Home Children: Canadian History by Leanne Dyck

 In 2011, the Canadian government designated September 28 as British Home Children day. 

Paul Henderson, “British Home Children: BC women reflect on shameful period in Canadian history”, The Free Press, September 28, 2019

Who were the "Home Children"?

Socio-economic disadvantaged children were torn from their families and brought to a foreign land--Canada. Some were welcomed into loving families. Others... Others faced overwhelming cruelty. And yet... And yet...

photo by ldyck

Home Children

In the mid-1800s [,during the Industrial Revolution,] many children in the United Kingdom lacked adequate care. They were hungry, sometimes resorting to stealing, and many were living on the streets—think of the works of Charles Dickens. Even children living with their parents in the workhouses were not much better off, often worked 14-hour days or more with little food. Many died before they reached 20. [1] [And, as a result of the revolution, t]raditional extended families were broken up and many moved to urban areas to find work and a better life. And so, if anything happened to one of the parents, there was no immediate family nearby to take them in. [T]here was no social system in place to help [the families] through...difficult circumstances. [2]

Independently, several people of different religious backgrounds came to the same conclusion: the problem could not be solved in Britain. These children had to be removed from the streets and given food and clothing. They had to be taught to read and write, given work skills and solid religious training, then sent abroad where farm labour was desperately needed. They had no future in England, Ireland or Scotland…

Maria Susan Rye...arrived in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in 1869 with a group of 68 children taken from the poorhouses of London and Liverpool. They were initially housed in a converted jail which Maria had brought with her own money and renamed Our Western Home. [Maria was the first of many women and men who brought groups of children from Britain to Canada.]

More than 80,000 children (some scholars even say 100,000), mostly ages 9 to 14 but some scarcely 3 years old, were sent...between 1869 and 1939. None of them was accompanied by a parent.

They were regarded as orphans, even though two-thirds had at least one parent who was still alive. [3][And, in fact, h]ome children were often told that their parents were dead so that they could break their emotional ties more easily. [1]

Sometimes [placing the children in these homes]...was meant to be a temporary solution until the family got back on their feet and there are cases on record where some parents went back to pick their children up, only to find that they had already been sent away. Sometimes the parents received an ‘after sailing’ notification, informing them that their children had been emigrated a week before. [2]

[The children were shipped] overseas to Canada with bright promises of a better life, with a home, a family, fresh air, and healthy food. [3]

Once in Canada, the children were sent to receiving homes right across the country until farmers picked them up or they were sent on their destinations with a cardboard sign around their necks. There were at least seven applicants for every child shipped to this country. [2] [The] farmers completed a Form of Indenture. [1] The terms would require the children to be housed, fed, clothed and sent to school. A small fee would be paid for fostering younger children, older children would help with chores, and more extended labour would be required from adolescents. At 18, the terms of indenture were to be discharged. [2]

[S]ome children did...find homes and families in Canada, others found nothing but poverty and misery. While many were well treated, many others experienced appalling living and working conditions and even in some cases psychological, physical or sexual violence. [3]

Children could be ‘returned’ and reassigned. Many were moved from one farm to another. Some ran away or simply disappeared, some died from ill-health or injuries resulting form neglect and abuse, some committed suicide…

[T]he belief in eugenics that was running rampant throughout the UK and North America caused children to be considered inferior stock to their Canadian counterparts. They were stigmatized as such, merely because they were poor and needed help. In communities where these children were meant to be fostered and nurtured, they were often taunted and made to feel shame for being a Home Boy or Home Girl. [2] [They] were shamed about their origins, shamed about parents who couldn’t care for them, and taught that a better life meant turning away from their primal identity of family. [4] This shame caused many Home Children to remain silent about their backgrounds their entire lives [2] [and is responsible for] a spate of suicides in the 1920s. [5]

[T]he majority of children continued to be sent right up until the advent of the Second World War, after which heightened social consciousness condemned the sending of any more children to Canada in this way… Britain not only sent children to Canada, they also sent them, up to the early 1970s, to South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Despite all the trials that they had to endure, these...British Home Children...set down roots in Canada and contributed to the country’s social, economic and political development. Many of them served in the Canadian Army during the First World War and the Second World War. Today, over 10% of all Canadians are thought to be descendants of British Home Children.

