Vikings in North America by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

  

The Vikings in North America

 

It has been long thought that the first European to step on the soil of North America was Christopher Columbus. But excavations done at a site in northwest Newfoundland, called L’Anse aux Meadows, in the 1960’s recovered artifacts like jewellery, a stone oil lamp, a bone knitting needle, and tools that were compared to ones used at Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland around the year 1000. They have been carbon dated to between the years 990 and 1050, proof that the Vikings were in North America long before Columbus.

       Vikings were people from Scandinavia, present day Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, who were merchants as well as warriors. During the late eighth to eleventh century they raided, pillage, and conquered settlements in Scotland and throughout Europe. They also had settlements in Iceland and Greenland.

       Surnames ending in "-son" or "-sen" are considered to have Viking ancestry. My great-grandparents emigrated from Scotland. Plus, the little finger on my right hand does not lay flat when I set my palm down. My sister has the same condition but worse. Her little finger had a permanent bend to it. She went to her doctor and received a botox shot to relax it. When she went for physio she was told that a bent finger like that was a sign of being a Viking. I also have a friend of Norwegian ancestry with the same little finger.

       But, that bent little finger comes from my mother’s side who also had one. Her maiden name was Relf, which I learned was first found in the 1000s in Nairnit, a town in northern Scotland. So, with this ancestry on both sides I consider myself a Viking. In 2017, I visited L’Anse aux Meadows in northwest Newfloundland.

       From the parking lot I walked to the interpretive centre where I looked at the displays of what the settlement would have looked like during its occupation. There are replicas of the longships that the Vikings sailed in, artifacts unearthed during the excavations, write-ups about the Vikings, tools that were found, and maps showing the route the Vikings used to get to Newfoundland or Vinland, as they are thought to have named it. The Scandinavians of the medieval period were known as Norse and they were farmers and traders. When they began raiding other countries they became known as Vikings, the Norse word for raiders.

       There has been a lot of interest in the Vikings recently with televisions shows and documentaries about them and their raiding which began in the 790s and lasted until around 1050. With their longboats and advanced sailing and navigational skills the Viking men and women travelled from Scandinavia south through Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and west to North America.

       I left the centre and followed a long, wooden boardwalk through grass and small bushes to the actual site. There I found a post fence around a yard with large mounds covered in grass. When the Vikings landed here there were forests from which they were able to get material for their boat and house building. The remains of eight buildings were found in the 1960s and they are believed to have been made of a wooden frame and covered with sod.

       The structures have been identified are a long house, an iron smithy, a carpentry shop, and smaller buildings that may have been for lower-status crewmembers or even slaves or for storage. There are three replicas of those sod buildings with their thick walls on the site. One is a long house which is equipped with clothes, beds and bedding, household utensils, tools, a fire pit and has a couple dressed in period clothing cooking a meal. The Vikings hunted caribou, bear, and smaller animals plus whale, walrus, and birds for food as well as fished.

       I wandered through the rooms divided by hand carved wooden plank walls. Light came from the fire and holes in the ceiling which are partially covered with upside down wooden boxes to keep the rain out.

       One of the other buildings is the smithy complete with anvil, forge, bellows, and various tools. I wandered the rest of the site and saw the outlines of other buildings that have not been reconstructed. It is estimated that between 30 and 160 people lived there over the years.

       The Vikings arrived in Newfoundland from Iceland via Greenland. According to historical records the site was inhabited by the brothers and sister of Leif Ericson plus a series of explorers. It is believed the settlement was there for seven or eight years before being abandoned. This is the only confirmed Viking site in North America and is the farthest west that Europeans sailed before Columbus.

       After viewing the buildings I followed a trail along the rocky shoreline and then turned inland to walk on a boardwalk over a bog back to the parking lot.

       One of the best things is that not only does the interpretive centre have the history of the Vikings, but there is also extensive displays showing the history of the aboriginal people who inhabited the area over thousands of years before any European arrived.

