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bedrock of family and story @theaatkinson #mywana

The bedrock of family and fiction

Thea Atkinson

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My Grandmother was a war bride. I never really understood what that meant as a kid. I assumed it meant she’d left her country to marry a man she’d met during the war. And it does. It does mean that. But I’ve realized over the years that it means so much more.

I learned during my early school days that the province I call home: Nova Scotia means New Scotland. Because of the heritage of this long strip of land surrounded on three sides by Atlantic ocean, it’s named for my grandmother’s home. I imagine that despite her love for her new beau, it must have given her some pause, some sense of comfort and security, that she’d be moving to a place that would seem like her own home. The name must have taken some of the fear away.

She’d seen hardship in Glasgow. I know this. I imagine the hardships she faced were even more daunting here if only because the support system we all take for granted was gone. She had no family to run to when she and her new husband fought. She had no mother to coddle her when she nursed her first born and struggled with trying to figure out what it meant to be a mother, how to make formula, change diapers, calm the squalling in the middle of the night. She had no friends to relieve the stressful hours with chitchat over a hot cup of tea.

And she had no one to turn to when she and this new husband realized they’d made a mistake.

I think she went home once, packed up my mother and rode the waves back to Scotland. I wonder what they thought of her back there: was she a failure, were they excited to see her? She had brothers who I don’t doubt would have torn my grandfather limb from limb if they’d been able to get hold of him. (what brother wouldn’t feel such fierce protectiveness over a hurt sister? See: my blog post about my own brothers)

But she returned to Nova Scotia and she stayed here. My mom tells me stories of her walking home from work in the winter. They had no car and ‘work’ was 10 kms away, in the town. I think of the 10km drive from my house to my work and it takes 15 minutes. What must it have been like to walk to work everyday, work, and then walk home. So you can feed a family, put clothes on your three girls’ backs?

I only know that in the story, my grandmother’s nylons are torn and holey in places. Her shoes are soaked. She’s wet and cold from the snow. I take snow in the winter for granted. I just assume the snowfall is going to be a foot high with temperatures below freezing and a wind chill that gains fierceness from the Atlantic air. In Scotland, the average precipitation is 9cm in January. The average low temperature is 1degree.

In the story, my grandmother doesn’t complain. Just hangs her threadbare coat behind the stove and asks for a good hot cup of tea.

That hardy Scots will, I suppose, as hard as the brogue that never left her despite living in an area where English and Acadian French mix to form an odd sort of accent that most folks in my area call Fringlish. How she must have stood out in that.

What kept her here, I don’t know, but I imagine it had to do with family. Her new family. Those three girls married and had kids of their own. Her grandchildren–my brother and I especially–practically lived there. We ate pizza late at night in her bed and watched The Rockford Files. She made me Koolaid and told me tales of Nessie and Robbie Burns.

Is it any wonder I’ve remained fascinated with Scotland?

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Introductory price of .99c

If you liked this post, I would muchly appreciate a tweet or share. In fact, I’d be so happy to have a tweet that if you make sure to include the hashtag #theagimmesome, I’ll enter you into a weekly draw to win an ebook. This week: Throwing Clay Shadows. It’s my new release, and is set in Scotland on the Isle of Eigg in the 1800s mostly because my family originated there.

If you’re not sure what to tweet, I even have one drafted for you:

what is your heritage? read blog post and tweet for entry to win an ebook by @theaatkinson. #theagimmesome http://bit.ly/pm3iEU

The new release Throwing Clay Shadows will be on sale for its first month for  99cents. Please do at least sample or better yet, click on through from the picture to pick it up . It costs less than a Timmie’s coffee.

 

9 Comments
by Thea Atkinson on August 22, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Thea Atkinson on August 22, 2011

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/bedrock-of-family-and-story-theaatkinson-mywana/

Runaways and Fiction

by Thea Atkinson

I wanted to run away once.

Not because my childhood was so horrible I felt I needed to escape. Well, I did have 3 brothers who tormented the living snot out of me, but that’s not the reason.

No.

I wanted to run away because my best friend had decided to. I remember thinking how brave that decision was and I envied her, her courage. In fact, I remember envying a lot of things about her: she got awesome bendable leg Barbie dolls for Christmas while mine were plastic, hard edged ones that spread-eagled when I tried to sit them down. She had a minibike–my dad couldn’t afford to buy me a pedal bike. She had a big fisherman father’s shed to play in with coils of rope as high as you stood.

You don’t need to tell me now that I envied her for all the wrong reasons–especially in light of the fact that my home was such an amazing place for a child to grow up that I bring my daughter there every week just to connect with all of her cousins and aunts and uncles. We’re close, my family. But I digress.

I envied this friend also because even at our tender ages she was a great writer. She even won a radio contest with her essay. She had something, some spark that just made her writing electric.

Still, with all that stuff in her favour, she wanted to run away. The best I could do as her BFF (a term not used back in the day) was to help her.