Although...their story is part of the school curriculum in Ontario, the British Home Children [‘s] legacy of trauma and child abuse...is not well-known by the vast majority of Canadians.[5] [A]nd their descendants have yet to receive an official apology from the Canadian government such as those made by the government of Australia in 2009 and the government of the United Kingdom in 2010. [3]

By honoring their memory, [Home Children Canada, established in 2012] seeks to ensure that the Home Children’s contributions and struggles are never forgotten and their rightful place in history is acknowledged with dignity and compassion. [6]

[1] The Canadian Immigration Historical Society, “A Silent History: The British Home Children”, January 1, 2011 https://cihs-shic.ca/the-british-home-children/

[2] Lori Oschefski, Home Children Canada, “Who Are the British Home Children?” British Home Children in Canada https://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/

[3] Lara Neilson Bonikowsky, “Uprooted Lives: the British Home Children”, in The Canadian Encyclopedia, April 13, 2013

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/children-lost-and-found-feature#:~:text=On

%2024%20February%202010%2C%20the,various%20British%20colonies%2C%20including

%20Canada.

[4] Barb Janes, “Shame, secrets and dark histories: Remembering the legacy of British home children”, CBC, September 28, 2019

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/pov-barb-janes-british-home-children-1.5296069

[5] Paul Henderson, “British Home Children: BC women reflect on shameful period in Canadian history”, The Free Press, September 28, 2019

https://www.vicnews.com/news/british-home-children-b-c-women-reflect-on-shameful-period-in-canadian-history-61605

[6] Home Children Canada https://www.britishhomechildren.com/

September 30th is Orange Shirt Day

 

photo by Eleanor Cocker

I purchased my orange shirt from Eddy Charlie and Kristine Spray. You can learn more about them and Orange Shirt Day here. 

"artist Bear Horne gifted [his] design to Eddy Charlie and Kristine Spray to be used in this advocacy work."

Books that helped me connect with Orange Shirt Day...

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese (book review)

 is like a slap shot--a quick and powerful read.

Barren Ground by David A Robertson (book review)

is set in early November in Winnipeg and is about two Cree foster children--thirteen-year-old Morgan and twelve-year-old Eli.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (book review)

is historical fiction about the 60s scoop

Two Tricksters Find Friendship by Johnny Aitken and Jess Willows (book review)

is a year in the life of a new mutually supportive friendship between Jessie, a white girl, and Johnny, an Indigenous boy.

Song: "O Seim" by Susan Aglukark

On this blog in October...

How to find your story's end by Leanne Dyck

Finding the end of a story can be as challenging for a writer as finding the end of this mess is for a knitter...

photo by Leanne Dyck

Sometimes I've cut a story short--ending it before the end. Other times I've written on and on and on, well past the end. 

How can I learn to recognize the end of my story?

Determined to answer this question, I searched for a solution. I found this strategy...

Whoever it was, whenever it was, this wise writer advised me to find the story question. She said that it would be at the beginning of my story. For example, she continued to explain, in a mystery, your story question is who shot the victim. In a romance, your story question is, will the protagonist find love? After locating the question, search for the answer. The answer will be located at the end of your story. End your story after answering the question.

The end is the resolution of the problem that you introduced in one of the first two chapters...

-Bob Mayer 

photo by Leanne Dyck

Okay, so, what if your problem isn't finding the end of your story, but rather how to end it? 

Well, in her book

Endings

1. A pivotal, life-changing event occurs...

2. Characters modify short-term goals one last time...

They know exactly what they have to do now, and absolutely nothing can stop them from doing it...

3. The Showdown Begins...

The main character and opposition come fact to face, there's no hiding...

4. The opposition is vanquished and the conflict ends...

5. The story goal is achieved

6. Characters react to the resolution of the plot and subplot

7. Characters revise their life goals

8. Possible reemergence of the conflict of opposition...in thrillers, horror novels and mysteries.

photo by Leanne Dyck

In his book,

'Study endings as much as you study beginnings. The most important thing about the ending is to close out your main story line and all your subplots. Don't have the reader guessing... [T]he climax is not the same as the resolution. The climax ends the crisis. The resolution explains how the crisis is over and also lays out the effect on the characters who now go on.' 

photo by Leanne Dyck

Dos and Don'ts of Novel Endings

-Don't introduce any new characters or subplots

-Don't describe, muse, explain or philosophize

-Do create that sense

-Do enmesh your reader deeply in the outcome

-Do resolve the central conflict

-Do afford redemption to your heroic character

-Do tie up loose ends of significance

-Do mirror your final words to events in your opener

-Don't change voice, tone or attitude

-Don't resort to gimmicks

The End

photo by Leanne Dyck

Sharing my author journey...