       In 2018, I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. In the museum is a permanent exhibition of parts of five original Viking ships excavated nearby in 1962. A thousand years ago these ships were deliberately scuttled (filled with rocks and sunk) in a river to stop the enemy from invading the city by water. Over the decades since they were found, the pieces have been preserved and put together on a metal frame to show how the ships would have looked. Also at the site are replicas of the Viking ships and I became a Viking for an hour. A group of us sat on the seats and rowed the ship out of the harbour using the long oars. Once on the open water we hoisted the mast and set sail. After sailing for a while we headed back to the harbour. As we neared it I had the honour of pulling on the rope that lowered the mast and sail and we glided back to our dock.

       It would be fun, someday, to write a novel about my ancestors.

       

 

Canadian Authors by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

 

 

 

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

 

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Sleuthing-the-Klondike

 https://bwlpublishing.ca/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

      I am a proud Canadian author of over twenty fiction and non-fiction books in my long writing career. But I am just one of thousands of published writers from this huge country. Canada has had a long and illustrious history of producing world renown authors and books going all the way back to the 18^th century.

     Frances Moore was born in England in 1724. She was a well-known poet and playwright in England before she and her husband, Reverend John Brooke moved to Quebec City in 1763, for John to take up the post of army chaplain. During her time there Frances wrote The History of Emily Montague, a love story set in the newly formed Quebec province.

     The story is told through the voices of her characters by way of personal letters between the two. This is known as epistolary (of letters) type of writing and it was popular during the1700s in Europe. The Brookes’ returned to England in 1768 and the novel was published in 1769 the London bookseller, James Dodsley. The History of Emily Montague was the first novel written in what is now Canada and the first with a Canadian setting. Frances died in 1789.

 Ontario

William Robertson Davies was born August 28, 1913 in Thamesville, Ontario (ON). He grew up surrounded by books and he participated in theatrical productions, developing a lifelong love of drama. He attended Upper Canada College then studied at Queen’s University at Kingston, ON. He moved to Oxford, England where he received a Bachelor Degree in Literature from Balliol College in 1938. His thesis, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors, was published in 1939 and he began acting in London.

     William married Brenda Mathews, an Australian who was working as a stage manager. They moved to Canada in 1940 and he began a career as literary editor at Saturday Night magazine. Their first child was born in December 1940. Two years later he accepted the position of editor of the Peterborough Examiner in Peterborough, ON. During this time he wrote humorous essays under the name Samuel Marchbanks and wrote and produced many stage plays.

     In 1947, several of his essays were published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, and The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks came out in 1949. Davies used his early upbringing to provide themes for his novels and his first novel Tempest Tost was published in 1951. His second, Leaven of Malice, came out in 1954. In 1955 he became publisher of the Peterborough Examiner and his third novel, A Mixture of Frailties was published in 1958.

     Besides novel and play writing, and being a newspaper publisher, Davies taught literature at Trinity College at the University of Toronto from 1960 until 1981. He left his post as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner in 1962 and became a Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto’s new graduate college, in 1963. Along with his father William Rupert Davies and his brother Arthur Davies, William bought the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper, CHEX-AM and CKWS-AM radio stations, and CHEX-TV and CKWS-TV television stations. His third book of essays, Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack was published in 1967.

     William Robertson Davies wrote a total of eighteen fiction and non-fiction books, plus fifteen plays. He won many awards for his writing including the Governor-General’s Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. He was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.

     William Robertson Davies died on December 2, 1995, in Orangeville ON.

 

Josiah Henson was born on June 15, 1789, into slavery in Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland. When his family was separated by each being sold to different plantations, his mother pleaded with her new owner, Isaac Riley, to buy her youngest son so she would have him with her. Riley agreed and Josiah came to work for him. Josiah was twenty-two years-of-age when he married. He also became a Methodist Minister and was made the supervisor of his master's farm.

