I will speaker phone my way to any North American book club meeting going. By all means, shoot me an e-mail if you’re interested. It’s feasible.
I’m game.
The Catch

What was I trying to achieve with The Catch? The same thing I’m always trying to accomplish, I suppose, which is to write about someone both particular and emblematic. In Minnie, I think I created someone who sincerely loves being single. Many of us do, although that’s rarely conveyed in pop culture or, I suspect, the self-help aisles. In any case, not conveyed the way I want to – with a hell of a lot of believability.

SWTT Cover

I better tell the story of December 28th, 2003, because that’s when the tale that became The Catch got its start. My cousin, S-1, and her husband, L, have a beautiful seaside property in Guernsey Cove, PEI, just outside the fishing village of Murray Harbour, where L grew up. Since they work in Boston they’re not home as often as any of us would like. But they’re always back at X-mas time. The morning of the December 28, 2003, S-1 and L bumped into an old school friend of L’s (at the liquor store if you must know, stocking up on Gosling’s Bermuda Black rum, because not only did L work in Bermuda for several years but my PEI ancestors bought their land from the Goslings back in the late 1700’s before the wise Goslings decamped for somewhere with palm trees instead of black flies). The friend, J, and his wife, S-2, were promptly invited out to Guernsey Cove that evening. For one thing, S-1’s cousin in from Toronto, i.e. me, was scheduled to make an appearance. Plus D, another school buddy of L’s and J’s, now a licensed lobster fisherman.

The recipe for a Dark & Stormy? Ginger beer and Goslings on ice with a lime wedge – lather, rinse, repeat. I had a bunch of them. Enough to go on and on to J and S-2 about how they had to hire L to design their new house (which they did, and he did, and it’s a beauty). The thing that struck me most that night was the immense respect L and J betrayed for fisherman D. L is an architect at a prestigious American firm. J is a partner at a big law practice. But D was “the man” in that the man way. Many jokes were cracked about D’s superior power, both muscular and financial.

Well, I just had to go over to the man’s house that night to check out his renovations. D is too much of a gentleman to report this but I danced to Steve Miller Band on his new kitchen island, then crashed on his couch with my face shoved in Paris 1919. “Holy crap, the guy’s a genius to boot,” I thought when I came to. (Few in my cohort voluntarily read history.) Turns out the formidable text was a Christmas gift and D only got a couple of chapters in. But it got me thinking about how uncomprehending most urbanites are of rural sophistication.

Another fateful thing happened on the night of 28/12/3: S-1 and L invited me to spend the following summer at Guernsey Cove writing my heart out. Which I did, from June to October 2004 – working on the draft of Six Weeks to Toxic that sold to my first editor. I also began imagining a fisherman of great acumen and moral beauty, for whom a city woman would eventfully tumble. The rest is my history. I hope you partake.

You can purchase The Catch at: Amazon, Indigo (Canada), McNally Robinson.

Click the cover below to find out more about my first book,
Six Weeks To Toxic.