage called False Narrows, a sometimes treacherous channel between two islands.  When the tide is high, it looks inviting, a promise of deep blue water  between two open sections of ocean.  But lurking beneath the surface are the broad, oyster- and clam-rich sandbars that will catch an unwary boater.  When the tide is low, the sand islands bare themselves to the sky and to rubber-booted tide-pool explorers.  A deep, marked channel  guides the careful boater through to the open water on the other side, but even following the markings, paddlers and sailboards will struggle against the current, and motorboats will find their props clogged with trailing kelp. Last summer a sailboater tacked too close to the shallows and got caught by the dropping tide.  He and his passengers had to wait hours for the tide to lift them off the sand.

Sometimes I sip my coffee, sit back and watch. I admire the beauty of the changing landscape, count the herons, smile at the otters, marvel at the wingspan of the eagles. Other days the metaphor takes over.  Don't we all see the surface rather than the hazards hidden below?  Those with experience and careful preparation know the harmless way through to the other side.  And sometimes, a hapless blunderer will roar through the shallows, blithely unaware that he or she is centimetres from disaster. False narrows, false promises, blind luck.

Some say, when they hear I've moved to a Gulf Island, people tell me, "that will be so relaxing."  I'm definitely more in tune with natural rhythms, but the ebb and flow creates no shortage of daily drama.

Second novel release date!

Baggage, my second novel, will be published in April 2019.

It's a very exciting time in a writer's life to send a book out into the world.  As a parent, I know how important yet how difficult it is to launch a child, then stand back and let the world descend.  It's similar as a writer, letting my book out, a boat on the current, pulling away from shore.

I'm looking forward to seeing the new cover, writing an updated author biography, having new photos taken, bracing for a book launch.  But I understand afresh what Fitzgerald meant when he wrote how Gatsby must have suddenly seen "how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass."  Reality can be a hard place.

In my years of disillusionment, I used to write down and re-read quotes from that book. Years later, I see all around me that we all have baggage we must deal with, realities we must face and still carry on. And as someone once told me, it's what you do next that counts.

My library hosted Tom Ryan (Nova Scotia author) last May.  A student asked him, "What's your favourite book?" and he answered, "The one I'm working on.  I always have to look ahead."  He's younger than I am, but I'm taking his advice.

I'll let you know what's up with the next book when it's less "scarcely created."

Fishtailing history

You may know me by my first novel, Fishtailing, which won the Governor General's award in 2010.  It's a novel in verse for young adult readers, from the points of view of four students in a high school on the West Coast.

Trisha is searching for her identity in a mixed-race family; Kyle is torn between a life of music performance and the certainty of a mechanic's trade; Miguel and Natalie suffer from trauma -- Miguel has survived a civil war that has killed his parents and left him with fragements of family; Natalie is a survivor of neglect and sexual abuse who seeks to inflict her suffering on all those around her.  On the fringes are Ms Nishi, a well-meaning counsellor, and Mrs. Farr, a remote English teacher who assigns several of the poems that reveal the chaos of the young people's inner lives.  They fishtail out of control when a party brings the crises to a breaking point.

The book has won some significant awards, including the GG literary award for Children's Text (2010),
the Moonbeam Award for innovative writing, the shortlist for the Forest of Reading White Pine Award (2011) and the White Raven award (2012).  It's a quick but intense read, and I've had some strong feedback from readers about how strongly they felt about the characters and the story.

Here are a few links to reviews and stories about the book:

Goodreads
Quill&Quire
The Winnipeg Review
Kirkus Reviews
Canadian Review of Materials (CM)

Fishtailing Book trailer (created by Coteau)

New writing life begins!

I'm excited to announce my new life, beginning in just two weeks.  I am leaving the satisfying and demanding career of teaching and librarianship for the pleasures of full time writing on Gabriola Island.

My second novel, Baggage (working title!) is being published next year by Coteau, the wonderful publishers and promoters who put my first novel, Fishtailing, into the path of awards committees, reviewers and kids across the country.

We are done with the editing process (though as a writer, you are never truly "done") and are now into the long process of creating a real, hands-on book, with a cover, a blurb, a marketing plan and all those other things that go into what ends up on bookstore shelves.

Release date is April, 2019.  Keep watching for progress reports.