Turtle Valley is set during a forest fire, one that threatens the whole valley, and it's an event that's based on a real forest fire. In 1998 a massive forest fire in the surrounding Fly Hills threatened the town of Salmon Arm in south central British Columbia precipitating the largest peacetime evacuation in BC's history up to that point. Many homes were at first threatened, and then consumed by a fireball that swept down one mountain into a valley adjacent to the city, and then up Mt. Ida, the city's chief landmark, leaving it barren.

I was there, evacuating my own parents from this fire, a witness to it. I knew even as we went through this horrific experience that I would write of it, and I did, many years later, in Turtle Valley.

I remember watching this fire crawl down the hillside above Salmon Arm at two o'clock in the morning feeling sick to my stomach with fear. The fire was close enough to reflect off the puddles in the driveway as it threatened to consume the entire city of Salmon Arm, my home town.

During this event, fire quite literally rained down from the sky. Residents struggling to save their property talked of the burning pine needles that rained down on them. Later, when the high winds struck on the afternoon of August 5, 1998, pushing a fireball across the valley and up the mountain on the opposite side, chunks of burning wood, some the size of a baseballs, fell from the sky starting new fires in the fertile farm land on the floor of Salmon Valley setting alight the back of pickup trucks and trailers filled with the possessions of those fleeing the fire.

We were all put on a ten-minute evacuation alert as we watched that fire creep closer. That meant that at any moment volunteers or members of the RCMP would knock on our door and tell us we had only ten minutes to get the hell out.

Our focus, then, was on which of our precious possessions to save, and what to leave behind. My sisters and I worked with my mother and father to make those painful decisions, and they were indeed painful, as with each object we left behind, we also left behind memories, our history, bits of our own lives, our own dear selves.

The objects we ferried to safety held
potent memories. Just as I write in Turtle Valley, my grandmother's breadboard still held specks of dried bread dough from my grandmother's last day of bread-making, trapped within the elabourately and deeply carved foliage that rimmed its edge. This breadboard, like the other objects we trucked to safety, were time machines, triggers of memory, that held the stories my grandmother told as she made bread with my mother.

As you might expect, the treasured objects that my fictional family saves from the path of the fire in Turtle Valley became a focal point for the novel. Many of these objects offer clues to a terrible family secret that, once revealed, changes Kat's life forever. The carpetbag pictured below, which really did belong to my grandmother, holds the first clue that leads Kat to unravel this long buried mystery.

To capture the feeling of intimacy and nostalgia that family objects invoke in all our lives, I worked with photographer Mitch Krupp (http://www.mitchkrupp.com/) for a year to photograph the objects that I wrote of in the novel. These lovely photographs are featured at each chapter break in Turtle Valley. The objects pictured, like this carpetbag,
are, with a few exceptions, my own treasured family heirlooms. This carpetbag, the breadboard, scales and the other objects that belonged to my own grandmother became touchstone pieces for me as I wrote this novel, representations of her continued presence in my own life, just as they are for my character Kat. In a novel that is largely about memory and story, the objects in the photographs represent those we all have in our lives, the dear possessions that define us, and remind us of where we came from, and who were are.

The pub date for Turtle Valley is September 8.

It's so strange. As I prepare to launch my new novel, Turtle Valley, in Newfoundland this coming week, I'm dreaming night after night of my mother, who died this past spring after living with a debilitating stroke for a year. In one dream she was walking, showing no evidence of the stroke, and I was aware that this was a moment out of time, and that she was already dead in another time. I took her arm and said to her, "We've got to enjoy this moment because it won't last and it won't come again." I woke feeling that I had been with her -- perhaps I had -- and that I had been given a message: to make note of each moment I was in, to really live within it, because it won't come again.

I wish she were here to witness the publication of this book, to live this moment with me, because she influenced the novel in so many ways. My mom, Irene Anderson, gave me the magic for this book and my other novels: it was her eerie stories of ghosts, premonitions, synchronicities, visions, and sleepwalking that inspired the magic realism in Turtle Valley, A Recipe for Bees, and The Cure for Death by Lightning.

