NEWS RELEASE
CREATIVE AGING BOOKS AND IDEAS
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Hands up for those who have thought about — dreamt about — leaving the traffic-jammed, people-crushing, cheek-to-jowl City of Toronto, or any other city for that matter, and heading north to Neverland.
Meet Mary Lawson, small-town northern Ontario girl, and author of the buzz-making book, A Town Called Solace.
Lawson, who was 55 years of age when her debut novel, Crow Lake, was published, is a distant relative of the beloved Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. Set in a fictional community in northern Ontario (Lawson was born in southwestern Ontario and now lives in Britain), Crow Lake won the Books in Canada First Novel Award (now the Amazon.com First Novel Award). CBC Radio listeners chose Crow Lake as one of the top 40 essential Canadian novels of the decade.
Lawson left her small-town Ontario home in 1968, when she was 19 years old, in order to travel to London, England. Within a short period of time, she had landed a research job in the psychology field, met a man and was married. The stage was set, for once Lawson had children and became a stay-at-home mom, she decided to try her hand at writing — a stellar conclusion that several years later vaulted the author to the New York Times Best Seller list.
When Lawson first started, she was writing articles for a series of women’s magazines. However, along the way she penned a short story, which was set in a mythical northern Ontario town in the 1940s, a time frame consistent with the author’s childhood. While her then-editor told Lawson that her story was not the kind of content the magazine published, she did tell her that she had the beginnings of a novel. The editor also told Lawson that “when she wrote about Canada and northern Ontario towns, her writing went to a whole other level completely.”
This short-story-turned-novel became Lawson’s first book, Crow Lake, which was chosen as a Book of the Year by the New York Times. Two more books followed: The Other Side of the Bridge and Road Ends.
Lawson’s strategy of setting her novels in northern Ontario towns is pragmatic; it gives her the opportunity to go back, both in a physical sense as well as a mindful sense, to the landscape of her childhood.
“I loved writing that first story, Crow Lake, because it allowed me to go back home in my mind. Also, I knew what I was talking about — knew what the circumstances were like up there at that time,” Lawson says. “It was turned down many times over a four-year span, but when it finally landed with a publisher there was a bidding war and it was translated into 28 languages. I was quite taken aback. I thought the story would (mostly) resonate with people who are familiar with the north, but the novel was about a family, and everybody has a family regardless of their closeness or distance.”
Read Cece Scott’s full interview with Mary Lawson and register for Creative Aging Books and Ideas, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2 p.m. event here.
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