Ask the Author: Karen Emilson
Answered Questions (4)
Karen Emilson
Not yet titled, this is what I'm working on now . . .
Street-smart Jennifer flees Toronto to avoid questioning by police and catches a Greyhound headed west, with her only road map—a beat-up calendar from 1968—and a few treasured possessions hidden in her knapsack. Her goal is to find Salt Spring Island and fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming an artist, but bleary-eyed and exhausted, she gets back on the wrong bus at the Winnipeg depot and two hours later, wakes up in the small town of Lundi, Manitoba.
It's January 1980. She's wearing high heels. And both her wallet and the bus are gone.
Now she's stuck, and the only people who can help her don't want her to leave—the eccentric funeral home owner, a retired cattle rancher, the town florist, and the young, bearded construction worker she calls "Scumbag" who sat next to her on the bus. His name is Magnus and he is the grandson of Bjorn Magnusson, a wealthy business owner in town.
Lying, thieving Jennifer soon finds herself caught up in small town life and unwittingly holds the key to a decades-old mystery, as she struggles to stay one step ahead of the RCMP officer who doesn't believe her lies. Can she let go of her haunting past and pursue her dream; or remain stuck forever in the town that just won't let her go?
Street-smart Jennifer flees Toronto to avoid questioning by police and catches a Greyhound headed west, with her only road map—a beat-up calendar from 1968—and a few treasured possessions hidden in her knapsack. Her goal is to find Salt Spring Island and fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming an artist, but bleary-eyed and exhausted, she gets back on the wrong bus at the Winnipeg depot and two hours later, wakes up in the small town of Lundi, Manitoba.
It's January 1980. She's wearing high heels. And both her wallet and the bus are gone.
Now she's stuck, and the only people who can help her don't want her to leave—the eccentric funeral home owner, a retired cattle rancher, the town florist, and the young, bearded construction worker she calls "Scumbag" who sat next to her on the bus. His name is Magnus and he is the grandson of Bjorn Magnusson, a wealthy business owner in town.
Lying, thieving Jennifer soon finds herself caught up in small town life and unwittingly holds the key to a decades-old mystery, as she struggles to stay one step ahead of the RCMP officer who doesn't believe her lies. Can she let go of her haunting past and pursue her dream; or remain stuck forever in the town that just won't let her go?
Karen Emilson
I don’t know how it feels to be anything else. For me, being a writer has always been a part of who I am. It isn’t all that I am—I proudly wear the label of sister, wife, mother, grandmother and friend—but being a writer does define me. I see the world and communicate in a way that is different than non-writers simply because, to me, life is meant to be understood through story. But to answer what is best about this intimate part of myself is difficult.
It is the same as if someone asked, what is the best part about being a Canadian? To ponder that question, I’d have to say: To be Canadian means I am able to experience such a unique diversity in both the landscape I live on and the people I meet.
So I’d have to say the best part about being a writer is that I live in a place and time that affords me the opportunity to spend every day writing about whatever I want. I am free to be me.
It is the same as if someone asked, what is the best part about being a Canadian? To ponder that question, I’d have to say: To be Canadian means I am able to experience such a unique diversity in both the landscape I live on and the people I meet.
So I’d have to say the best part about being a writer is that I live in a place and time that affords me the opportunity to spend every day writing about whatever I want. I am free to be me.
Karen Emilson
When Lake Manitoba overflowed its banks in 2011, flooding out the farmland at Siglunes, I was inspired to finish a story I'd started 10 years earlier about the immigrants who carved out a living there. It took me five years to write "Be Still the Water" and it was released in early fall, 2016.
Karen Emilson
I see writer's block as an inability to access that place inside where creativity begins. I've never sat down in front of the computer and been unable to write, but not too long ago I experienced a period of time that included many personal losses and couldn't write about anything except those experiences. My creativity was gone otherwise. So instead of writing, I read a lot, studied, researched and outlined my most recent novel which I wrote once I'd worked through the grief.
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