     In 1825, Mr. Riley fell on hard times and was sued by a brother-in-law. Henson guided eighteen of Riley’s slaves to Riley’s brother’s plantation in Kentucky. When he returned and asked to buy his freedom from Riley for $450.00 (350.00 cash and $100.00 IOU), Riley added an extra zero to the IOU. Cheated of his money, Henson returned to Kentucky. In 1830, he learned that he might be sold again so he, his wife, and their four children escaped to Kent County, in Upper Canada (now Ontario), which had been a refuge for slaves since 1793. That was the year Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe passed: An Act to prevent the further introduction of Slaves, and limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude within this Province. While the legislation did not immediately end slavery, it did prevent the importation of slaves and so any United States slave who entered the province was automatically free.

     Josiah Henson worked on farms in Upper Canada before moving with friends to Colchester to set up a Black settlement on rented land. He eventually was able to buy 200 acres in Dawn Township and made the community self-sufficient. The settlement reached a population of 500 at its height, earning money by exporting black walnut lumber to the United States and Britain. Henson purchased an adjoining 200 acres for his family to live on.

     Henson served in the Canadian Army as a military officer. He led a black militia unit in the Canadian Rebellion of 1837-38. When slavery was abolished in the United States many residents of the Dawn Settlement returned to their original home. Josiah Henson and his wife had eight more children in Upper Canada and he remarried a widow from Boston when his first wife died. He continued to live in Dawn for the rest of his life and many of his descendants still live in the area.

     Henson wrote his autobiography The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as narrated by Himself. It was published in 1849 and many believe he inspired the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowes’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Henson then expanded his memoir and published it as Truth Stranger Than Fiction. Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life which came out in 1858. Since people were still interested in his life, in 1876 his story was updated and published as Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life: An autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson.

     Josiah Henson died on May 5, 1883 at the age of ninety-four.

Canadian Authors--New Brunswick by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

  

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

 

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Sleuthing-the-Klondike

https://bwlpublishing.ca/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

     I am a proud Canadian author of over twenty fiction and non-fiction books in my long writing career. But I am just one of thousands of published writers from this huge country. Canada has had a long and illustrious history of producing world renown authors and books going all the way back to the 18^th century.

     Frances Moore was born in England in 1724. She was a well-known poet and playwright in England before she and her husband, Reverend John Brooke moved to Quebec City in 1763, for John to take up the post of army chaplain. During her time there Frances wrote The History of Emily Montague, a love story set in the newly formed Quebec province.

     The story is told through the voices of her characters by way of personal letters between the two. This is known as epistolary (of letters) type of writing and it was popular during the1700s in Europe. The Brookes’ returned to England in 1768 and the novel was published in 1769 the London bookseller, James Dodsley. The History of Emily Montague was the first novel written in what is now Canada and the first with a Canadian setting. Frances died in 1789.

 

New Brunswick

Julia Catherine Beckwith was born on March 10, 1796 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her mother, Julie-Louise Le Brun, was from a wealthy French family that had immigrated to Canada in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Her father, Nehemiah Beckwith, moved from New England in 1780 and owned a successful ship building business. Julie-Louise had given up her Roman Catholic faith when she married, but Julia spent a lot of her early life visiting her French cousins in Nova Scotia and Quebec. One of her cousins became a nun of the Hotel-Dieu in Montreal.

Her mother’s previous religious background was the source of the idea for her first novel St. Ursula’s convent, or the nun of Canada. She wrote it in Fredericton when she was seventeen and it had complicated plots, romance, suspense, and heroic adventures. It was not to be published for almost ten years.

     In 1820, in order to lessen the burden on her mother after her father’s death by drowning, Julia moved in with her aunt in Kingston, Upper Canada (now Ontario). She married George Henry Hart on January 3, 1822. George was a bookbinder and Julia operated a boarding house for girls. Her novel was published in 1824 by Hugh C. Thomson as St. Ursula’s Convent or, The Nun of Canada; Containing Scenes from Real Life. According to Beckwith’s wishes, the author was listed as anonymous. It was the first work of fiction written by any man or woman who had been born in Canada and the first to be published in what is now Canada. Julia Beckwith is considered Canada’s first novelist.

