Launching a Book from the Harbour of Mourning

If you follow this blog at all, you know it's been a time of great happiness and immense sorrow for me lately, as my first book was published in the same week my mother, the inimitable Ietje Dolman, passed away. My thanks to everyone who has expressed their congratulations and/or condolences to me in recent weeks. I hope many of you can make it to my launch for Lost Enough, at Ottawa's Black Squirrel Books Sunday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m., so I can thank you in person, and read for you, too.

As I slowly start to work on the first few items on the ambitious marketing plan list I made for the book when I thought I'd be much happier at this point, some things are beginning to falling into place. The more readings I line up, the more local bookstores (such as Ottawa's Stonewall Wilde's, and Perfect Books) that graciously and happily agree to carry Lost Enough, the more event listings that list my events (such as the stellar Ottawa resource, Bywords Calendar), and even the more publishers and writers retweet my shameless promotional tweets, the more I see that what will always be most valuable to me as a writer (not to mention as a reader) is the sense of community this life has already given me.

Barring my winning the long shot lottery of writing and becoming one of the true rarities of the Canadian book world--an author who can afford to write full-time--I will likely never get rich doing this. Much to my 84-year-old father's chagrin, I will likely never even be able to make enough net profit from my writing to buy more than an occasional bottle of cheap red wine and tub of frozen yogurts in which to drown my financial despair, or a few more books to keep me going.

Here, though, in this writing community, which stretches across all boundaries and borders, and introduces me to people I would never have otherwise met, living different lives with different insights, and all driven by the need to share, is the beauty of a writer's life: to connect. Writers are often a riddle, us introverts who also desperately want to share with others, to be known and to know. I'm starting to crawl back out from under the safety of my mourning blanket, and to look up from the stack of books I've been hiding with under here. Soon, I'll start to go back out into the world and start exploring again.

I've already learned how much support there is out there. As I continue to nudge my small book forth into the wild and scary world of reviewers and readers and sales, I know I already have one of the best things the writing world has to offer--a community of people searching for not just one truth, but all of them.


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Read a review of Lost Enough.

Ietje Dolman, 1932-2017

On Saturday, April 8, 2017, the most amazing and remarkable woman I know passed away. My mother, Jacomina ("Ietje") Dolman (nee Berends) died after a seven-month struggle with cancer of the esophagus. She was 84 years old.

The loss, to me and to our entire family, is overwhelming, and I cannot imagine how someone who was always so vibrantly fully alive could now be gone.

Here is a picture of her taken at her dance class graduation. She was eighteen and would, within hours, meet her future husband, Gerrit, who would be her love to the end some 66 years later.

Our mom's life was hard, at times brutally so: she grew up in the Netherlands through the horrors of WWII, and eventually emigrated in her early 20s with two small children to a country where she didn't speak the language, knew no one and had few rights. She served as free labour on the first farms to hire my father in Canada, as a condition of their agreement to hire him. And she would go on to fight and eventually win her battle with alcoholism, dying 28 years sober, something for which I will always be incredibly proud of her for.

In her retirement, Ietje turned her Protestent work ethic towards sharing her craft skills in every way she could think of to help others, including knitting and crocheting countless shawls and hoods for the homeless, and making dolls for orphaned children in Africa. She was also a brilliant storyteller, and, had her life gone differently, I have no doubt she would have been a better writer than I can ever hope to be.

I could list so much more about her here, but it's her humour and her perseverance that will inspire me the rest of my life. She was a survivor. I will miss you forever, Ietje.

It's here! It's here! My first book day!

Yay! It's book day for me, as Lost Enough: A collection of short stories is released by Morning Rain Publishing.

I admit I'm more than a bit excited. I even used exclamation marks in the heading above, so obviously I'm plotzing to the point that my inner editor has been knocked out cold. But, a first collection only comes out once, after all. (I know there's a joke in there about my being bisexual and, unlike my book, having to come out come out over and over again, but I'm in too good a mood today to make it here.)

If you'd like to buy a copy, you can order e- or print versions through Amazon or Chapters/Indigo (I noticed chapters.ca didn't have button to purchase the print edition yet, but it should be there soon). Or, you can (nudge, nudge) support your favourite independent bookstore by asking them to order it for you.

Here in Ottawa, Black Squirrel Books and Perfect Books will also soon be carrying copies, and, if you're around Ottawa the evening of Sunday, April 30, I'd love to see you at the Squirrel for the official launch, where you can get yourself a signed copy and hear me read a bit from the book.

Finally, if it's beyond your means, I encourage you to order it (and any other books by authors you'd like to read) through your local library.

I'm going to go back to my plotzing now...