My Poetry Moment by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

https://books2read.com/The-Travelling-Detective-Boxed-Set

https://bwlpublishing.ca/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

Canada's Deserts by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

https://books2read.com/The-Travelling-Detective-Boxed-Set

https://books2read.com/u/bapW6a

Canada’s Deserts

Only forty-one of the one-hundred ninety-five countries on this earth have deserts but the deserts cover almost one-third of the earth’s land mass. 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 one desert and three pseudo-deserts. A pseudo-desert is defined as an area that has some of the qualities that make up a desert, but does not meet the technical standards to be termed a true desert

There are three main features of a desert: less than 250 millimetres (10 inches) of precipitation each year; sparse vegetation; and severe weather changes. Other characteristics include humidity, high winds, little cloud cover, and aridity. The types of deserts are semi-arid, cold, coastal, and hot and dry.

The people of the Southern Interior of British Columbia claim that Canada’s only desert is in the Osoyoos area. Many of the businesses in the region have the word ‘desert’ in their names, such as the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre and the Osoyoos Desert Centre. Tourists come to this part of British Columbia to see this popular desert.

But others say that, although it does have desert type plants like cacti and animals such as the sage grouse and tiger salamander, it is not really a desert because of the precipitation which is 323 mm (12.7 in) annually. It is defined as a pseudo-desert.

Another pseudo-desert in Canada is the Carcross Desert, located outside the community of Carcross in the Yukon. At 2.6 sq km (1sq mi) it is called the smallest desert in the world. But while it is termed a desert it is actually the remains of an ancient glacial lake which left the sand dunes when it dried up. In spite of the strong winds from Lake Bennett which bring in more sand, kinnikinnick, Yukon lupine, Baikal sedge, and lodgepole pines are able to survive.

The local people used the dunes for sandboarding, hiking, beach volleyball, and all-terrain vehicles and there are scenic tours for tourists.

The third pseudo-desert in Canada is the Great Saskatchewan Sand Hills covering 1,900sq km (734 sq mi). Like the Carcross Desert they are desert-like sand dunes situated just north of the village of Sceptre in southwestern Saskatchewan. Also like the Carcross Desert, the hills were left when glaciers melted 12,000 years ago and are home to a variety of plants and animals that have adapted to the dunes.

The Canadian Arctic Tundra is considered the only true desert in Canada. However, it isn’t a hot desert; it is a cold polar desert and covers a large area in northern Canada. The land is covered by thick layers of ice instead of sand and has a cold, harsh climate with temperatures dropping as low as -40 degrees Celsius (-40F). Trees have a difficult time surviving in the permafrost during the short growing season so the tundra is covered mainly by small shrubs, mosses, and lichens. A number of animals--arctic hares, muskoxen, polar bears, arctic foxes, and caribou--manage to live in this cold desert in the far north because they have thick fur coats to keep them warm.

Pantser Writing by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

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

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

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

 

 Pantser Writing 

If I had to chose between being called a plotter or a pantser writer I am definitely a pantser. I have never worked with a solid outline or arc for my novels, whether they are mystery, historical, romance, or young adult. And this is mainly because I find that my characters seldom end up the way I first pictured them and the plot never takes the route I thought it would.

I either start with an idea or a character and decide the setting and then start writing. I do begin the story with a character in his/her everyday life so the reader can get to know them then I put in the trigger that is out of the control of my main character or starts the mystery. This puts the main character on his/her quest for a solution.

I do have scenes pictured where characters are going to have a certain conversation or be at a certain place but unexpected conversations or character twists surface as I am writing the story. Some of these are surprises or mishaps or problems that get in the way of my character’s quest. I strive not to make these predictable nor so far out that they don’t make sense to the story. They should leave the reader with the thought that (s)he should have figured that would happen. I find that it is no fun to read a book where you can foresee where the story line is headed and what is going to happen before it does.

