KILLER WOMEN IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY

This weekend I'm pleased to welcome my good friend Janet Kellough as our special Type M guest.  Janet is the author of The Thaddeus Lewis Mystery Series. The fifth book in the series, Wishful Seeing was short-listed for the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award. The sixth “Thaddeus” book, The Heart Balm Tort was released in July. To learn more about her books, check out her website.

She's a native-born daughter of Prince Edward County, Ontario, where the Thaddeus Lewis books are set, and she's here now to tell us about an exciting new venture she and Vicki Delany are spearheading. 

If you’re a female writer, you’ve probably read the articles and participated in the discussions – about how women’s books aren’t taken as seriously or reviewed as often as male-authored books; about how women are more often published in paperback than in hardcover, which impacts their incomes; about how less frequently they are featured at literary festivals; and how so many female authors have tried to get around the barriers by disguising their pennames that now any author who uses initials is automatically assumed to be female.

I’m a female writer. I get as ticked off by this stuff as anybody else. But anyone who knows me knows that I’m always looking for solutions. What if, I thought, we just go ahead and do our own thing? What if we start a festival that showcases Canadian women crime writers? There’s a niche available – both the Bloody Words Conference and the Scene of the Crime Festival have disappeared, leaving a void that is felt by all crime writers. I could do this. After all, I have a background in small concert production, and writers have got to be easier to herd than fiddlers, don’t they? (We’ll see.) I could do it on my home turf – Prince Edward County Ontario., the country’s newest tourist mecca.

Wisely or not, fellow author Vicki Delany agreed with me, as did the owner of The County’s independent bookstore Books & Co., graphic designer Christine Renaud and foodie Theresa Durning. Macaulay Heritage Park and Picton Library offered their cooperation. And two local wineries, The Grange and Black Prince came aboard as sponsors. The Women Killing It Crime Writers’ Festival was experiencing a remarkably easy birth.

And the writers we contacted were unbelievably enthusiastic and supportive. New York Times bestseller Susanna Kearsley said yes. So did Maureen Jennings of Murdoch Mystery fame. Canadian bestselling authors Barbara Fradkin and R.J. Harlick are coming. Bony Blithe winner Elizabeth J. Duncan will be on hand, as will Melodie Campbell and Nazneen Sheikh. Local author Robin Timmerman is featured. And Mary Jane Maffini, aka Victoria Abbott, agreed not only to participate, but to hold a Saturday morning (Sept. 2) workshop at the library.

And this won’t be some stodgy old literary festival. We’re talking women here. There will be refreshments – of both the sticky and liquid variety. And fun, starting with Friday night (Sept. 1) at The Mysterious Affair “table-hopping” event, where each author has five minutes to tell a table of readers all about her book; Saturday afternoon’s Murder at the Vicarage, an elegant Victorian tea in an historic home featuring the writers of lighter fare (hats and gloves optional); and Saturday evening’s Appointment with Death (and Dessert) with the authors of grittier stories, who will discuss life and death and sex and other fun stuff. We aim to raise the roof.

Will the festival be successful? I’m pretty confident that it will. Will male readers come? Because we need their support too. I hope so. Will it turn into an annual event? Chances are good. Because we’re women. And we know how to kill it.

The Women Killing It Crime Writers’ Festival in Prince Edward County runs September 1^st & 2^nd in Picton, Ontario. For schedule and ticket info visit our Facebook page or go straight to the WKI page at Eventbrite.ca

THE KNOW-IT-ALL WRITER

I am delighted to invite my good friend Janet Kellough to blog for us this week. Now that I am also living in Prince Edward County, I am finding myself drawn into the character and the history of the area through Janet's enthusiasm. And her darn good books. (Who knows when you need to trap a muskrat.)

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The old adage in the world of writing is “write what you know”. I have heard this amended (probably on this blog) to “write what you’d like to know”. [Editor: That might have been me. VD]

It’s good advice and I have done both. I started out as a performance storyteller, spinning tales drawn from the lore of Prince Edward County, Ontario, where I grew up, and where my family has lived for generations. It was, and remains, a rich source of material. (Did you know that the Glenora Ferry was once hijacked and a 19^th century hangman bungled a double execution in Picton? The first was a prank; the second was grisly.) I have also written what I was anxious to find out about. The first novel in my historical series The Thaddeus Lewis Mysteries concerned a saddlebag preacher who stumbled across a serial killer. The bare bones of the story was right there in the preacher’s autobiography, waiting for me to pluck it out, but I was eager to fill in authentic details and bring the story to life. I now know more about Methodist Church history in early Canada than I ever thought possible. (It was complicated, cantankerous and contentious.)

In continuing the series, I discovered a further amendment to the aforementioned writer’s advice: “Write what you never dreamed you’d want to know, but have stumbled across and found fascinating anyway.”

The first two novels in Thaddeus Lewis were set firmly in familiar territory – eastern Ontario in general and Prince Edward County in particular. I fudged the third one a bit - 47 Sorrows began with an old newspaper clipping I ran across that described a peculiar incident in Toronto in 1847 when a wagon overturned and spilled a coffin into the street. It burst open to reveal two corpses inside. Scandalous! And intriguing! This led me to articles about the tragedies experienced by the influx of sick and starving Irish flooding into Canada that year, and to the “fever sheds” that housed them. After all, where better to set a murder than smack dab in the middle of a group of people who are dying anyway? I placed the bulk of the story in Kingston, Ontario, a place I know, but there was an exciting chase that led to Toronto.

The next book, The Burying Ground, led me into completely unfamiliar geographic  territory. The story revolves around The Toronto Strangers’ Burying Ground, a potter’s field which in 1851 was at the corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. It was in the middle of nowhere back then. Honest. I spent hours poring over old maps. The harbour was different then, and the Don River hadn’t been straightened out yet. And the latest Thaddeus book Wishful Seeing takes place between Cobourg, Ontario and Rice Lake to the north. Oh wondrous intrigues of the early railway boom in Canada!  I knew nothing about it when I began, but now I understand why Cobourg has such an improbably spectacular town hall.

In the meantime, I took a dive into speculative fiction and found myself reading about genetics and the founder effect, as well as the differences between chimpanzees and bonobos. Right now I’m researching stories about sex in early Ontario. And I’m trying to find out what the Royal Shipyards in Deptford, England were like in the 1650s. I know how to trap a muskrat. I can make soap from scratch. I’m familiar with the diagnostic signs of typhoid fever.

I will admit that this kind of obsessive and far-ranging research might be most attractive to the sort of junkhead who watches Jeopardy and wins trivia contests (aka me) but it’s the thing that keeps me plunking words down on the page. Because I still don’t know what it is I want to know. And I may never find out, because I’ve discovered that I want to know everything. About everything. And being a writer gives me the perfect excuse to keep reading about it.