     Julia and her husband moved to Rochester, NY, in 1824 where her second novel, Tonnewonte; or, the adopted son of America, was published and portrayed as having been written by an American. It, too, had suspense and depth of feeling, but as some critics said it had the same stilted expression and moral overtones as her first novel. Besides entertainment value, Julia wrote to express attitudes toward society.

     By 1831 Julia and George had six children and they moved back to Fredericton. There she contributed to the weekly paper, the New Brunswick Reporter. She also wrote her third book Edith (or The Doom), which was never published.

     Julia Catherine Beckwith died in Fredericton, New Brunswick on November 28, 1867, the age of 71.

 

Raymond Fraser was born on May 8, 1941 in Chatham (now Miramichi), New Brunswick, the youngest of three children. His older sisters left home and his mother died when he as a teenager. He spent a lot of his alone time reading. He attended St. Thomas University in Fredericton. There he played sports in his freshman year and was co-editor of the student literary magazine Tom-Tom in his junior year.

     He worked as a teacher for a year then moved to Montreal in 1965 where he and poet Leroy Johnson created the literary magazine Intercourse: Contemporary Canadian Writing (1966-1971). He was also one of the founders of the Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group, which put on readings in local high schools. To earn money while writing he worked as an editor, chief staff writer, and a freelance writer for the tabloid newspapers. Fraser’s first book of short stories, The Black Horse Tavern, was published in 1973.

     Raymond Fraser and his wife, Sharon, travelled through Europe during the 1970s. The Struggle Outside came out in 1975 and The Bonnonbridge Musicians in 1978. The Bonnonbridge Musicians was a finalist for the 1978 Governor General Literary Award for Fiction. He finally settled in Fredericton and began writing full time. He also was the Writer-In-Residence at the Fredericton High School.

     Raymond Fraser wrote a total of eight books of poetry and fourteen novels and short story collections, five of which were listed in Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books (2009). He also received the first Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Arts that year. He became a member of the Order of New Brunswick in 2012 and received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from St. Thomas University in 2016.

     Fraser died in Fredericton on October 22, 2018, at the age of 77 from cancer.

A War of Words by Vanessa C. Hawkins

 

 

 Vanessa Hawkins Author Page

    

You ever hear of a word war? If your familliar with Nanowrimo or national novel writing month, then you probably have. Word wars are like the Olympics of writing, minus the spandex. They're a turbo boost for productivity, turning procrastination into a distant memory faster than you can say "writer's block." It's like a battle royale, but instead of wielding swords, we're armed with laptops and caffeine-fueled determination.

Not a word war... though accurate.

Imagine a room full of writers, all clacking away furiously on their keyboards, eyes wide with the thrill of the chase for word count supremacy. It's a frenzy of creativity, where the only rule is to write like the wind and pray your spellcheck doesn't fail you.

A real life depiction of a room of writers...

And let's not forget the camaraderie! Word wars are the ultimate bonding experience, where fellow writers become comrades-in-arms, cheering each other on through the highs and lows of the literary battlefield. Plus, there's nothing like the sweet taste of victory when you emerge with the highest count!

So far, word wars have gotten me through a few writer's blocks. Nothing beats a bit of competition, though I usually always lose... Lately I have been trying to turn by brain down a notch. Stop overthinking everything I write down and just get it on paper so I have something to work with during the editing phase. But I got to wondering if its only me who struggles. Obviously not.... but what do you do to get through blocks and obstacles? Wait till it passes, and hope the time is short, or power through it?

Surely some one else can relate, right? 

From Big to Little by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

https://www.bookswelove.com/authors/canadian-historical-mysteries/

I am a Canadian writer and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and home to a wide variety of rocks, plants, and animals. Here are some of the oldest, largest, and smallest examples.

