The Bay of Fundy 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, Mike, 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.

Today I’d like to describe our stop at the Bay of Fundy situated between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Bay has the highest tides in the world and was formally designated one of North America’s seven wonders of nature in February, 2014. (The others are Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Mount McKinley, the Everglades, and Yosemite National Park).

 

 

 

 

 

       From Moncton, NB, we drove south on Route 114 to Hopewell Cape and the Hopewell Rocks arriving in the afternoon. It was low tide so after we paid, Mike accepted the cart ride offered while I decided to walk the trail to the Rocks. I arrived at a viewpoint overlooking the ocean floor and the reddish rock structures.  Mike and I took the stairway down to the floor and wandered out among the tall formations. The ground was surprisingly solid with a few muddy areas.

       The Hopewell Rocks were originally a massive mountain range that was older than the Appalachians and bigger than the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Over millions of years the range wore down and after the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, water seeping through cracks in the cliffs eroded the sedimentary and sandstone and separated the Rocks from the cliffs. The incoming and outgoing tides have eroded the base of the rocks at a faster rate than the tops and that has caused their unusual shapes. Those shapes and the vegetation growing on top have given the formations their nickname of the Flower Pot Rocks.

 

 

 

       Due to the tides the Rocks are covered in water twice a day. Some visitors are able to see the high and low tides in one day but since the next high tide would be at night, Mike and I found a place to camp and returned to the Rocks the next morning. There is approximately six hours between low and high tide and the entrance fee covers a return visit to enable visitors to see the Rocks during both tides.

       Again, Mike took his ride and I walked. I reached the viewpoint and the change was astonishing. Just the tops of some of the rocks showed, the rest being under water. The tides can reach a height of 16 metres (52ft), which is as high as a four story building, twice a day. I walked down part of the stairs but the rest was blocked off to the public because they were under water. High tide is a good time to take a kayak tour and three kayakers were paddling around the formations.

 

 

       Seeing all the water and the partial formations, it was hard to believe that just the day before I had walked on the floor of the bay. It was an amazing experience.

Launching a Novel

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On March 26th I hosted a book launch for my new novel, To Catch a Fox. For the venue, I chose Owl's Nest Books in Calgary because I'd held launches there for my two previous novels and I love this independent bookstore which is so supportive of local writers. You'd think launches would be old hat for me the third time around, but I always find something new to worry about. This time, in addition to reading and answering questions, I tried out a power point presentation using a system borrowed from a friend. At the last minute, I decided to rent a microphone and am glad I did. It was easier to use than I'd expected. Close to 85 people attended the launch and those at the back would have had a hard time hearing my voice, especially after it was strained from 40 minutes of talking.

My friend advised me to make my book cover the first slide, for people to watch during the introductions  

For my talk, I wanted an upbeat mood despite the novel's dark material. So I chose a travel photo theme and showed pictures from my two holidays in Southern California to research potential settings for To Catch a Fox. I found I didn't need notes, since each slide prompted me about what to say next. My idea was to give a sense of how I worked my own travels into the story and make the settings feel more real for readers when they later encountered them in the book.

This woman conveniently photo-bombed my picture of the Santa Monica boardwalk. Julie, my protagonist, jogs along this same boardwalk.  

Initially, I planned to save my readings from the novel to the end of the presentation. Then I realized it would be more interesting for listeners to look at a picture where the scene takes place. So I paused part-way through my talk for my first reading. I was afraid this might break the flow, but it served as a transition between my first and second research holidays.

Julie questions a clerk in this bike shop at the Santa Monica Pier. Like my husband Will and me, Julie and her sidekick Delilah rent bikes and ride on the boardwalk. Their purpose is to question more bike shop owners, who might have known Julie's mother in the 1980s. Will and I simply rode for fun. 