Question:  When is a rejection letter not a rejection letter?
Answer:  When it inspires you to write on.
Please allow me to explain...

Guest Post: Quattro Books--Allan Briesmaster, publisher

Quattro Books’ publications reflect the unique cultural character and dynamism of Canada today: what it has been, and what it is in the process of becoming. The Canadian literary scene is international; our national experience is informed and enriched through literatures brought by immigrants and newcomers. We are the home of the Novella.

Quattro Books is motivated by the vision for open-ended literary expression. The literature that we are interested in aligns closely to what Northrop Frye aptly called “post-national literature”: literature which tackles and breaks taboos surrounding origin. We aim to publish meaningful literature regardless of its linguistic, cultural, and national background; in doing so, we contribute to a community which accurately reflects the multiplicity and excitement of literary production in Canada. For us, a good novella or poetry collection by a Canadian author familiar to readers is just as important as a literary creation by an unknown writer who experiments with form or style.

Below is a list of some of Quattro’s most recent titles that have been published, and some of our highly anticipated titles!

Spring 2014

Travels by Night  - by George Fetherling

Travels by Night, long a national bestseller, is George Fetherling’s account of surmounting every obstacle as a despised minority to become to become a fixture in Canadian culture. A book with a broad cast of characters ranging from Margaret Atwood to John Lennon to Marshall McLuhan—and dozens more.

George Fetherling is a well-known novelist and commentator. Some of his other familiar books are Walt Whitman’s Secret, The Sylvia Hotel Poems and The Book of Assassins. He lives in Toronto and Vancouver.

Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table by Peter O’Brien

Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table is about storytelling in the digital age. It’s a jaunty account of a single father, 55, and his daughter, 15, studying Grade 10 Latin together. The book explores the bustling life of teenaged girls, the expanding influence of technology, the peculiar logic of contemporary family life, and how fathers and daughters communicate, or fail to communicate, in the era of Facebook.

Father and daughter talk about teenage “death circles,” discuss how brothel owners in ancient times advertised their establishments, and come to realize that, while buying a new cell-phone contract, they might not think the same thing when they hear the words “three-year Virgin contract.”

For the book, the author interviewed Gordon Lightfoot, Dr. Ruth and the former Bishop of Mumbai. Also interviewed are a 12-year-old girl from New York City who studies for her Latin tests by texting with a friend, and a 99-year-old businessman who dined with George Orwell and still uses Latin every day.

Come Cold River by Karen Connelly

 In Karen Connelly’s first collection of poetry since The Border Surrounds Us, the poet offers up a searing, complex portrayal of her troubled family. Refracted, augmented, drawn through various cities, streets and fields, over mountain ranges and foreign landscapes, this portrayal grows into an authentic homage to people who are often invisibilized or silenced. Simultaneously, it becomes an indictment of her own country, Canada, its long history of racism and unconscionable violence against women, children, addicts, and poor people. Never didactic, insistently real, these poems make us wonder “how to enter again/that unlikely tenderness/the cracked ribcage of the world/ as if it were the last shelter.” Come, Cold River is a piercing, exquisite look at the social inequalities in Canada.

Quattro Books

We acknowledge the generosity of the Ontario Arts Council, the OMDC, and the Canada Council for the Arts

Guest Post Author E R Brown

Marc Emery and me, or

How do you research a subject like grow-ops, when you don’t smoke weed?

My book, Almost Criminal, is about a young man who is seduced into the grow-op business. As one online reviewer put it, it’s a view “into the BC drug trade through the eyes of Tate, a brilliant teenage screwup.”

In every reading I’ve given, and every author Q & A session, one subject is certain to arise. Even my mother asked, “How do you know so much about marijuana? How much research did you do?” At least she was nice enough not to use that nudge-nudge, wink-wink tone of voice.