Canada’s largest tree is a western red cedar called the Cheewhat Giant. It is in the Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island. It is 56m (182 ft) tall and has trunk diameter of 6m (20ft). The Cheewhat Giant is also the biggest western red cedar in the world.

Canada’s tallest tree is a Sitka spruce in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island. It stands 95m (312ft) high.

Canada has the oldest exposed bedrock on earth and it is the oldest section of our planet’s early crust. It is known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt and is in Northern Quebec on the eastern shore of the Hudson Bay. It has been analyzed by geologists and they have determined that the rock samples range from 3.8 to 4.28 billion years old. The earth its 4.6 billion years old and there are very few remnants of its early crust, since most of it has been rotated back into the Earth’s interior by the movement of the large tectonic plates over billions of years.

 The Banff Springs Snail isn’t the smallest snail in the world; that is held by the Augustopila psammion species found in a cave in Vietnam and four of them fit inside a grain of sand. However, the only place in the world where the Banff Springs Snail is found is in a handful of thermal springs in Banff National Park in the province of Alberta. The snail was first discovered in 1926 and the largest of the snails are about the size of a small fingernail.

The world’s largest colony of Lesser Snow Geese can be found on the Great Plain of the Koukdjuak on the western side of Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, Canada. Beginning in late May as many as two million snow geese migrate there to breed and when the young hatch, they and their parents go further inland to feed. By early September the young are large enough to head south for the winter.

Putting a Puzzle Together VS Mystery Writing by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

https://bookswelove.net/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

My daughter and son-in-law gave me a one-thousand piece puzzle. It has been years since I’ve put a puzzle together and I thought it would be fun. However, as soon as I dumped out the pieces on the table I realized that putting the puzzle together would be much like me writing a mystery novel.

     First, the big pile of pieces is like the big mishmash of ideas, clues, scenes, characters, and settings that make up the notes I have for my mystery. Before I can start the puzzle I have to turn all the pieces upright so I can see their colour, just as I have to sort through my notes when I start my novel. I have to decide where in the story my book begins much like I have to decide how to start my puzzle. I can outline my novel as some writers do or I can jump in and start writing. With the puzzle, I can find all the outer edge pieces and put them together or pick scenes of the picture and find the colours to match.

     I decide to start with outer edge and I sift through the pile to find them. I return the rest to the box. As I work on the edge I have to go back through the box to find edge pieces I missed, just like I have to go through my manuscript and find where I have missed adding some important information or missed putting in a misdirection.

     Because of the way they are cut, it is hard to decide if a piece is part of the outside edge or if it is a regular piece. Just like writing, is that a clue or a red herring?

     With the puzzle I know at the beginning what the end result will be because of the picture on the box. Sometimes when I start my mystery, I know the ending, however sometimes the characters say or do something that I hadn’t planned on and I am left trying to figure out how to get them out of a situation or how to diffuse something they have said.

     I learned that there are various names for the parts of a puzzle piece: loops and sockets; knobs and holes; tabs and slots; keys and locks; even outies or innies. Sometimes it is frustrating to try and get knobs to fit into the holes. The colour looks the same only the tab doesn’t fit correctly into the slot. Or the pieces lock perfectly but there is a slight difference in colour. If one doesn’t seem to fit in a spot, I have to match it somewhere else. That is the same with my writing. Sometimes I come up with a good line or a scene only to find that it doesn’t suit where I want it and I have to find a better match somewhere else.

     When I get stuck with trying to figure out where my story goes next, I can work on a different section in my novel. In the puzzle if I can’t seem to make a scene come together I can go to a different part and work there. Every puzzle piece is tailored to go with the rest to make the picture just like every clue, every scene, every red herring has to fit into the story properly.