As a non-techy person, I had to make three trips to my friend's house to get the presentation working properly. My friend's favourite part of the program was the cheesy apartment that Will and I rented for our first California trip. Julie and Delilah stay in this same place. Another friend who has started reading To Catch a Fox told me she'd have thought I was exaggerating the racy décor if she hadn't seen the slide show.

The boudoir, where Julie slept. Delilah slept in the sofa bed in the cluttered living room.  

I started writing To Catch a Fox when I got home from the first trip. After two drafts, I felt confident of my Los Angeles area details, but wanted to get a better feel for the novel's primary setting -- a fantasy retreat. All I had was a vague sense that it was about a two hour drive east of Los Angeles. When my sister-in-law suggested we join her on a cruise from San Diego, Will and I tacked on a road trip to the California interior. Our explorations wound up locating my New Dawn Retreat farther south than I'd thought, in a sparsely populated orange growing belt. We began the drive with a stop at the California Citrus State Historic Park and bought a bag of oranges. They were delicious.

This landscape below is the closest I could get to my imagined retreat. The New Dawn Retreat in my story features a broad lawn enclosed by hills, with citrus and olive cultivation on the hillsides.  

For my second reading, I chose a scene set at the New Dawn Retreat.


The presentation wrapped up with questions and door prizes, which included an Owl's Nest gift card as my thanks to the bookstore, a recently published chapbook of one of my short stories and, most exciting of all, bottles of Dawn dish detergent.   

What I find most fun about book launches is seeing people from different areas of my life gathered together in one place. Friends, family, my fellow hiking and book club members, writer acquaintances, readers who've enjoyed my previous novels. I don't get a chance to talk to them all, but it's wonderful to see their supportive faces in the audience and to touch base briefly with a few.

And now, what will I do for my next launch? First I'll have to write the book.

"Cursed be he that moves my bones" by Karla Stover

     BWLAUTHORS.BLOGSPOT.COM

This weekend, while looking for something to watch on TV as I sat with two dogs on my lap making pine needle baskets, (and no easy task in Puget Sound where there aren't a lot of pine trees), I stumbled on one of the few programs PBS doesn't charge to watch. It was about a group of archaeologists and historians who wanted access to the contents of William Shakespeare's grave.


Unlike the majority of Great Britain's men of letters who lie in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner, Shakespeare was interred in Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church. I don't remember why they wanted a look-see, but they weren't the first hoping for a peak. After all, the grave is less than 3 feet deep. And in the mid-19th century, Ohio-born school teacher Delia Slater Bacon became convinced that if she was allowed to open the site, she would be able to prove "the works attributed to him had in fact been written by a coterie of writers led by Francis Bacon and including Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh and were credited by them to the relatively obscure actor and theatre manager largely for political reasons."

The teacher so disliked Shakespeare and was so vocal about both that dislike and her theory that after receiving some encouragement from Ralph Waldo Emerson she moved to England in 1853, "ostensibly to seek proof. She was uninterested in looking for original source material, however, and for three years lived in poverty while she developed her thesis out of ingenuity and 'hidden meanings' found in the plays."

Three years later, cold and hungry, she abandoned her plan of opening Shakespeare’s grave to look for the documents she believed would support her position. Perhaps she took its creepy epitaph to heart.

"Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, 

To dig the dust enclosed here. 

Blessed be the man that spares these stones, 

And cursed be he that moves my bones." 

One of her additional theories was "that Francis Bacon had hidden proof of the plays’ authorship in his grave." But by this time her brother begged her to come home," writing to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he believed that Delia had been verging on the edge of insanity for at least six years. Delia, however, refused to leave England.

Delia’s mental state worsened, and as she suffered from constant fevers and poor health, and became suicidal, she was ultimately committed to an asylum, first by the mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, then by her brother after she returned to the United States in 1858.

As for the results of the PBS special, what the researchers found "is that half of the Bard's grave is undisturbed" but that the head end where his skull would have been contains nothing. It's merely voided space. The popular theory is that grave robbers took it many years ago.;