I talked about where the magic came from in the on-line conversations I had both with Pearl Luke and Jack Hodgins on my forum this summer. In my conversation with Pearl Luke, we got to the topic when I asked Pearl about the premonitions and visions of her protagonist in her own novel, Madame Zee. Here was her answer and a bit of our conversation:

Pearl: I guess, in the end, if there was a point to the novel, (it was) that there is no controlling or even understanding psychic ability. I believe many of us do see snippets of the future. I don't necessarily believe they come from those already passed away, though that is a comforting thought. Nevertheless, somehow, we are able to pick up information that has got out there into the ether--through events, through imagining, or however it is there in the "library of the universe." Regardless of that, when we tap into it, it is only extra information, the way those who are not colour-blind see what the colour-blind do not.

I have always been fascinated by the psychic world. You've written about that yourself. Do you share that fascination?

Gail: Yes! I've had a clairvoyant character, Augusta, in a Recipe for Bees. Her experiences were based loosely on my mother's stories of her own experiences. As I was growing up, breakfast time conversation was about the dreams we had, with the expectation that some of them may 'come true' or be reflections of a coming reality. She talked about the ghostly manifestations she experienced as a girl, and of her strange sleepwalking experiences. I don't know what to make of all that now, however I am aware that it coloured my writing life, and is likely the reason why I'm drawn to writing magic realism.

Do I believe in this stuff? Well, I'm university educated and know the power of the human brain to construct 'realities' of all kinds (one of my characters in Turtle Valley has a bumper sticker that reads "Don't believe everything you think"). On the other hand, I've had a great many strange experiences, particularly connected with writing, where I will write about something and have it happen after I've written of it. Turtle Valley was full of these kinds of experiences. The writers I work with talk about this phenomenon all the time. Is it precognition? I don't know. I rather imagine that I'm so immersed in the writing project that I see elements of my project where I would not have before.

****

The magic found in Turtle Valley stems back to The Cure for Death by Lightning, a novel that I worked on, as a directed studies, with Jack Hodgins when I was a student at the University of Victoria, and when we chatted on the forum this past week, he reminded me how the magic worked itself to the surface in that novel.

Jack: I knew that you'd come to us from the Shuswap region of the province (and had won a story competition where I was the judge -- though I hadn't made the connection for a while) and you mentioned that you had an idea for a novel based on stories you'd heard back home. (Having "used" stories from home myself -- the Comox Valley in my case -- I was immediately intrigued. I don't know if it was the same visit or a later one, but you showed me a few pages of lined paper on which you'd handwritten several paragraphs. I read them, and I believe they included a passage in which the turtles were crossing the road. There might even have been the title "Blood Road." At any rate, it was well written and such a unique episode that I wanted more. At this stage, what I assumed was a touch of "magic realism" was apparently simply realism. Well, realism slightly "heightened" through your use of language. I'm pretty sure I said "More More!" and it was probably only later that we discussed the value of toning down the deliberate "magic" since the material itself had so much magic in it already.

****

The material did indeed have magic in it. That project started with my parents stories, my mother's in particular, of the Shuswap-Thompson, stories of dark deeds, ghosts, premonitions, and strange natural phenomenon, like the turtles that crossed the road in Turtle Valley in such numbers that wagons and cars couldn't pass. Here flowers rained down from the sky, ghosts walked with the living, sleepwalkers performed strange rituals, and terrible secrets were kept within families from one generation to the next. A gothic place. But it was also a place of great abundance and sensual delights, a place where one could sit in a cherry tree and eat warm cherries straight from the tree on a hot summer's day. However hard life was here, there was great solice in the daily rituals of baking and preserving food, of eating rich meals, and the company found in friends and neighbours in evenings where entertainment came in the form of homemade music and storytelling. It was out of this rich soup of storytelling that my mother offered me that The Cure for Death by Lightning arose.

