Votes, Love and War

My new novel, Votes, Love and War, will be published later in 2019.  It's a novel about the women's suffrage movement in Manitoba and the impact of the First World War upon the enfranchisement of women and other progressive causes.  In this novel, as in all historical novels, fictional characters mingle with real people. Lillian Beynon Thomas and Francis Marion Beynon were very real leaders in the Votes for Women campaign in Manitoba, and were part of a progressive circle that included Fred and Winona Dixon, J.S. Woodsworth, A. Vernon Thomas, and many more.  The Beynons were sisters, both former teachers who became journalists and were well known throughout the Canadian west on account of the womens' pages they edited.  Thanks in part to their efforts, Manitoba was the first province of Canada to enfranchise women  - in 1916.

When my fictional narrator/protagonist, eighteen year old Charlotte Tyler, left her rural home in 1913 to find work in Winnipeg, she dreamed of meeting the Beynon sisters. Under their wings, she participated in the suffrage movement and got to know other progressive people. Then in 1914, Canada went to war against Germany, and over the next four years, many hopes and dreams were shattered.  Votes, Love and War were the primary concerns of Charlotte and her friends "Lily Kate" Thomas and "Francie" Beynon in the teens of the last century.

Tamaracks Celebration

Last Sunday (June 2, 2019) There was a celebration of the anthology, Tamaracks, at Pressed, a cafe on Gladstone Avenue here in Ottawa.  Eight Ottawa area poets, along with the editor of the anthology, James Deahl and Norma West Linder, read their poems in Tamaracks and some of their other work.  I was honoured to be among the Ottawa poets: Sylvia Adams, Frances Boyle, Mary Lee Bragg, Doris Fiszer, Maureen Korp, Blaine Marchand and Colin Morton.