 

Sometimes, part way through my story, I have to go back and add chapters at the beginning because one of my characters has decided to say to do something unexpected. I have even had characters try to hijack my story and make it about them. An example is in Sleuthing the Klondike. I had two main characters Helen and Baxter and decided that Helen needed an lady's maid. I introduced Mattie who was supposed to be a very minor character but she suddenly began telling her story and almost took over as the main female character.

For the climax of my stories my character goes through the action of resolving the problem or solving the mystery. This has to be fast paced and sometimes at a risk to the character. By this time the reader should be rooting for the main character and wanting him/her to succeed without injury. Hopefully, too, this is where the surprise comes in, where the reader goes. “Wow, I didn’t see that coming." or "I never thought it would be that person.” I have even been surprised or saddened or happy by the ending of my novels and have said that.

 

I believe that if my emotions are rocked by the ending so, too, should those of the readers.

My Yukon Historical Novels by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

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

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

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

BWL Publishing Inc. published twelve books of the Canadian Historical Brides Collection in 2017, Canada's 150th birthday. Each book was set in one of the ten provinces or two territories (Northwest Territories and Nunavut were combined). Because I had travelled to the Yukon twice and had hiked the Chilkoot Trail on the hundredth anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1997, I chose the Yukon of 1896/97 to write about. My novel, Romancing the Klondike, was published as a hard copy and ebook in 2017 with an audible version being released in 2022. It follows the lives of two young women who travel from Halifax to Fortymile on the Yukon River in 1896.

Pearl Owens is commissioned to write articles about the north for her hometown newspaper. She is accompanied by her cousin, Emma, and they plan on meeting up with Emma’s brother who has been in the north with two friends for five years.  Gold is discovered on Rabbit Creek just as they arrive. Emma marries one of Sam’s friends and returns to Halifax while Pearl remains in the newly established Dawson.

I wrote a sequel to that book, Rushing the Klondike which was published in October of 2022. Although it is not part of the Canadian Historical Brides Collection, it is a continuation of the original Romancing the Klondike story.

This year BWL, Inc has begun releasing the Canadian Historical Mysteries Collection, which includes twelve mystery novels set in each of the Canadian provinces and territories. My novel, Sleuthing the Klondike, was published in April, 2023 and also takes place in the summer of 1898. Helen Castrel arrives in Victoria, B.C after a long journey from London, England and hires Detective Baxter Davenport to go with her to Dawson City to find her brother. David Castrel is a remittance man who hasn’t been heard from for a year. While the main characters are different from my other two books, their lives become intertwined with the characters of the first Klondike books during their investigation.

The following is a brief history of the Yukon

The name Yukon is derived from the Loucheux first nations word Yukunah which means `big river'. The land was mainly occupied by the Tagish and Tlingit native people for centuries before the non-native explorers arrived in the 1820s. In the 1840s fur traders set up a few Hudson's Bay Company posts along the Yukon River. When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, there wasn’t a clear border between Alaska and the Northwest Territories, as the land was known then. In 1887-88 William Ogilvie, a Canadian surveyor, surveyed the area making the 141^st meridian the western boundary with Alaska and the 60^th parallel the southern border with British Columbia. Hence the phrase North of 60.

     Prospectors went north looking for gold in the 1880s and there was a gold strike along the Fortymile River, which drains into the Yukon River, in 1886. There were other smaller strikes until 1896 when gold was discovered on Rabbit Creek later renamed Bonanza Creek. A town named Dawson sprang up on the Yukon River at the mouth of the Klondike River. When word of the gold discovery reached the outside world in the summer of 1897, thousands of men, women and children hurried to Dawson during the winter of 1897-1898 hoping to find their fortune.

     Because of the rush Dawson grew quickly to be the largest city north of San Francisco and it became known as the `Paris of the North'. It had hotels, dance halls, daily newspapers and saloons for its 30,000 inhabitants. Fresh eggs were brought by raft on the Yukon River; whiskey came in by the boatload before freeze-up; gambling made rich men out of some and paupers out of others; dance hall girls charged $5 dollars in gold for each minute they danced with a miner; the janitors made up to $50 dollars a night when they panned out the sawdust from the barroom floors. Due to the influx of people, the region officially entered into the confederation of Canada and was designated as the Yukon Territory on June 13, 1898. Dawson became the capital. Eventually the word `territory' was dropped and it was called The Yukon.