And Turtle Valley as well. It's fitting that Jack and I ended up talking about The Cure for Death by Lightning this week as I launch my new novel Turtle Valley, as that's where Turtle Valley began, in that same rich well of story telling. When I went back to my home landscape in early drafts of this novel, to my fictional landscape of Turtle Valley, many of my characters from The Cure surfaced to tap me on the shoulder. The first was Beth who was the young woman hit by lightning in The Cure. My own mother inspired this character with her strange stories; she was hit by lightning as a girl. When Beth came to me this time around as an old woman, she was still cursed with her lightning arm that would act on its own. Strangely, it was after this character emerged that my own mother suffered the stroke that stole from her the use of her "lightning arm" and her ability to tell stories, or to write them down. That terrible event hugely influenced this novel, feeding both the Beth character, and the Ezra character who has suffered a stroke in the novel.

A couple of days before my mother's stroke I experienced what might be called "visions." They were what Pearl Luke called "snippets of the future:" I saw, in my mind's eye, flashes of a hospital room, the intimate details of it. The railing of a hospital bed. An elderly wrist with a hospital band around it. These flashes came to me out of nowhere twice, once as I was taking a shower, and then later as I was about to fall asleep. They were powerful experiences, filled with shock and fear, and when they occured I knew something was about to happen. Then the feelings passed and I brushed them off. Then, a day later, my mother had the stroke, and when I walked into the hospital room I saw the bed railing, the band on her wrist, the flashes I had experienced the day before. Was this experience a premonition? On the surface it certainly seemed that way. But as a writer, I'm also well aware of how much information I pick up and process subconciously that I don't conciously. What changes in my mother's behaviour signaled to my subconcious mind that she was about to have a stroke? What changes in her smell, perhaps, or speech patterns? What clues did her body give mine? This is my rational mind talking, after the fact. At the time of my "visions," my emotions told me something else: that my bond with my mother was strong, and that I was attuned to her enough to know when something was about to go terribly wrong. When I sat in that hospital room and told my mother of this experience, she reminded me with gestures (because she lost most of her ability to speak), and the single word "mother", of the story she always told, of how she simply "knew" the moment her mother had passed away, even though they lived in different cities and she hadn't seen her for months. In a similiar way, the day before my mother's passing, I simply "knew" she was about to go. What do we do with these experiences? Brush them off? Explain them away? A part of me does. But another part holds them dear as evidence of how connected I am to the people I love, and to the world around me.

When Mom was alive and could still speak, she would often tell me, "If there's a way to reach you after I've passed away, I'll find it!" Perhaps she has found a way, as she comes to me nightly in my dreams. But there are times when I wake in the night after meeting her there in that dreamworld, when I wish she would find a way to reach me in my waking life, so I could talk with her once more. Maybe she'll find a way yet and I'll walk with her ghost, as Beth walks with her mother's in Turtle Valley. In the meantime, Irene Anderson continues to haunt the pages of my books.

For more on my conversations with Jack Hodgins and Pearl Luke, click on "forums" on my website http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/

Is the end of the book (as we know it) in sight? Maybe. Check out what the article "Reading the Future" on UVic's KnowlEdge site has to say: "U Vic English professor Dr. Ray Siemens predicts that within one generation, we'll be doing most of our reading online, books included."

As a true book lover, my first reaction to that claim is, "No way!" Computer screens hurt my eyes. It's uncomfortable to sit in front of a computer for any length of time. And how can you possibly replace the wonderful feel (and smell!) of a book in your hands? There's that wonderful, luxurious feel to settling into bed with a good book. Settling into bed with a laptop just doesn't cut it. And yes, yes, I know the technology will change, as it already is, so we'll be taking little handheld devices into bed, but still, how can you replace a book.

And yet here I am, blogging on my computer, reading other blogs, my newspapers, the Quill and Quire and, yes, sections of other writers' books that the publishers provide as widgets, all on-line. The truth is I already spend far more time reading on-line than I do reading good old fashioned bound books. That realization strikes me as so very sad. As sad as when I realized I no longer had any use at all for my old typewriter -- on which I had written my first published story -- and I finally hauled it off to the thrift shop. As sad as when my husband contemplated throwing out all his darkroom equipment because he no longer had any use for it; all his photography work is now digital. Will I one day feel as much nostalgia for a dusty book as I do now for the forlorn film camera or electric typewriter sitting on the thrift shop shelf? Yes, apparently I will. So I'll start my goodbye now by taking a book off to bed with me, hoping that it will be a long, slow farewell.

