Research by Juliet Waldron

Researching—that’s a part of this writing activity that’s fascinating to me in the 60’s full Spockian sense. :)

However, research, particularly at this early stage, can also be the thing which brings your story to a screeching halt just about the time the characters are beginning to speak. This is frustrating when it happens,  but how can you create believable dialogue if you don’t fully understand the context—the who, what, where, when--within which these characters ought to be?

Once you start digging into what you don’t know, there’s a pause in writing. You’ve got to haul out a book, or go hunting around online—enter the jungle of clicking around and hope you don’t pick up some electronic disease during your  search for knowledge.

Only after you have satisfied that “need to know” can you get back to the story again, now, hopefully armed with some better understanding. You can only hope that those characters, just now taking ghostly shape, will successfully shrug on this new mantle, this new layer of detail, and begin to speak through you more clearly.

There’s always a sense, for me, when I start a historical novel, I’ve got to enter another reality, get inside that skin of a place, a period. For this story, I’m venturing out of the European world and trying to find the entrance into that of another Tribe, as well as the business of reaching back in time. The early 50’s coincides with my own childhood, and it is occurring to me that here’s small bit of time experience I share with my characters. Nevertheless, the distance between my “Stone House” childhood and that of Sascho and Yaotl of the NWT Tlicho is wide.

In other historical novels I’ve written, I’ve thought a lot about the context, the time, the place, the material culture, the tools and technology, surrounding my characters. As mentioned above, Fly Away Snow Goose has an extra dimension of difference for me, in that I’m challenged to enter a culture with which I’m really not familiar.

The Iroquois, whose world I tried to enter in the course of writing Genesee, were a much more settled people. The Athabascans of NWT in the early 1950’s--in all their divisions and tribes --are a people whose world remained migratory, much like the world of the last ice age. Many families still seasonally followed the animals who give them everything—food, clothing, shelter, and tools—the caribou.

To help me understand, I’m turning to ethnographic studies of the kind where the social scientist becomes first of all, an apprentice to his subjects. And in the course of doing this research, and trying to dig in emotionally, I’m sometimes brought up against my own culture’s prejudices and preconceptions.

By the 1950’s where this story is set, the lifeways of the people of this fragile land were in flux, due to government policies dictated by a colonizing culture which enforced its will in many ways. The residential schools, designed to “kill the Indian” in the child, were Canadian law. Increasing numbers of whites and their agents, powerful, faceless mining corporations, were entering their land, violating treaty rights, taking possession, and leaving pollution behind. These unfamiliar entities claimed to own the ancient places and pathways of the De’ that the Tlicho and their neighbors had walked for the last 10,000 years.  It’s against the background of these upheavals that this story will be told.

For these brave children, it’s about resistance, about language and belief, but even more, it’s a way of seeing the world—not as “mine” or “yours”—but as a web of interdependent relationships. I could stumble around forever trying to get this right, but instead I’ll quote Chief Seattle, Leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish 1st Nations.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together; all things connect.”

Historical non-fiction writing by Ron Crouch

Embarking on this Brides of Canada historical novel with Kathy Fischer-Brown, has been a completely new adventure for me as a writer. All my previous novels, though based on some aspects of reality, have all been works of fiction. This project has required an enormous amount of time in research and countless hours of reading as well as time well spent in the library.


Probably, like most immigrants to Canada, I was very ignorant about the history of North America. Having been born and raised in England, the history lessons, as I recall began with the Stone Age, then the Saxons and the Celts, the Romans and of course the Battle of Hasting in 1066 when the Normans invaded from France under William the Conqueror … and as they say, the rest is history. I don’t have any clear recollection about North American history, I’m sure the subject was mentioned. I was brought up on Rule Britannia and Briton’s never, never, never shall be slaves. (Though the government at the time didn’t have a problem making citizens of other countries, slaves). No mention of what was done to the aboriginal peoples of not only North America, but to those around the world, even as far away as Australia.

Becoming involved in this project has been a complete eye opener for me. I had no idea how much influence the Hudson’s Bay Company had on the formation of Canada, having read one of Peter Newman’s books on the subject. Unbelievable that Canada was built on the fur trade, notably the humble beaver. What struck me the most was the resilience of the people, the hardships and suffering, the cruelty that they endured, both the people of the First Nations and the immigrants. The thought that people travelled thousands of miles across Canada in all weathers, enduring the brutality of long winters, the mosquitoes and blackflies in spring and summer and all manner of biting, stinging insects. As I researched North American history, it struck me how close Canada was to becoming part of the United States or the other way around.

I know firsthand how unforgiving the seas can be. To have boarded a sailing ship back in the late 1700’s, bound from England to North America, was to risk life before you even got there, assuming you got there. Imagine walking down the gangplank onto another continent back then. Unless you were one of the landed gentry, establishing a new life in North America would have been unbelievably challenging.

My grandfather told me an interesting story. I guess it would have occurred back in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. His mother-in-law, a young woman at the time, decided to board a ship from England bound for the United States. Her husband had already set out to make a new life for them over there. They missed each other terribly. It was to be a surprise. When she finally landed in the U.S. she learned her husband had taken another ship back to England to surprise her. Apparently the two ships must have passed each other somewhere in mid Atlantic, these two lonely souls unaware their sweetheart was aboard the other ship.

You know, you don’t have to be that old to recall childhood events, that to the so-called millennials, you’d have to have been at least a hundred years old, if not older to remember such things. I’m in my sixties, but can still recall as a small boy in England, having our milk being delivered to the house in glass bottles by horse and cart. To me, it’s incredible how far technology has brought us in such a relatively short space of time and where it is all going to lead us.

Thanks to Brides of Canada, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about my new country.

If you are interested in learning more about the Canadian Fur Trade and the Hudson Bay Company, check out this website from Canada Geographic.

The Challenge of Writing Historical Fiction

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Writing a historical or non-fiction book can be something of a challenge as it is essential to get the facts right. There is nothing worse than reading something in either genre that you know is wrong. Not only does it make you shake your head, but in my case often is the cause of me casting that book aside. If the author didn’t fully invest him-or-herself in the book why, as the reader, should I?

I tend to be something of a nit-picker. I know this because I am a Virgo but have to say that I am more mellow now I’m older and have learned to be kinder—not only to other authors—but also to myself. However, getting historical facts right is not always easy to do without a lot of research and asking people who are experts for help.

Over the years I have found that librarians, historians, and other authors have been flattered to have their opinions sought and are usually very helpful. I remember days spent in the bowels of a library, either trolling the shelves or the stacks, for that nugget of information that was on the edge of my cognizance but remained elusive. Now there is Google and I can surf the net to my heart’s content without ever having to leave the house.

Google’s drawback for me is that it is a bit like going down the rabbit hole. One thing leads to another and unless I am very strict with myself it’s easy for me to be drawn off-topic. Pages get bookmarked, some get printed, all get noted to some degree if it is the information for which I’ve been looking. For my second Regency book, His Ocean Vixen, I needed information about the West India docks in London. I found some fascinating material, including some old dock plans and it all added that spice of real life to my text.

My last book, Brides of Banff Springs, is set in 1935 and although a more recent historical period than my Regency books, still required a great deal of research both in reading and talking to people. Learning about a slower but no less stressful part of history, tends to put my life into perspective and I appreciate all the more the conveniences I have today.

How people lived, what they ate, what they wore, where they shopped and where the goods they bought came from, never fail to fascinate me. Some details don’t make the pages of my book, but it’s all a learning curve and I never know what may come in useful at some point in one of my stories.

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