Guest Author - Jane Urquhart

Jane Urquhart

Hardcover: 256 pagesPublisher: MacLehose Press (5 Jan 2012)ISBN-13: 978-0857051240

Today, I have the honour and pleasure of featuring Guest Author, Jane Urquhart

I asked Jane to talk to us about how she came to write her latest novel, Sanctuary Line

I followed many different routes to “Sanctuary Line.” Although Liz, the protagonist, would have been a decade younger than me when she was summering on the shores of Lake Erie, I nevertheless fully recalled my own summers on the shores of a similar great lake and brought into the book the now vanished agricultural world that surrounded that distant time. Added to this was a desire to investigate the whole notion of migration, especially as it applies to the fragile monarch butterflies Liz works with, but also, and significantly, as it is experienced by seasonal migrant workers --- such as the Mexican farm labourers in my book --- and by North American families, almost all of whom know their origins to be elsewhere.

Also, the knowledge that, in recent years in the Middle East, North American women have been in active combat, intrigued me. Liz’s cousin Mandy, an Officer and military strategist was the result of my looking more carefully at that. I am fortunate in that I have received an Honorary Doctorate from, and have presented lectures at Canada’s Royal Military College and have met, therefore, some of the brilliant young officers who have gone into combat, and I was amazed and moved by their interest in literature. Mandy’s love of poetry was no doubt inspired by my visits to the College.

 Finally, I have been puzzled for some time about the effect of the telling of tales and the creation of family mythologies on the goals and expectations of the members of a specific family, particularly when those mythologies are passed on and in some cases  created by a charismatic and powerful individual .The Irish sections of the book were created to examine this tale-telling.

But, perhaps, the real driving force behind the writing of Sanctuary Line was my own awareness of the permanence of change; how the world we think we know in childhood alters and then disappears before our eyes as we mature, partly because of physical change, and partly because we begin to understand that that world was never really as solid and comforting as we thought it was.

I would like to thank Jane for taking time from her busy schedule to talk to us about her writing


DizzyC