On my website you will see a few quotes from various readers about my Loyalist trilogy and I’d like to talk about one of those today. A friend of mine knows a lot about history in general and much more about the Rebellion history of Norwich; she and I spent time bicycling around that area many years ago with our young mothers’ group. No matter where we went this friend would point out places and tell the history. It was all fascinating.
With The Loyalist Legacy, I brought the Garners into my part of Ontario. I was very careful about my facts. When my friend wrote me the comment below I was so pleased I just had to put it up on my website:
“I was delighted with the way you handled the Norwich Rebellion in the last Loyalist book, Elaine, and have heard many positive comments about it.” Marie A.
I feel historical fiction can have lots of fiction in it but the details of actual history just have to be correct. Marie checked my facts as I’d written them and I checked over and over with reference books as well.
The fiction comes with adding fictional characters, places, details, and events. I remembered my daughter talking about a house where she cleaned for an old lady. One day the lady moved the kitchen table and pulled back a rug to reveal a door in the floor. She pulled it up and asked my daughter to go down and retrieve something for her. Beth took one look at the deep, dark hole with a rickety ladder leading down into the abyss and visions of that door slamming down over her flashed through her mind. My normally very compliant daughter just was not going down there. That scene was still in my mind when I wrote the story of two black former slaves at the time of the Rebellion of 1837. You’ll find that story near the end of The Loyalist Legacy.
The Garner family in the Loyalist trilogy are fictional even though they are based on and often named for my ancestors. I’ve had to decide what they might have looked like but draw on things I know about my father’s family to flesh them out. Someone has a widow’s peak and someone else has a prominent chin dimple. These family traits helped me give character to the fictional family. I’m not sure anyone in my family has ever said anything about the resemblance to my dad but it’s been fun for me.
I know my father told a story of a native woman coming to visit one of my ancestors, leaving her papoose on the porch while the two talked inside, and the child being carried off by a wild animal–bear or lynx, I’m not sure, as my cousin told me two different versions of the story. I decided to use the lynx because of the sly nature of cats and, believe it or not, the appeal of a lynx’s strange pointed tufts on its ear tips.
In the second book of the trilogy, The Loyalist’s Luck, I brought in the historical fact of the burning of Newark (present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake) but I also added a wonderfully sad story I discovered in my research. The residents had been given one hour to retrieve what they could from their homes before the Americans burned the town. This was in December, 1813, a very cold and snowy time of year in the Niagara peninsula. I found a story of an old lady, sick and unable to leave her bed, who was carried out into the street to watch as the Canadian Volunteers (siding with the Americans) burned her house to the ground. Through that old lady I was able to make my readers feel the absolute pain of war.
Another decision that just seemed to push itself into my mind was having Robert Garner, fictional brother of William, decide to sever off small sections of his land right where the present-day village of Thorndale is located, north of London, Ontario. Interestingly a relative of mine named Robert Garner did donate that land in the second part of the nineteenth century for municipal purposes and today there are playing fields and community buildings there. My niece’s house is actually located on the land donated by our relative. This has little to do with the plot of the book or even with the characters but it helped me add a layer of feeling that otherwise might not have been there as Robert suffered through his wife’s illness. I hope it helps my readers empathize with these characters who could very well have been real.
We never really know what facts or nuances from our own past will pop up in our writing. For me they are most pleasing. They make the story really my own. No one else could have written what I’ve written. There is an extra layer of richness that I feel each and every time I read from my work for audiences near and far. And there’s a connection to my family and my memories. If only history in school could have been taught from the point of view of the people involved instead of the memorize-the-six-reasons-for-whatever method.
Click on the books below for great historical stories:
November is launch month for The Loyalist Legacy, the third in my Loyalist Trilogy and what a month it has turned out to be. Our thoughts are on our American neighbors to the south and the most vitriolic and divisive election any of us can ever remember. No matter whose side you’re on, this was a dirty fight and it was hard to see dignity and even honesty go out the window.
And it’s the time of year when we specifically remember those who served that we who have come after might live our lives in freedom.
Of course almost my every waking thought is on my book launch with personal appearances, book signings and speaking engagements, and my three-week book tour all over the Internet. Yesterday I did a newspaper interview here in my hometown after two major events on the weekend. So much fun! Meeting people who love historical fiction in general and my Loyalist trilogy in particular is pretty darn rewarding.
As I drove home after one of these events I thought about the connection between my latest book (the Loyalist Legacy), November 11th and Remembrance Day, and this pivotal American election.
Five Items to Make Us Feel Better This November
Though our history is relatively short it is full of catastrophic events which could have ended Canada. Wars, rebellions and civil disobedience are part of our past and yet here we are. My Loyalist trilogy is a testament to the efforts of individuals fighting for a good life here.
Canada suffered through the 1837 Rebellion in Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) yet managed to survive and become one of the best countries in which to live today. William and Catherine Garner, the real couple whose names I borrowed in The Loyalist Legacy, were there for that rebellion and survived.
Reading fiction and particularly historical fiction lets us imagine things that may have happened in the past from which our ancestors recovered. We see the strength in ordinary people when faced with disheartening and even terrifying events going on all around. We can recover.
One of the things my daughter started me writing with her is a gratitude journal. Every day we try to write 3 things for which we are grateful and it helps me to focus on the good in my life as well as have a wonderful view into just who my daughter is. We pick each other up with that journal and we remember how lucky we are.
In The Loyalist Legacy the difficulties of being settlers in an unsettled land, of fighting to save children from disease with no healthcare, and of seeing one’s neighbors divided over just how to solve political and social problems every day–those difficulties seem so much larger than ours just at this moment. There is a bigger picture. Perhaps we can all focus on it while we strive to build a better world.
November is launch month for The Loyalist Legacy, the third in my Loyalist Trilogy and what a month it has turned out to be. Our thoughts are on our American neighbors to the south and the most vitriolic and divisive election any of us can ever remember. No matter whose side you’re on, this was a dirty fight and it was hard to see dignity and even honesty go out the window.
