To all those who have been lost and then found the islands of the people.
That’s the dedication I chose for my debut novel, A Room in the Forest. It’s about a young woman who is lost. Not in the sense of someone losing their way home. Lily has no idea which way she wants to go with her life. She leaves home with not much more of a goal than spending time among the trees. From there she stumbles onto a path.
Haida Gwaii is that place that she didn’t know she needed to go to, but once she arrived she didn’t know how she could have thought of going anywhere else.
I remember the first time I went to the islands. My trajectory didn’t follow the exact path of Lily’s, but I did leave my Alberta hometown (Calgary is a little bigger than Lily’s Frontier) with no real sense of where I wanted to go. Anywhere but the place I grew up. Stops in Vancouver and then Smithers, led me to a cabin on North Beach for a spell. One night the ocean puked its magic onto the beach after a storm and my guts never felt the same again. I couldn’t imagine not returning.
So I did. And stayed for 10 years. Leaving again was gut wrenching, but that’s the way the path takes us sometimes. Some part of me is still there. The part that wrote this book.
I also want to acknowledge the passing of a woman who was such a big part of my early days in Smithers and Haida Gwaii. Vesna (Kontic) Young. You were stunning. RIP.