We spent weeks (probably days, actually) sweeping off some old linoleum covered floor that was the only remnant of a shed on the back of her father’s property. We dug up fern roots that we’d learned were edible in science class if you peeled all the black stuff off. They tasted like popcorn or nuts when we tried them out, and we stored them in baggies to keep them clean when we stuffed them under the floorboards.

With everything ready, she declared the date: our mutual birthday. Mid summer. She should be able to have good weather till she got where she was going.

The last bit was a bit fuzzy. All she knew was she was going to sleep at the old floor overnight and take off in the morning and head out–somewhere.

I was afraid for her, but if anyone could do it, she could. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to leave–heck, it could be just the spirit of adventure–but I knew right then she would make it.

Come supper time of my birthday I hadn’t heard a word from her all day. I blew out my birthday cake candles and spared a thought for the slice I would have liked to offer her, but she was miles away by then. Gone.

I sat on my front step and stared at her house. I was poised to expect the phone to ring, for her mom to demand I tell her where she was, and I agonized over what I would say. I couldn’t tell the truth; I’d promised to keep the secret.

It was lonely sitting there. I remember that. That was the first time I realized I was never going to see her again. The first time I realized that I would never want to be away from my own family that way. Despite 3 boys that picked on me, they would also do worse to anyone else who dared do the same. My mom and dad gave me as many hugs and kisses as they could fit in a day.

I didn’t have things, but I had family.

And that was the most important thing.

I ached for her that she was leaving hers behind.

All this I mulled over as I stared across the road at her yellow house, the VHF aerial tower in her dad’s backyard, the paved driveway.

Then I saw her.

She was ambling down that drive and across the road, not looking up, not saying anything, just moving up to my spot on the step, sitting down next to me.

“What happened?” I asked, both terrified she’d gotten caught and thrilled to see her.

She shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“The popcorn rotted.”

She said it by way of explanation, but there was something else trilling beneath the admission, something that had us both sitting silent.

We both sat there saying nothing after that, just stared out at her backyard where we’d had so much fun. Both of us thinking, no doubt, about all the things that as children we were beginning to realize: that family has a connection to us that runs deep into our cores.

And that there’s really no place like home .

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Olivia has her own secrets that both make her run away and pull her back home. Find out what they are in Secret Language of Crows. Still not sure if you’ll like it? Baxter Claire wrote a review for it on her blog.

Secret Language of Crows by Thea Atkinson

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Plus: I have a short story on Smashwords or Feedbooks that is always free. If you’re unsure whether you’ll like my writing, I encourage you to sample “Crows” from the purchase site, or just pick up God in the Machine from:

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10 Comments
by Thea Atkinson on August 6, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Thea Atkinson on August 6, 2011

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/runaways-and-fiction/

Is there a secret behind the story?

by Thea Atkinson

I grew up in a house with 3 brothers: one who put snakes in my boots; one who stole the money from my piggybanks: all of them, even the one I hid behind my closet door; and one who continually tried to peel my fingernails from the nailbeds.

I love each one of them, and all for those same reasons mentioned.

My brothers, like many brothers the world over, tormented the living daylights out of me, their only sister. They made me play goalie in the winter so often I never learned to skate. They forced me to run bases when I didn’t want to by firing an orange hockey ball at me until I darted around at their bidding afraid of the sting those balls delivered. Those brothers of mine threw ski poles at me, hit me over the head with a glass liquor bottle ala cartoon barfights, they Indian burned my arms absolutely raw.

And they would absolutely all die for me, each one–or at the very least beat the snot out of a bully.

So when one of them began to suffer the torments of addiction and relapse, it was inevitable that it would affect me to my core. We in the family all held our collective breaths, working at loving the person and not the behaviour. We went through all of the sickness of enabling and co-dependency and all those other terribly guilt-ridden symptoms of being the healthy family members of a very sick person.

It was this particular brother who I’ve seen give away his last bit of money to someone who needed it. I’ve seen him sit with my months’ old daughter for hours trying to calm her during a colick spell. He tells a joke like noboby’s business and if you’re perched awkwardly at at party with no one to talk to, he is the one who will spend his time with you and pull you into the crowd.

He genuinely likes people: a strange thing in my family of introverts. I think people get this about him and they respond. He has never lost that, even when he was struggling with the worst of his crisis.

It wasn’t until he started coming through the tunnel that I was able to breathe again–and breathing for me meant writing.

Secret language of Crows doesn’t sell well–it’s my fault, really. It’s so close to my heart that I don’t market it much–if at all. It doesn’t detail my brother or my family’s crisis, (That would be highly disrespectful of the people I hold most dear) but it does explore my own sense of helplessness and guilt in ways that you can only do in fiction.

Metaphorically, it lets me beat myself up and come out clean on the other end.

There’s a lot of symbolism in there that may only mean something to me, as it’s an intensely personal novel, but I think you may just find your own intimacy in there. You might transpose your own personal truth–isn’t that what symbolism does, after all?