     A Territorial Administration Building was constructed in 1901 for the territorial seat of government and Dawson was the centre for the government administration until 1953 when the capital was moved to Whitehorse.

     The Klondike gold rush ended in 1899 when word of a gold discovery in Nome, Alaska, reached the prospectors and they headed further north. However, over the next few decades gold companies were formed and continued to mine the creeks, this time using dredges to dig up the creek bottom. They left behind huge piles of gravel called tailings. The dredging lasted until 1960 when gold prices declined making the operation uneconomical. Today, mining is done with big trucks, huge sluices, and back hoes.

     The north is known as the Land of the Midnight Sun after the words in Robert W. Service’s poem The Cremation of Sam McGee:

                    There are strange things done in the midnight sun

                      By the men who moil for gold.

     The Arctic Circle is the most northerly of the five major circles of latitude of the Earth. It is an imaginary line that marks the southern edge of the Arctic at 66 degrees 30' north latitude in the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada, and in Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. The land north of the Arctic Circle gets 24 hours of sunlight on the longest day of the year, June 21st. The further north of the circle you go the more days of total sunlight in the summer you will get. This is because the North Pole is tilted towards the sun and gets direct sunlight from March 20 to September 22 as the earth rotates. Conversely, on the shortest day, December 21st, the land north of the Arctic Circle gets 24 hours of darkness because the North Pole is tilted away from the sun.

     The Yukon is a great place to view the aurora borealis or northern lights. These are bright dancing lights that are really collisions between the gaseous particles of the Earth’s atmosphere and the electrically charged particles from the sun that enter the earth’s atmosphere. The most common colours are pink and pale green produced by oxygen molecules about sixty miles above the earth.  Silver, blue, green, yellow and violet also appear in the display. Red auroras are rare and produced at high altitudes of about 200 miles. The lights are best seen in the winter and the further north you are the better they appear.

     The Yukon has the smallest desert in the world, the Carcross Desert, near the town of Carcross. It is an area that was once covered by a glacial lake. As the glaciers melted the level of the lake lowered until just the sandy bottom was left. Winds off Lake Bennett keep the sand moving and prevent most plants and trees from taking root on this.

     During the late Wisconsin ice age (10,000 to 70,000 years ago) an arid section of the northern hemisphere was not glaciated because of the lack of moisture to support the expansion of the glaciers. The area, called Beringia after the Bering Strait which is near the centre of the region, encompassed parts of present-day eastern Siberia, Alaska, The Yukon, and ended at the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. The growth of continental glaciers sucked up moisture which led to the sea level dropping by up to 106 metres (350 feet). As a result, a land bridge was formed between northwest North America and northeast Asia.

     It is believed that parts of western Beringia (eastern Siberia today) were occupied by man 35,000 years ago. The forming of the Bering Land Bridge allowed the first humans to travel from Asia to North America. There is evidence that the history of man in North America goes back 25,000 years ago.

     Some of the animals that survived for thousands of years in this arid land surrounded by glaciers were the North American horse and camel, the steppe bison, the giant beaver that weighed up to 181 kilograms (400 pounds), the Mastodon, the woolly mammoth, the giant short-faced bear, the scimitar cat, the American lion, and the giant ground sloth. All of these are extinct.

     The territory of The Yukon was founded on gold mining, but there has been coal and silver mining in the territory also. It is now a favourite destination for tourists.

Canada's Coastline by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

Canada’s Coastline

I am a Canadian and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and has the world’s longest coastline. It is 243,792 km (151,485.326 mi in length and borders on the North Pacific, Arctic, and North Atlantic Oceans and includes the coasts of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton island, as well as, thousands of off-shore islands. The next closest country is Indonesia with 54,716 km (33,999 mi). The sovereign country of Monaco has 5.6 km (3.5 mi) of coastline.

