$30.00 CAD (tax included) + $14.00 postage & shipping (Canada Post) 512 pp.
If you live in Ottawa, please contact me, we may be able to arrange a book pick up or drop off to save shipping.
NOW AVAILABLE AT:
THE BOOK NOOK in Perth, ON
OCTOPUS BOOKS in Ottawa, ON (2 locations)
Please note, we're working to get this into other bookstores.
Have you ever felt like you didn’t quite fit in?
Was there ever an imperfect fit among you and your peers or you and your family?
If you’ve ever felt that way, join Jill McCann as she maneuvers the rocky waters of life in a prairie village in the 1970s. Jill has alcoholic parents and a bully for a brother, but she has allies, too. With the love of family members and friends, she endures her childhood and teen years. Jill emerges at the end of school life a little world-weary, a little damaged, but she triumphs quietly in a life well-lived and well-loved.
Is this work autobiographical?
No person from the story exists in real life. Yes, I grew up in the rural prairies in the 1970s and yes, I didn’t quite fit in. However, I don’t have a sibling or alcoholic parents. I was an anxious child, teen and adult, too sensitive really to survive adolescence unscathed. Perhaps because I have no siblings I didn’t know how to respond to teasing. I took so much to heart and really did become complicit in the dance of exclusion. I didn’t feel accepted, so retreated from the stinging words. I struggled for a long time in and after adolescence feeling not quite good enough, even though I had friends and great love from my parents and spouse.
My spouse could not understand my residual bitterness and urged me to write something down. I began sometime in 2002 or 2003. I don’t recall what I wrote at first, but it took a long time on days off and those moments before I went to sleep to go over what I’d written to bring up memories of small town life, because this is a story of life in a village, too. There are simple things there, too – mundane stuff about how things were and I tried to paint a realistic picture.
This book was published by Baico Publishing Inc.