So, I’ll state this again, just for the record: I don’t smoke. Not cigarettes, cigars, pipes; not tobacco or cannabis or any of the products derived therefrom. There was a time when I did, but that time has passed.

But yes, I did research the subject. It took time, but I established an arms-length relationship with someone “inside” who checked facts for me. My home library grew to include titles like Bud Inc. (Ian Mulgrew); The Cannabible (Jason King); and Marijuana Grower's Handbook: Your Complete Guide for Medical and Personal Marijuana Cultivation (Ed Rosenthal and Tommy Chong). If you want advice on how to set up the plumbing for a basement grow-op, just ask. If you want to know the difference between varieties of pot, I’ve got the breakdown from Alaskan Thunderfuck to Vietnamese Black.

My book is a crime novel. It’s not about marijuana, it’s about crime and society, and how my protagonist makes it through. It’s neither pro-pot nor anti-pot. Which brings me to Marc Emery, Canada’s self-proclaimed Prince of Pot, who’s serving a ten-year jail term in a US federal prison near Yazoo City, Michigan. When I was seeking “advance readers” - people who might write a nice blurb to go on the book’s cover - I thought of Marc.

It took some digging (more research!) and some help from Marc’s wife, but I managed to reach him. Marc was happy to read the book. “I have time on my hands,” he wrote. As a result, my name is now in the federal corrections system’s CorrLinks database.

Marc was enthusiastic until my protagonist makes his first visit to a grow-op. The experience I described was not right, he said. I described a teen’s somewhat smart-ass reaction: Tate is not impressed. Marc complained that a grow-op is “sexy, the smells are wonderful, spicy, peppery, pungent.” He implied strongly that it was a near-religious experience.

Now, I know what a grow-op smells like. It’s earthy and damp, and the fertilizers are either chemical or, um, natural. Spicy and peppery wouldn’t be my words. I’m sure that, for Marc, visiting a grow-op is a near-religious experience. But he’s an activist, and he has an agenda that is wrong for my story. I think that, if I were strongly pro-pot (and engaged in the kind of "research” that people jokingly ask me about) my novel would not be the same.

Marc didn’t blurb my book. But he was helpful: he found technical errors that my previous source had missed, for which I’m grateful. He also described a technique for packaging marijuana so it’s undetectable at the border. I didn’t include that in the book. Research is one thing, but I didn’t feel like telling any casual reader how to beat the cops.

I’m sure my mom would agree.

E.R. Brown is a Canadian writer of crime fiction. His first novel, Almost Criminal, was published in April 2013. An award-winning advertising copywriter, he worked as a stagehand, recording engineer, technical writer and chandelier cleaner before settling down and writing for a living. His short stories have been published in literary magazines and broadcast on CBC Radio. He was born and grew up in the Montreal area,  and now lives in Vancouver.  

book: Almost Criminal (Dundurn, 2013) ISBN 978-1459705838
website: www.erbrown.com

Booklist review (starred),  May 2013

Almost Criminal: Tate MacLane is too smart for his own good, a sort of misguided prodigy. Prematurely graduated from high school, he was tossed out of university (“socialization issues”). Now 17, he’s working at a coffee shop in Wallace, British Columbia, a “hopeless corner of nowhere” and dreaming of finding a way to get back to Vancouver and back to school. Along comes Randle Kennedy, a marijuana grower. Until the drug is legalized, he’s growing medical weed, and the Canadian cops tend to be lenient if they know you’re in the medicinal side of the business. But make no mistake: Randle’s a drug dealer. And young Tate is now working for him. When Tate discovers the truth about the life he’s wandered into, he knows it will take more than his keen intellect to get him out safely. Tate is a fresh narrative voice, and Randle, who could have been a fairly stereotypical drug-dealing villain, has surprising depth; he’s even a weird sort of father figure for young Tate. If you took a gritty crime novel and a coming-of-age story and squashed them together, you might get something very close to this excellent book.


Rick Mofina (bestselling author of the Reed and Sydowski series):
E.R.Brown hits it out of the park – great characters and storytelling evocative of Elmore Leonard.