The photo above is one from my upcoming novel Turtle Valley, of a lovely old camera that I can't bring myself to throw away. Photo credit: Mitch Krupp.

For the rest of that article "Reading the Future" go to: http://communications.uvic.ca/edge/

Love to hear you opinions on the loss of the book on the forum (http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/). Go to this topic under "book chat."

In July Catherine Bush and I got together for a chat with the release of Writer's Gym as an excuse (see our conversation below, and on my forum). Both Catherine and I have exercises in this guide, and one of mine is now posted on the CBC site.

I often give this simple exercise to my students and I've been amazed at the writing that has come out of it. When the writer engages his own senses, the writing suddenly comes alive, and engages the reader's as well. Give it a try and you'll see what I mean.

Check it out at:

http://www.cbc.ca/wordsatlarge/features/feature.php?storyId=509

As you can tell from my site and my blog I'm married to a photographer, and he's a really good one too, but when I asked him to take some author photos of me today, I realized that his priorities for the exercise and mine were somewhat different. Among the mugshots were several photos of my, ah, accoutrements. And throughout the series of photographs my chest was more often in focus than my eyes. Which made me wonder if asking my husband to take my author photos was really such a bright idea after all.

But then I always find this whole author photo thang an unsettling experience. It's just weird to see yourself through the lense of a camera, though someone else's eyes. I hadn't realized until I saw those photos today that I have fine hairs growing off the tip of my nose. They're noticable enough that I've got to pluck the damn things. Then there's the nose itself. Could it have gotten bigger? Geeze, I need a good hair cut. And what's happening to my neck?!! In short, do I really look like that?

It's often just as unsettling to see the novels I wrote through another's eyes. I have a really hard time answering many of the questions I receive from students in English classes where one of my novels is being studied. Recently one student asked these questions about A Recipe for Bees: "Could you tell me about Augusta's identity and the revelation of it and also the preservation of memory and the premonitions that exist in the novel?" Within hours I received another email from a different student asking, "I was just wondering about your novel, A Recipe For Bees, why is it that Augusta is so secretive, and also the 'theme' of dying twice (as a way of preserving memory)? Thanks this would be very helpful for me, Please!!!"

Obviously an essay was due. And soon.

So, I sat down to answer these emails. Augusta's identity? Gosh, I don't know. She was like so many farm women I grew up with who struggled to gain some measure of independance. I didn't really think in terms of "identity" as she evolved. Premonitions? Well, I just put premonitions in there because I grew up hearing tales of premonitons from my mother. Is there a 'theme' of dying twice in A Recipe for Bees? I don't remember thinking about that when I wrote it. But maybe. Sure. Is Augusta secrective? Hmm, I don't remember her character that way. But then again she had to be. What's all this about "preservation of memory?" Geeze, time for me to reread the book. Obviously it's very different than I remember it!

I like getting these questions and I've set up an area on my forum for Q & A, so people can ask questions of me, directly, as they do following a reading. With each of these questions I suddenly see my own writing in a whole new light, though the eyes of the reader who asks them. Did I really write that? Did I mean to put that idea or theme in the novel at the time (because after so many years I've simply forgotten). What did I mean by that? Does my novel really look like that?

I do my best to answer the questions I get from readers, but in the end I usually say, "What do you think about that? You're the expert!" And I mean that. I trust the reader's interpretations of my book over my own. It is, after all, her book, not mine. She bought it, or borrowed it from the library, and put her own imagination, experiences, history, and expectations into the book as she read it. The book she holds is one she created, right along with me, when she read it. I talk more about this in my short essay "The Art of Reading" which is posted on the forum (at http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/) under "book chat."

So, I don't know, maybe Mitch, a photographer with more than thirty years of experience behind him, is the expert in this whole author photo thang. After all, he sees me much more often than I see myself. He knows what I look like better than I do. Maybe he was right to focus on my chest. With this photo above he may have captured my best feature.

For more on the subject of the author photo, check out this essay at Writer's Block:
http://www.writersblock.ca/summer2002/feature.htm

For my own author photos, keep checking my website at www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca, click on "biography", and then on "photos."