Part of Canada’s coastline encompasses Hudson Bay which, even though it is saltwater, is sometimes considered a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. While politically it is considered part of Nunavut, it borders on Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, and Nunavut. Hudson Bay is famous for the fur trade between Europeans and Indigenous peoples from the 1600s to the 1900s.

Canada has ten provinces and three territories. Two of the provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, are land locked. The others plus the territories all have some part of their coast on saltwater. The province of British Columbia has the most with 25,725 km (15,985 mi) on the Pacific Ocean, while the Yukon Territory has only 343 km (213 mi) along the Arctic Ocean.

The government of Canada has set aside five key ecosystems of Canada’s coastline as Large Ocean Management Areas (LOMA) for conservation, planning, and management. The Pacific North Coast comprises one-quarter of the Canadian Pacific ocean waters. This area is home to sea lions, dolphins, seals, porpoises, and twenty-seven different whale species. It is also the habitat of 80% of the global population of Cassin’s Auklet plus a number of other seabirds. The glass sponge reef along the coast dates back 9,000 years.

The people around the Eastern Scotian shelf rely on fishing and petroleum exploration for their livelihood to the detriment of the region and the number of marine animals that live there. LOMA is trying to improve the area. Although, shore around the Placentia Bay area off the coast of Newfound and Labrador  is degrading due to economic development, it is still the habitat for 49 bird species, 14 marine animal species, and 23 fish species. There are also a number of plant species.

The Beaufort Sea is a marginal sea (a division of water separated from an ocean by islands, peninsulas, or archipelagos) in the Arctic Ocean off the shore of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. This LOMA is a complex a marine system because of the short summer free of ice, the freshwater flowing into the sea during the spring and summer and the increased dropping of sediment. It has been an important area for humans who have hunted and fished for centuries. Six communities oversea the management of the LOMA and by doing so are able to pass on their harvesting skills to future generations.

The fifth LOMA protected area is the Gulf of St Lawrence which sits at the mouth of the St Lawrence River and covers 155,000 sq km (60,000 sq mi). Some of the species that inhabit the waters are Greenland shark, the St. Lawrence beluga, giant whales, seals, tiny pink crustaceans called krill that are near the bottom of the food chain, sea ducks, and geese. It is a very productive and diverse estuary along the coasts of Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfound land and Labrador.

 

Canadian Lakes by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

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

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

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

Canadian Lakes

 I am a Canadian and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and has about 20% of the world’s freshwater. It also shares the world’s largest body of freshwater-the Great Lakes-with the United States. Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, are divided by the border while Lake Michigan is totally in the United States.

Nearly 14% of the world’s lakes over 500 sq km (193.05 sq mi) are within Canada’s borders. The largest lake totally within the country is Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. It is the 4^th largest in North America and the 9^th largest in the world. The name comes from the Chipewyan word satudene which means ‘grizzly bear water people’.

Great Slave Lake, also in the Northwest Territories is the second largest freshwater lake in Canada and the 10^th largest on the Earth. With a depth of 614 metres (2,014 ft) it is the deepest lake in North America. It was named for the Dene, the first nation’s people who were called Slavey by the Cree first nations.

Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba, is Canada’s third largest freshwater lake and has the largest watershed (the rivers that drain into a lake plus all the land with streams that drain into those rivers) in Canada. Its watershed is about 982,900 square kilometres (379,500 square miles) which is about 40 times its size. This ratio is the biggest of any other large lake in the world. Waters flow into Lake Winnipeg from the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario and from the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana making it the 11^th largest freshwater lake in the world.

Lake Athabasca sits on the northern border of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan with 26% in Alberta and 74% in Saskatchewan. It is the fourth largest lake totally in Canada and waters from it flow northward through the Slave and Mackenzie river systems to the Arctic Ocean.

It is estimated that there are about 2 million lakes of various sizes in Canada and they make up about 9% of the country’s mass. This means that 891,163 square kilometres (344,080 sq mi) of Canada’s total area of 9.985 million square kilometres (3.8 million sq mi) is covered by freshwater.