Setting a Novel in Canada -- or Not?

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Does setting a novel in Canada limit your readership to Canadians? Over the years, I've heard this question at Canadian writing conferences and other places where aspiring writers gather. Invariably, someone comments that he sent a query to an agent or publisher in the USA and was told Canadian stories don't sell. The implication is that Canada holds little interest for readers outside our country. 

Even Canadians might prefer reading about far away locations. I've been guilty of this, especially when I travel and want to learn about the country I'm visiting. A novel set in my destination gives me a flavour for the place and its history better than a guidebook.

I also recall hearing that a common feature of blockbuster novels is a variety of international settings. Author Dan Brown nailed that formula.  

But others argue that Canada might be exotic to those who live far from here. They cite writers who have found great success with their stories set in Canada. Louise Penny has a US publisher and an international audience for her mysteries that take place in a Quebec village. L.M. Montgomery's classic Anne of Green Gables is beloved across the world. Japanese tourists trek to modest Prince Edward Island to visit Anne sites. 

Readers of Britain's Rough Guide travel guidebooks and tours voted Canada the second most beautiful country in the world for 2019. Wouldn't that mean they'd want to read about people in this beautiful land? If Anne and PEI can charm the world, why not my home province of Alberta?  

Japanese movie poster

I went ahead and set my first novel, Deadly Fall, in Calgary, where I live. This made setting research easy.  My mystery sleuth Paula's drives the route pictured below in the book's opening chapter. I've driven and walked across this bridge numerous times. 

Paula works out in a former church converted to a gym in Calgary's inner city suburb Kensington. In the real world it's a sporting goods store. 

Book #2 of my Paula series, Ten Days in Summer, continued with my Calgary setting. This time Paula investigates a murder against a backdrop of The Calgary Stampede. My research included attending our annual Stampede parade. 

I was really sneaking peeks at the police offers present, since Paula's homicide contact, Mike Vincelli, is on crowd control duty during the parade scene in the book. 

My third novel, To Catch a Fox, is a departure from my mystery series and single Canadian setting. Julie Fox, a Calgary engineer, must travel to a new location, to search for her mother who took off when Julie was a child and hasn't been heard from since. I settled on southern California for the novel's alternate location because it was far enough from Calgary for Julie's mother to get lost in, yet convenient as well as enjoyable for me to visit twice to research. 

Santa Monica beach - Julie jogs along this boardwalk

In some ways, I find it easier to write about less familiar settings since I'm seeing the place with new eyes and am more likely to come up with fresh descriptions. 

At the San Diego zoo, bird of paradise plants are on the lookout, like Julie the pursuing and pursued fox

While I like writing about different places, I'm back to Calgary for my current novel-in-progress, the third book in my Paula series. I love travel, but lean toward writing about places I know well and deeply.   

And for those curious about the other countries that made the Rough Guide readers' list of the world's most beautiful countries for 2019, here they are:

1. Scotland
2. Canada
3. New Zealand
4. Italy
5. South Africa
6. Indonesia
7. England (UK regions were judged as countries) 
8. Iceland
9. United States
10. Wales (Do the British love their country's beauty best, or have not many travelled elsewhere?)

Calgary in winter - beautiful, eh?

Lucy Maud Montgomery and Prince Edward Island by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan

 
I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.
       I have decided to write about the scenery, attractions, and history of my country. This post is about Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The Confederation Bridge connects Borden-Carlton, Prince Edward Island, with the rest of Canada at Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick. It is the longest bridge in the world that crosses ice-covered water and was completed in 1997 at a cost of $840 million.

 

 

 

     We paid our toll and drove the bridge over the 12.9 kilometre wide Northumberland Strait. We headed to Green Gables in Cavendish in the Prince Edward Island National Park. One of the most famous writers in the world was from Prince Edward Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874 in New London, PEI. Her ancestors came from Scotland in the 1770s and her grandfathers were members of the provincial legislature for years. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Lucy was 2 and Lucy spent a much of her childhood with her maternal grandparents on the Macneill homestead in Cavendish. Her father moved west in 1887 and remarried. Lucy joined him but felt out of place and soon returned to PEI and her grandparents. She also spent time with her extended family on her mother’s side and her paternal grandfather.
     However, her grandparents weren’t very affectionate and Lucy felt lonely and isolated. This led her to reading an abundant number of books and using her imagination to write her own stories. She started with poetry and journals when she was nine years old and had her first poem, On Cape Le Force, published in the Charlottetown Patriot in November 1890. She started writing short stories in her mid-teens. She first published them in local newspapers then sold them to magazines throughout Canada and the United States.
     Lucy studied to be a teacher and began teaching in a village school in the late 1890s. She was also writing and selling her works so that when her grandfather died in 1898, she was able to leave her teaching position and move in with her grandmother. Between then and 1911 she wrote and sold poems and stories and also worked in the post office on her grandmother’s homestead.
    Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908 and was an instant bestseller. She got her idea from other novels written by women like Little Women and from a story she read about a couple who had arranged to adopt a boy but were sent a girl. The book sold more than 19,000 copies in the first five months and was reprinted ten times in the first year. It is still in print after more than a century. Lucy wrote two sequels, Anne of Green Gables: Anne of Avonlea (1909) and Anne of the Island (1915) plus five more Anne books over her lifetime. She had a total of twenty books, over five hundred short stories, and one book of poetry published before she died in 1942.
     In her private life,  Lucy had many suitors over the years and became secretly engaged to a distant cousin named Edwin Simpson in 1897. This ended with she began a romance with a farmer named Hermann Leard. Leard died in 1899 from influenza and Lucy threw herself into her writing. Lucy married a minister, Ewen Macdonald, after her grandmother died in 1911 and they moved to Ontario where Ewen had a parish. They had two sons, Chester and Stuart, and a third one who was stillborn. They moved to another village in 1926 and then, after Ewen was admitted to a sanatorium in 1934 and he resigned his parish, they moved to Toronto in 1935. Ewen died in 1943.
     The Green Gables House has been restored to match the descriptions in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. I toured through the historic site, seeing the exhibits in the Green Gables house and strolling the Haunted Woods and Balsam Hollow trails that were mentioned in her books.

     Prince Edward Island also boasts have Canada’s smallest library. It is one room with shelves of books along the walls and a table and chairs in the centre.