Robin Spano (author of the Clare Vengel Undercover series of novels):
ALMOST CRIMINAL is a wildly fun read. The concept is original, characters are vivid and fleshed-out, and the story surprised me at each turn, with its unlikely teen hero turning conventional morals upside down. E.R. Brown is an exciting addition to the Canadian crime scene.

Why the Wolf? by Natalee Caple

In my new novel a lone she-wolf follows the main character of Miette as she searches across the Western landscape for the mother who gave her up for adoption, the infamous Calamity Jane. Wolves have always appeared in Westerns for the obvious reason that they are truly present in the West. Wolves have appeared quite recently in the Western through Cormac McCathy’s book The Crossing, where the protagonist makes a doomed attempt to locate and rescue a she-wolf he has injured. The she-wolf in The Crossing is a figure that can represent the inexorable destructive progress of capitalism. The relationship between man and wolf seems like an allegory of the nightmarish marriage between urban expansion and natural sustainability. In this, my ecocritical read of The Crossing, the real crossing over happens because of a metaphorical choice to restore nature that comes too late.

But for me the wolf works as symbol because of the wolf’s commitment to a pack. My wolf is meant to seem more uncanny and unnatural because she is a lone she-wolf (where we think of lone wolves as masculine), and she seems invested in a pack that includes only women (Miette and Calamity Jane), which suggests that she defies traditional definitions of pack and territory.

Wolves fascinate me because they have long appeared in international mythology. Wolves show up in folklore from North American, Europe, Russia, and China. The Cheyenne often include “wolf” in the names of Cheyenne men, particularly warriors. But of wolves as maternal figures, or as a figures that women might identify with, there are fewer examples. Romulus and Remus are twins raised by wolves in Roman myth. Barry Lopez notes that “women show up frequently in native American folklore and history as wives to wolves or their helpers” (121). A wolf is a benevolent figure who aids an abused woman in one Sioux story Lopez calls “Woman Who Lived With Wolves” (121). Navajo witches become werewolves (123) and along the lower Pacific coast of Canada and the United States several tribes incorporate the figure of the wolf into initiation ceremonies as well as ceremonies for healing and to enter puberty (128). I drew on this breadth of representation, this rich cultural shared imaginary, as I constructed a she-wolf for my Western.

In the chapter that is Calamity Jane’s fourth birth, I add to the many stories of her birth by rewriting a legend out of Texas from a hundred years earlier about a girl who lived with wolves and was stolen back before her pack was murdered. In this way, I try to show Calamity Jane as born into a violence that is natural and known (in the storm that tears her from her mother) but no less cruel or terrible for being natural. 

Like the storm, the violent instincts of people are natural but terrible.

On the third day of the hunt the girl was cornered in a canyon. A wolf stood in front of her snarling and bristling until it was shot dead. The girl collapsed and cried over the body of the wolf, holding the head of the beast to her breast. When the hunters approached she growled and barked and as they grabbed her she bit and tore their flesh with her teeth. One hunter cracked her head with the butt of his gun and she fell down unconscious. They bound her and took her to a nearby ranch and locked her in a room. When she woke she howled and howled and howled until the men were on their knees with hands over their ears.

In the Old West wolves were both competition and prey for men. “Wolfers” looking for quick cash captured and killed wolves for bounty. This state endorsed murder aligns the figure of the wolf with the figure of the innocent outlaw abused by society, and so becomes a credible metaphor for wayward women like Calamity Jane (who was known to howl like a wolf when drunk). For my novel, which is expressly anti-violence and about the incredible diversity of individuals from the West not usually found at the centre of a Western, I wanted a figure from the natural world that I could connect with marginalized human communities who have experienced nationally endorsed violence (via police action and laws that promotes violence) including women, indigenous peoples, Black men and women, criminals, Chinese and Japanese North Americans, and the mentally ill. I did not want to render all of their experiences equal (in terms of similarity) so I hoped that the wolf as guide might instead gesture to complicated and even mysteriousness links between their narratives.

Set in the badlands of the North American west in the late 1800s, In Calamity’s Wake tells the story of orphaned Miette’s quest to find her mother, the notorious Calamity Jane.

Miette is reluctant to meet the woman who abandoned her—whom she knows only as an infamous soldier, drinker and exhibition shooter—but she sets out nonetheless across a landscape peopled with madwomen, thieves, minstrels and ghosts, many of whom add a thread to the story of her famous mother.

