There are four events left on this year's STARFest schedule, starting with today's double bill event with P.S. Duffy and Jennifer Robson.
Peter Bailey, the library's director, has enjoyed all of the authors thus far but has a special interest in this one.
"I'm a history grad so I'm really interested in Saturday's event."
Both Duffy and Robson have their first novels now out and both focus on the First World War as the time period.
P.S. Duffy: Charting the course
P.S. Duffy has indeed had a storied life. She was born in China in the 1940s but grew up on Canada's East Coast in Nova Scotia where her ancestors settled in the 1750s.
"I knew that if I ever had the courage to write a novel, I would set it in Nova Scotia because I have very close ties there. I would say that a big piece of my heart definitely is in Nova Scotia. When I first got there at age 10, I just felt like I had been there before. It was a very powerful feeling."
She was still a child when she was bitten by the bug to write, although at the time there were pirate stories on her brain. "I outgrew that idea," she laughed.
While she has spent most of her literary career writing on fairly high-minded non-fiction material (to wit her memoir of her family's experiences during the Communist Revolution, her graduate-level academic textbook on right brain damage and her neuroscience articles for the Mayo Clinic), she has always kept a place for something fictional.
The Cartographer of No Man's Land is her début novel. Set in Mahone Bay during the First World War, it tells of a young man's coming of age while his father is off fighting on the Western Front. The separation between the two is not just one of distance but also psychology as the elder suffers the emotional traumas of battle and witnessing inhumanity.
The tale allowed her to exercise her honours undergraduate degree in history while still allowing her more creative freedom than she had ever experienced from her academic work. However, she said the level of research involved makes the processes very similar.
"It's totally based on inspiration and is a creative act that is very different from writing about science. It's far more satisfying because there's more of your heart and soul. Both types of writing require precision of language but the creative impulse – there's nothing better than when you get it right. When you feel like you've conveyed what you're trying to convey on the page and have moved a reader emotionally and affected them in some deeper way, not just intellectually."
Duffy makes her appearance alongside Jennifer Robson whose book Somewhere in France is also set during the same time period, something that she thinks will really engage the audience. Apart from that, the event will be hosted by Edmonton Journal writer Paula Simons.
"I'm really honoured that someone like her is conducting the interview," Duffy said, crediting Simons' maturity and experience. To celebrate writers is one thing but to celebrate readers is quite another. I think it'll be a terrific event."
Jennifer Robson: History is her story
Jennifer Robson, who also has a début novel set during the First World War, will join Duffy in her STARFest event tonight. Somewhere in France is a war story from a woman's perspective as it explores the challenges of balancing love and duty. The protagonist, Lady Elizabeth Neville-Ashford or Lilly for short, is a young woman trying to find her independence while maintaining a romance after she becomes a driver with the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.
She calls it a traditional romance novel "to a certain degree. What I would call it is historical fiction with a literary bent."
"First and foremost, it's the story of a woman. One of the many things that motivated me in writing the book is that there's lots of fiction about the First World War written from the perspective or point of view of the men, which is understandable. At the same time, there were women who were intimately involved with the war, not just on the homefront but also actually on the military side of things in these auxiliary units. Their voices were more or less silenced. I wanted to bring that aspect of the war to life."
It's had a strong reception so far, making the bestseller lists for the Globe and Mail and USA Today.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the author would write this story. "Yes, history is in my blood," she admitted. It seems that she has been surrounded both by history and by writers her whole life. She first learned about "The Great War" through stories told to her by her father, historian Stuart Robson, who taught First World War and Second World War history as well as a general "Plato to NATO" history at Trent University.
Her grandfather first worked as a sports reporter in Vancouver before becoming a journalist with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the First World War, later attending law school while her grandmother supported the family also as a journalist writing "for the women's pages."
"She remained a reporter for the rest of her working life. She interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt during the war, which I always thought was spine-tingling. She was a writer – a newspaper woman – down to her toes," Robson commented, admitting that she calls herself a history geek.
"It's embarrassing. My children are constantly mortified. I'm always finding ways to work history into the conversation. That's a reflection of my own childhood."
She credits her father for introducing her to the writings of Wilfred Owen, who was a well-known English soldier and poet of the time. His passion for the subject soon became her passion. Later on, she would become a guide at the Vimy Ridge Memorial, an experience that she calls immensely formative.
There's a sense of being duty bound, she claimed, to tell stories set in this period in order to bring history closer to the general public. She obtained a doctoral degree from Oxford, first working as a journalist herself at the Globe and Mail but working on this novel along the way.
"The interest – the passion – I had for history, specifically for the history of this period … it was always there. Now, I feel like I'm actually putting my doctorate to some good use!"
Somewhere in France was years in the making and more years in finding a publisher. A change in people's entertainment habits brought things like Downton Abbey more into the spotlight, and that helped to create a more amenable atmosphere to the novel. "Timing is everything," she admitted. To her, this also means that there's no time like the present. There are no more surviving soldiers of that First World War and that makes these stories all the more important.
"The direct link is gone. It falls to the surviving relatives and historians, novelists, journalists … people who feel moved to keep the memory of these people alive. One way of getting across these stories is through fiction. You tell an engaging enough story then people's interests will be caught by that and maybe they'll start doing some [non-fiction] reading on their own and start learning about the war. It's history geeks like me who are holding the torch. It's nothing less than I would say an honour to try and keep the memory of this generation alive for our children and the generations to come."
She is looking forward to her appearance at today's event. She loves connecting with readers even through Twitter and especially Facebook, the two social media platforms that she had to be dragged to "kicking and screaming." Everywhere she goes, Robson visits war memorials and will make a special stop at St. Albert's cenotaph. She intends to bring up local involvement in the old wars and might even visit the current exhibits at the Musée Héritage Museum that both focus on aspects of the First World War.
