Appreciative of independent community bookstores that support independent local authors! Thank you, Salt Spring Books

 I'm so pleased that The Road to Keringet is one of three  finalists for a creative non-fiction award for independent authors.  And it's good news that self-published authors have been included in a literary festival. Appreciation to the Whistler Writers Festival for hosting this contest and bringing visibility to independently published work. Here's a little bit about the award, from the Whistler Writers Festival website:

This year’s Whistler Writers Festival, October 13–16, will include the presentation of the inaugural Independent Book Awards. The Whistler Independent Book Awards will be open to Canadian authors or permanent residents who have independently published a book or books in the last five years. There will be a single winner, with two additional finalists, in each of four categories: fiction, non-fiction, crime fiction and poetry.

The shortlist will be selected by the Canadian Authors Association (Vancouver) and the three finalists in each category will be independently judged by a panel including a respected Canadian author or poet and an appointee of the Whistler Writing Society. Judging the Fiction category will be author and translator Genni Gunn, whose most recent novel, Solitaria, was nominated for the 2011 Giller Prize. JJ Lee, whose debut book, The Measure of a Man, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, will judge the Non-Fiction category. Crime novelist, journalist and publisher Linda L. Richards will judge the Crime Fiction category, while former Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau will judge the Poetry category.

Jointly produced by the Whistler Writing Society and Vivalogue Publishing, the Whistler Independent Book Awards mark the evolution of independent publishing. While the industry has grown dramatically in the last decade, there have been no juried Canadian awards recognizing exceptional quality in these titles—until now. “These awards reflect our ongoing commitment to inclusiveness,” said festival organizer Stella Harvey. “We are proud to welcome accomplished independent authors to the Festival and to celebrate their work.”

Review

The Road to Keringet as reviewed by Tom Sandborn in the Vancouver Sun and reprinted in the Victoria Times Colonist.

 We would all like to have memories of our lives survive past our death, I suppose, and one of the places that can happen is in the memories of our family and friends. For a few, the remembered stories go public in the form of printed memoirs and autobiography. This is not always good news for readers or other family members. But a new book by Maggie Ziegler, a BC psychotherapist, is an outstanding and luminous example of what can be accomplished when memory and family reminiscence are served by shapely prose and a serene, compassionate retrospective view. 

 “When I am gone I want you to write everything down very quickly. Before you forget,” Zeigler’s mother Mary said to her as she began a painful descent into dementia and her eventual death. “Write down what I’m saying.”

The daughter’s 2012 book, The Road to Keringet is the result of that end-of-life commission. It opens as the mother and daughter are struggling to come to terms with Mary’s illness and care needs as dementia erodes her memory and competence, and reflects back on the mixed joys and sorrows of the mother’s life, weaving together the family back story  (which includes Mary’s growing up working class in England and meeting and marrying her German Jewish husband Wolfgang in Africa during WWII) with a clear eyed and painfully honest portrait of a complex marriage that began in hope and romance, and broke apart in mid life bitterness.    

 The author, a BC-based psychotherapist who specializes in trauma intervention,  draws not only on notes from her last conversations with her mother  but also on the contents of innumerable boxes filled with diaries, journals, letters and newspaper and magazine clippings her mother had preserved from her quietly adventurous life in England, Kenya and Canada. Some of the clipped material and correspondence reflected Mary’s own modest success as a free lance writer, and the more personal material illuminated much that had been opaque until then for the daughter- the childhood sorrows that shaped her mother’s character, the nature of her parents’ attempts to sustain an unconventional open marriage during the conformist 1950s, the tensions and heartbreak that drove them apart as they wandered from Kenya to the UK and then to Canada,  and the central role that writing played in the mother’s life. It also led to a final tender and absolutely believable reconciliation between the author and her mother. Ziegler’s account of that moment of forgiveness and resolution at her mother’s deathbed is a magnificent set piece and worth the price of admission to the book in itself.

 In a publishing world that can often seem over-crowded with memoirs of family grief, a new book needs to do something remarkable to distinguish it from all the other books of clamorous, insistent memory on offer. Everyone has a story, and nearly everyone has complicated, often painful aspects to their memories of family life. An aspiring memoirist has to persuade the reader that she or he has something new to tell, and that the telling is done in graceful enough prose to make the time spent on the story worthwhile. 

      

The Road to Keringet more than meets that challenge. Maggie Ziegler’s tender and tough minded account of her parents’ marriage and early years is interwoven with a breathtakingly honest and unsparing account of what it was like for their grown children to face into the gathering darkness together with their mother. This aspect of The Road to Keringet will be of keen interest to the many Canadian families who are living through the torments that attend seeing loved ones eroded by the cruel tides of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

     

But whether or not our parents are suffering from dementia or not, all adult children face the task of coming to terms with our parents in all their fallible humanity and making a kind of peace with the rigors and sorrows of childhood. Perhaps informed by her work as a therapist, Ziegler writes beautifully on this topic. She is unsparing in her honesty as she chronicles the ebb and flow of her good will for her mother and the waves of sometimes agonizing childhood memories that Mary’s suffering evokes in her. She doesn’t edit out the moments of impatience or self regard that intrude on her time with her mother, or the guilt that tortures her when she is a continent away from the care home where Mary is enduring her last days.

Ziegler’s text is notable not only for its lucid and sometimes lyrical prose but for its principled refusal to fall into either of the twinned,  seductive temptations that preside over every family memoir- sentimentality on one hand and mean spirited “Mommie Dearest” style denunciation of parents and siblings on the other. The author has the courage to view the sometimes unlovely particulars of family life and the aging body directly and unflinchingly, and the prose skills that render what she observes in full and evocative detail. All is viewed with every wart visible, but illuminated by compassion and serenity.