Interspersed with Miette’s story are the stories of Jane as told in legend, history books, dime store novels and by the woman herself. As Miette makes her way to Deadwood, South Dakota, history and myth collide to create a picture of a remarkable woman who shattered the expectations of her time, and a daughter who must confront the truth of her past. As in Billy the Kid or HBO’s Deadwood, In Calamity’s Wake blends fiction with real conversations and events to transport us, through vividly crafted atmosphere and seductive storytelling, to a side of the Wild West we’ve never seen before.

Globe and Mail:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/with-in-calamitys-wake-its-the-cowgirls-turn-to-ride/article11138436/


Link to Amazon purchase:
http://www.amazon.ca/In-Calamitys-Wake-Natalee-Caple/dp/1443406708

Guest Post: Author Lou Allin shares writing advice

Belle or Holly? : The Old Order Changeth, 

Yielding Place to New

            “Abandoning” a series is a harsh word. It sounds like an author tucked the books into a heated drop at a foundling hospital, or a love affair petered out. Maybe sales fell into the abyss.

            I left my five-book series when I moved from the Nickel Capital in Northern Ontario to Vancouver Island in Canada’s Caribbean. Instead of using an amateur sleuth, I started a police procedural. Now three books in, I miss realtor Belle Palmer, and I don’t quite adore young RCMP Corporal Holly Martin (too callow for my sixty-seven-year-old tastes), but it’s been a good decision. Why change? Moving was only one part of the answer.

            I need to live where I write, down to the last mosquito or banana slug. “Show me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are,” said Ortega y Gasset. The bitter cold and tormenting flies defined Sudbury. My nostrils and throat knew -15C from -25 or -35.  A spastic flicking dance pounding forest paths from May to August is now as foreign as the pungent esters of Deep Woods Off. I watch the fog roll in and out like Reddi-Whip, smell the brine and rotting kelp, and plunge my geocaching hand into a dark cleft in a cedar trunk (no poisonous snakes here) .

            Second, my sleuth needed to lose a few decades. Starting out, I made her my own age.  Forty-five. Mellow and wise, but still in shape. When my first review mentioned “middle-aged Belle,” I said, “No way!” Later, while she was heading toward fifty, I felt sadistic putting her through the hellish perils of the final chase scenes, paddling a canoe, riding a snowmobile, and dodging bullets.

            Third, challenges are stimulating. Anything which shakes an author out of ruts is good canon fodder. I had already welcomed two contracts for Orca’s Rapid Read books, 20K gems in simpler language with linear plots. Write normally, then hit the Hemingway key. Instant transposition. Some people have believed that joke, just like they ask where to buy a “bush poodle.” A fresh series would stretch my writing muscles.

            With a few orphan standalones, I was also peeved at agents who scoffed at amateur sleuths. I was pitching a Utah book where a reporter found a body in a cave. “But why should she care?” the agent asked, barely old enough to vote. “Where’s the motivation?”

             “And if I made the victim the sister of the reporter?” My eyes narrowed.

            “That would be better.”

            No such worries in a police procedural. Death knocks early, and it gets investigated. No sly inveigling of the amateur sleuth tootling around on her own, notebook tucked in pocket, boyfriend- or father-connection to the police for inside information.

            Even before I left Ontario, armed with a few maps, I started my Holly Martin series. Holly would be a staff sergeant….in a outlier detachment of three. Intimate. No pesky bureaucracy. Then I arrived at the island and learned the facts. Holly needed a staff of at least fourteen! Without even a single act, my new girl was demoted to Corporal. Worse yet, she wouldn’t get to investigate murders. Inspectors would be called in from the city, shoving her aside.

            But authors love to find “a way around.” Holly could discover “suspicious” deaths that looked like accidents or root around in cold cases. A key suspect, a friend perhaps, might be innocent. And she could continue to follow the ongoing hunt for her mother, who disappeared without a trace ten years earlier.

            As a bonus, I’m having fun with titles, leaving the “are Murder” list behind. After Northern Winters, Blackflies, Bush Poodles, and Memories, I was running out of ideas. My spooky new titles come from Victorian poems: And on the Surface Die, She Felt No Pain, and the latest, Twilight is Not Good for Maidens. The last comes from a children’s poem called “Goblin Market,” with little girls trading their golden curls for the forbidden fruit of forest homunculi. A vampire tease? No more than “BUSH” poodles attracted Republicans in 2003.

