Perhaps you have read The Finding Place, and you’re wondering what many of the landscapes described in the book actually look like. If so, this post is for you! Kelly’s birth village is a fictional creation, but is based on many of the villages I visited in the area around Yangshuo. The image above shows traditional cormorant fishermen putting on a demonstration like the one Kelly sees.
What a thrilling moment, to see the front cover of your novel for the very first time! And here it is. The background shows the Karst Peaks around Yangshuo, a magical landscape that features prominently in the novel.
The Finding Place is about that greatest, messiest, most essential of all things: family. Kelly didn’t have the greatest start to life. Like tens of thousands of baby girls in China, she spent her first few months in an orphanage. She will never know why her birth parents couldn’t raise her – but poverty, and China’s one child policy, likely played a part. Kelly was adopted into a loving family at ten months old and for almost thirteen years lived the life of a typical North American kid. She may have wondered, occasionally, about her birth parents and birth culture, but she had parents who loved her, and she felt happy and secure. All that changed shortly after her thirteenth birthday when Kelly’s dad walked […]
I have just finished reading Michael Harris’ wonderful and thought-provoking book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Harris encourages us to take a close look at what we might be losing, as all things technological and wired encroach upon our daily lives. He argues that we are moving toward knowledge and away from wisdom, that ‘manic disruption’ and the type of multitasking our wired lives encourage can lead to incredible stress. Having worked with thousands of teens over the years I would also argue that it leads to anxiety, depression, social insecurity and a host of other problems. I was thinking about Harris’ book as my writing students walked the labyrinth in High Park on Monday evening, […]
Do we day dream enough these days? Do we tell ourselves stories in our heads for our own entertainment? See something unusual and ask ourselves, what if? Perhaps not. Ten years ago, perhaps twenty, we all had so-called dead time in our days. The walk to work or school. The moments spent relaxing in a bath. Time on public transit. Time spent waiting. And none of it was wasted. We day dreamed. Made plans. Formulated possible futures in our heads to see what they might look like. We imagined, and out of those imaginings ideas were born – some big, some to be discarded or smiled at, all of them worthwhile. These days, dead time has been killed. We fill it with texting, checking emails, […]