     What is frustrating to a puzzle solver is finding that one or two pieces are missing at the end. This is true for the reader of a mystery. All the clues have to be pulled together, the red herrings explained, the mystery solved, and the murderer caught. I can’t leave any pieces out.

     And the last thing I realized about how putting puzzles together and writing mysteries are similar is that both of them are an excruciatingly slow process for me.

My Poetry Moment by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

My Poetry Moment

      Over my writing career I have had articles, short stories, travel books, and mystery, young adult, and science fiction novels published. And one poem. When that one poem was accepted for publication, I felt I had taken my writing to another level. I decided, though, that my contribution was going to be different, that I was going to take the poetry community by storm. I wanted to make my mark, to stand out in the poetry world. And to do that I came up with a new poetry sub-genre that I called Script Poetry. Just like a movie script I set up the scene and the tone for the poem and give some background of the story in the poem by using a script layout. It made the whole poem more visual and that way I could get right to the meat of what I wanted to say. 

     I enthusiastically sent out my script poems and waited for the accolades to come in.

    Surprisingly, the publishers were not as galvanized about this new style of poetry as I was. No one accepted them for publication. 

     But never underestimate the power of a script poet scorned. At the same time as I was planning my burst onto the poetry stage, I was writing my mystery novel "The Only Shadow In The House," the second book of The Travelling Detective Series. I gave one of my characters the career of a poet and her specialty was Script Poetry. Needless to say the publishers and critics in my fictional world were highly impressed with the poems. The poetry was very popular with the reading public and the poetress won many awards. 

     To quote from my book: One critic wrote that her poems have an innovative, revolutionary style that is shaking the foundations of the conventionally staid poetry community, while another critic called them insightful and powerful. 

     I have taken one of the script poems from that novel for you to judge for yourself.

 

Fade In
Act One
Exterior-Farm House-Night.
There is snow on the ground. Stars twinkle in the clear, night sky. A vehicle pulls into the yard and a woman climbs out. She stares at the house then takes a deep breath. She releases it in a vapour. With slow tread she climbs up the steps and enters the darkened house. Inside, she stops and listens.

 

There is no noise in my house, it is dark and silent.
Today, I buried you. Is this what it is like in your grave,
total quiet, total darkness?
I flip on the light and wander the house
looking at the possessions that
represented a life that never existed,
except in my own mind.
This has been our home for nineteen years
but it now feels alien to me.
Because from now on I know that mine
will be the only shadow in the house.
I must leave here soon.

 

End Act One
Fade Out

 

Fade In
Act Two
Interior-Farm House- Night.
All the lights are on in the house. The woman is in the kitchen. She pushes over the shelving holding plant seedlings and pots. She heads to the dining room and goes to a china cabinet with no doors. All the shelves hold figurines and dishes and knick knacks. They crash to the floor with a sweep of her hand. The ones that don’t break, disintegrate under her foot.

 

“Damn you, Ben. Damned you to hell!” I yell.
I want you to hear. I want you to know
the sorrow and the pain you have brought me.
I go from room to room, expunging.
I spray your shaving cream on the walls.
I dump your aftershave in the tub.
I grab a knife and shred your clothes.
Finally, there is nothing of yours left.
I feel some satisfaction.
You destroyed my life and now I have
destroyed everything that represented yours.
“There you bastard,” I say. “Rot in hell.”

 

Fade Out
End Act Two

 

Fade In
Act Three
Interior-Farm House- Night
The woman is standing in front of a picture on the living room wall. The furniture and floor are littered with debris. She takes the picture off the hook and stares at it a long time.

 

I find our wedding photograph on the wall.
I’d had it enlarged for our tenth anniversary
as my loving gift to you.
Were you as pleased as you said you were
or was that just a sham?
I smash the glass against the corner of the table.
I cut my finger removing the shards.
I look at you smiling back at me.
Were you an impostor in our marriage?
For now I wonder how many other
women did you see over our nineteen years.
I slash the picture with the knife. How symbolic.

 

End Act Three
Fade Out