            Holly will have to grow on me. I was thirty two once, short on experience but long on strength and willingness to learn. That readers like her is the first step. And as for Belle Palmer, she’s alive and well in a parallel universe, along with my beloved German shepherd Freya and my father born in 1910.

Lou Allin kissing a chiton

Web site

Lou Allin's latest book...

Buy link

Amazon

Meet A Canadian Designer: Leanne Dyck by Leanne Dyck

This article was published in Knit Together:  the quarterly publication of Canadian Guild of Knitters (February 2003).
Owner/Editor Cynthia MacDougall

I was born and raised in an agricultural in Manitoba's Interlake region. Eriksdale is where my love affair with knitting began--at my Grandma Olafson's side. Turning straw into gold was a spell my Grandma knew well. Her needles and love kept every member of her family warm from husband to children to grandchildren.

My early attempts to master knitting were frustrating. Thankfully Grandma was always there with supportive words and soon I was showing some signs of improvement. I later joined 4-H and won awards for my knitting. In my teens, I began playing with sweater design. 

I spent fourteen happy years as an Early Childhood Educator (ECE), working in rural Manitoba and later moving to Winnipeg. Eventually my husband and I moved to Greater Vancouver. Here I continued my work as an ECE and enrolled in the Open Learning Agency. My goal was to earn a degree in Social Work. ECEs are skilled at stretching the day care centre's budget. I did my part by designing and crafting toys much to the delight of the children in my care. 

In 1998, my mom (Olavia) began to lose her battle with breast cancer. I went back to Manitoba to be at her side. During this time I realized that I could no longer live in urban BC nor work with people. I simply had no more to give: I was tapped out. It was also during this time that I shared with my mom my dream of running my own business. As always, she listened closely and encouraged me to visualize my dream. It was a stressful time, so to help me cope I turned to an old friend--knitting.

Shortly after Mom passed away my husband and I moved to a beautiful island in the pacific. Mayne Island was where I opened and ran Olavia's Craft Supply. Situated between Vancouver Island and the mainland, Mayne Island is a great tourist destination. Its natural beauty inspires creativity.

Soon I was designing and knitting sweaters which were very positively received. Although Mayne Island's population swells in the summer, many a business suffers when things return to normal. Mine was no different and after two years, I was forced to close my store. What would I do now?

Knitting had always been my passion. Why not make it my future? On August 20, 2002 my hand-knitting design website went live. 

Leanne Dyck is a creative knitter and writer whose designs are innovative and fun. Ed.

Direct marketing tips by Leanne Dyck

When my business began in August 2002, I was living on a remote island with limited finances and no formal marketing education. By February 2003, my hand-knitting patterns were being sold in three yarn shops, my bio appeared in Knit Together: the quarterly publication of Canadian Guild of Knitters, and people from 42 countries knew of my product. What is my secret?

I did a few things right. These "things" are inexpensive and easily done. 

I work on my business and promote it daily. What one thing can you do today?

Try e-marketing. E-marketing is more effective than other direct marketing methods. It saves on postage costs, allows for quick communication with multiple prospects, and lets you know immediately if your message was received. It is an easier form of communicating with a stranger than by phone.

Here are some tips:
1) Remember that direct marketing is not Spam. Carefully match your product with prospects. Find email addresses legitimately. One of the best sources I found was association websites. Look at their mandate do they promote business in your field? If yes, then use the email addresses provided. Remember if asked you want to be able to share where you obtained their address.

2)Inform don't sell.

3)Be polite. This may be the initial contact--the prospect may not have heard of you or your product. Your goal is to be product-specific, concise, and polite.

In his book Mail Order Business, Robert W. Bly states that direct marketing 'response rates can range from below 0.5% to 3% or higher'. You need names! The worldwide web has a wealth of contacts.

Just like the wings of a butterfly, your efforts may seem small and insignificant at times... but who knows what tidal waves they are creating? Continue to work on your business--anything worth having requires effort.

(This article -- titled "Working on Your Business" -- was published in the Craftlink magazine in June 2003)