Ziegler’s book, resonant with grace and compassion, will move and inform the reader. Highly recommended to parents and children, therapists and clients, those who cherish their families and those who find them sources of profound dismay. Readers would be well advised to travel the Road to Keringet.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes feedback and story or review suggestions at tos@infinet.net

    

      

readers comments

Some recent comments from readers…a pleasure to open my email and find messages like these.

Dear Maggie, What a great book! And a great story - love, romance, pain, sorrow, cultures coming together, war and its aftermath, oppression of several sorts, a picture of children growing and developing.  It certainly drew me; it creates a very real picture and sense of the people, the feelings, thoughts, context, background...  I always love it when there is a portrayal of the influence of the past in our present lives.  You did this so well. Your book is a huge gift to the world; anytime someone really opens up, it creates space for the rest of us.  Thank you for that. 

Dear Maggie, I'm so glad to have read ‘The Road to Keringet.’ It is a naked view of family - one that is incredibly challenging to articulate and I think you did it beautifully. I appreciated the depth of connection and honest revealing of truth. Congratulations.

Oh Maggie, what a great book. There are still tears in my eyes.  Such a moving story, told so well. So vivid, I'll be able to picture the places your mother lived for ever. I guess the tears are for the struggles of your mother's life and for the depth of your shared and rediscovered bond.  It's a very moving mother/daughter story. The book just sails along!  So moving!  So well written!  We should all have such motivated daughters.  

Dear Maggie, I devoured your book in just a few days.  I just finished it a few minutes ago.  I wanted to write you to tell you how much I liked it.  My cheeks are still wet with tears I shed when I read your description of the moments after your Mom died in the senior's home - the grace.

Dear Maggie, My heart ached for everybody in this book.  I marvelled at the sweep of time and history and place that permeates your family's story.  How wonderful life is that, as time passes, you can begin to see your parents for who they were as individuals, with hopes, dreams, quirks, and failings - but whole in their totality.  I think there must be healing in that, when you move beyond the hurts and baggage of a difficult upbringing.  There are nuggets of wisdom in this book that I marked as I read, and will go back to. 

Dear Maggie, I have been so moved by your extraordinary book, The Road to Keringet.  The language and the story are beautifully interwoven to tell of your mother's life and death, and the unfolding of your relationship to her. Nowhere did it devolve into sentimentality as it well could. What a labour of love and a tribute to your mother as well as to you. Thank you for writing it. I have been recommending it to many of my friends, especially people in the therapy world.

Vancouver book launch

Everyone is welcome!

Mother/Daughter Book Reading

Salt Spring Island Book Launch Event!
A special and unusual book reading on September 17 profiles recently published books by a mother and a daughter. Maggie Ziegler will read from The Road to Keringet, and her daughter, Caitlyn Vernon, will read from Nowhere Else on Earth: Standing Tall for the Great Bear Rainforest (published in 2011). Caitlyn will also offer a slide show and presentation on the Great Bear Rainforest.

The evening actually encompasses three generations of writing women, as Ziegler’s memoir is an innovative and compelling reconstruction of her mothers’ life. When her mother, a writer, began to lose her ability with words, she asked Ziegler to write her story, giving her a legacy of letters, diaries and published and unpublished writings. The book moves back and forth in time between the author’s voice and that of her mother, revealing her mothers’ life and also the complex relationship between mother and daughter.

The result, according to Salt Spring novelist Pearl Luke, is a ‘riveting read and the best book I’ve read this year.’

Luke comments that perhaps it is not unusual for a mother to ask her daughter to write her biography, “but when that mother is herself both an intriguing woman and a professional writer accustomed to documenting rich, sometimes shocking details, and the daughter is as compassionate and insightful as Maggie Ziegler, the resulting story is outstanding. This intelligent book records not only a mother's fascinating story, but a daughter's act of great love and devotion.”

While Ziegler’s book is on a broad canvas that spans three continents, almost a hundred years, and the social concerns of these times, Vernon focuses on one very special place, the Great Bear Rainforest.

Caitlyn Vernon is a campaigner with Sierra Club BC, and it was her love and concern for the future of the coast that inspired Nowhere Else on Earth. Combining her background in biology and environmental studies with her experience as an activist, she has written a timely and inspiring reminder that we need to stand up for our wild places before they are gone.

This book, written for young readers but popular with people of all ages, is full of stunning photographs, personal stories, ecological facts, the voices of First Nations who live on the coast, and ways to take action. Environmentalist and writer Ian McAllister writes that ‘this book should be required reading for all who celebrate the Earth’s natural diversity and its wild places.”

Nowhere Else on Earth has been nominated for numerous awards including the BC Book Prize. It won the 2012 Green Earth Book Honor Award, and is currently short-listed for the Lane Anderson Science Writing Award.

Join Maggie Ziegler and Caitlyn Vernon for what promises to be a stimulating and rewarding evening at Artspring on Monday, September 17 at 7pm. This event is sponsored by Salt Spring Books.

"A powerful, poignant and moving story'"

 

 “This original and captivating memoir reads like a good novel.”

“A high quality memoir with a strong narrative that kept me up most of the night."

“I agree with all the comments on the book cover, especially ‘compelling’ and ‘a work of love.’

That’s what readers are saying about The Road to Keringet. The book emerges from a promise made to my aging mother, a writer and diarist,  to continue to tell her story when a deepening mental confusion no longer allows her to put words into coherent sentences.  The process of imagining her life, through the journals, letters and manuscripts she leaves behind, while witnessing her decline leads to an exploration of our complex relationship and a transformative understanding.

You can find out more about the story by clicking on ‘about this book.’  It’s a well paced narrative and its exploration of two women’s lives, relationships and choices spans three continents and almost a hundred years is engaging and intriguing to readers who appreciate the uniqueness and yet universality of the story.