You see, in my own way, I died for this brother–or rather, I took on the bully for him.

And I’m quite satisfied for both our sakes that it’s not coming back.

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Thea is the author of several novels that she considers left of mainstream. You can find her on Smashwords, BN, Kobo, Sony, Apple

Anomaly by Thea Atkinson
Secret Language of Crows by Thea Atkinson

Purchase on Amazon

If you’re interested in seeing the final evolution of a journey to forgiveness, you can click over to any of the places it’s for sale: The two biggest are:

Amazon.com

Amazon.UK

Amazon. De

Barnes and Noble

.

33 Comments
by Thea Atkinson on July 17, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Thea Atkinson on July 17, 2011

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/secret-lives-of-brothers-and-sisters/

What is it about me and Jodi Picoult?

I’m No Jodi Picoult and I’m OK with That

by: Thea Atkinson

I have a friend who keeps asking me to write a book for her. Let’s call her Alicia. Alicia keeps saying things to me like, “Write me a romance, Thea. Write a good relationship book with lots of romance. Write me a good love story.”

I keep having to answer her back in ways she doesn’t want to hear. I keep saying things like, “That’s not the style I write; I don’t have a romantic bone in my body. I don’t even remember my own wedding anniversary.”

She’s persistent. It’s one of the things I like about her. So a few years ago, while I was bemoaning the fact that my agent hadn’t found a publisher who wanted to take a chance on a new literary writer, she piped up again: “You need to write a romance. A good story like Jodi Picoult.”

I’m not sure what genre she thinks Jodi Picoult writes in; heck, I thought it was chicklit with a romantic slant myself. I wasn’t so sure I could pull a Jodi tale out of the li’l twisted muse who visits me off and on.

Still, I told her I would try a short story first, see if I could do it before investing the many months it took to write a novel. I was excited. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could write something that people all over the world would want to read; no, would want to PAY for.

I settled down to write, then filled my mind with Alicia’s encouraging words: “You’re a good writer, Thea. Surely you can write a love story.”

I could. Of course, I could.

Imagine my discomfort a few days later when I had to admit to Alicia of the path that this little “romance” actually took. There I was, sipping tea, feeling sheepish as I confessed that the couple in the story were both octogenarians and that he accidentally broke a few of her bones while being romantic. Worse yet, that she ended up dying during the encounter of a heart attack. I titled it “Like Breaking Crystal.” I loved it. I was proud of it. It focused on all the psychological things I loved about fiction. I thought the characters were flawed, but human; sensitive, but also a little bit selfish. Ah. Just the ticket.

Alicia did not share my enthusiasm.

I think she might have blinked once or twice the way they do in cartoons when they’ve experienced a major shock. I think I might have shrugged comically, helplessly.

OK. I thought, so I’m no Jodi Picoult. I did try, after all. As much as I might like to believe that I could write a mass appeal novel and sell multiple copies, enough to buy me a new laptop, a brand-new thesaurus, and maybe a little trip to Petra, I have had to make my peace with the fact that I write dark literary fiction: a genre that by some descriptions is: that which does not sell.

Then imagine my surprise further when I, galled by my failure to find a market with my agent, started to research exactly what genre Ms. Picoult wrote in: Not chicklit romance, like I originally thought. (Sue me, I’ve not actually READ a Jodi Picoult novel….I thought it was chicklit, remember? And I like, well, edgier stuff than chicklit provides.)

Psychological thriller, it was labeled. I tasted the genre on my tongue. Sounded about right for me, too, I figured. I immediately put the novel she’d written (Sing Me Home) that most closely resembled my own, (Anomaly) onto my TBR to see if we do indeed write in the same vein. Until then, I’m content to call myself a psychological thriller author.

Purchase

Anomaly has 9 4& 5 star reviews on Amazon

Every now and then, Alicia still brings the subject up. She still persists, God bless her. She says I’m capable of writing the kind of story she loves to read and I feel so humbled every time she tries to support the writer in me by believing in me.

Now, I just remind her that the tale will end up in some very strange places. It will travel through some dark and brutal roads but end up with some wonderful sense of peace. It won’t have mass appeal, it won’t sell a million copies, but despite the fact that I can’t write romance, it will be an honest-to-goodness Thea made story.

And then I ask her if she’s ready to read that.

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If you liked this post, please do share. If you tweet it with the hashtag #theagimmesome I will enter you into a random draw to win a Thea ebook. The prize changes each week.

There’s always a free sample of Anomaly posted on Goodreads for those who want to check it out without throwing away 3 bucks. AND: on Amazon, all you have to do is click LOOK INSIDE for the freebie sample.

 

18 Comments
by Thea Atkinson on June 23, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Thea Atkinson on June 23, 2011

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/i-blog-about-jodipicoult-today-in-genre-exploration-mywana-amwriting/

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