It’s always been about books and writing.
As a kid in Ottawa, I waited for Thursdays, and the bookmobile; as a newly-fledged adult in Calgary, I haunted used bookstores in search of Anatole France and Alice Munro. As a young mother-to-be in Nelson, I started my own used bookstore called Packrat Annie’s (it’s still in business four decades later). After passing it along to new owners, I bookwormed my way into the public library. Eventually, that on-call library job became a career, one I retired from in 2020 after 32 years.
In between all of that were lots of words. There were stints as a reporter, a columnist, and a feature writer, and a heady creative period resulting in four traditionally-published novels that received some very nice reviews. I’m proud of these works of fiction, all of them out of print thanks to the ups and downs of the publishing industry. They’re in my basement, though, and available for purchase; just email! Read more about them below.
I’m an incorrigible volunteer, and I love wordsmithing for all sorts of community-building organizations. I’ve also illustrated five books for kids, although that feels like a different lifetime, now. I have been—and continue to be—an editor and a mentor to writers at all stages of their creative journeys, and I’ve been delighted to see a number of these projects find publishers.
For a full bibliography, please see my CV. If you’d like to know more about anything, please reach out.
Books
Flying with Amelia
Originally published in hardcover by
McArthur & Company, 2011
Subsequently published in trade paper by
Cormorant Books, 2014
Through a century and across a country, Flying with Amelia follows the descendants of two families as they arrive on Canada’s rocky shores and scatter. Told in ten stories, the novel weaves a collective identity that speaks of hope and resilience.
Book Review
Review:
by Candace Fertile
Globe and Mail, 2011
It’s not often that a book makes me late for drinks with a friend, but I was in the middle of the title chapter of Anne DeGrace’s latest novel, Flying with Amelia, and I had to find out what happens to the characters. And then I had to mop the tears off my face.
Being moved by a book is one of the great joys of my life, and Anne DeGrace never fails to deliver emotionally rich and aesthetically enticing fiction. In this fourth novel, she tackles a huge subject: the canvas of Canada over time, from 1847 to 2012. While I wanted to know more about the characters, she manages to move readers along to the next chapter, with a new time frame and new characters, in a thoroughly smooth and wise way.
The novel opens with Across the Atlantic, the story of the Murphy family, who are leaving their poverty-stricken circumstances in Ireland for the hope of a better life in Newfoundland. DeGrace describes the hellish voyage so viscerally that readers will find themselves stuck in the appalling conditions below decks with the Irish families, hoping to survive the trip and then their new home. Mary Murphy narrates the experience, a truly hideous one: “Some [biscuits] have weevils, and I tap them out so the children will not see.” Mary’s story shows the extreme lengths to which people will go to try to improve their lot in life. It also shows the power of poverty, a topic common to much of the novel.
With each chapter, DeGrace captures the voice of the characters in their time. The second chapter, Static, is set in 1901 in St John’s, when a boy named William earns some money by helping Marconi with his work. Everyone is poor, and William’s father doesn’t help the situation by drinking up any spare cash. But DeGrace manages to humanize the man while exposing his considerable failures.
The chapters are connected by fragments of family. The novel shows how spread out and broken a family can become, especially in a land as vast as Canada. The varied settings connect time and place with significant events, personal and occasionally international. For example, Angel is set in Montreal in 1929, and clearly the stock-market crash plays a devastating role. All of the Colours is set in a PoW camp in rural Manitoba in 1944. A Different Country is set in Toronto in 1967 and features James, a young American draft dodger. In every case, DeGrace makes the place and time lift off the page.
Generally in the novel, people move to find work or escape a bad situation. Life is hard, and the people that DeGrace writes about are not the wealthy. She is concerned with those whose basic needs are a challenge. And when the necessities are lacking, people respond in time-honoured ways, such as drinking and violence. But they also respond with love and care. In Home Girl, an elderly woman named Olive befriends Winnie, a young “home girl” sent from London. Winnie is in danger, and Olive does everything in her power to help her. Decency and kindness are the glue that can hold people together in the midst of appalling situations.
The title story is mainly told in letters, and it starts with a man’s newspaper advertisement for a pen pal. As the correspondence develops, so do the feelings of the writers in an utterly believable way. The book is worth it for this chapter alone, but all the others have as much resonance.
The final chapter has the same title as the first, Across the Atlantic, yet this time the travel is in the opposite direction as DeGrace embroiders the threads of family connection through time. Flying with Amelia is a beautiful achievement by a gifted writer.
Sounding Line
Trade paper, 2009
McArthur & Co
On the evening of October 4, 1967, the tiny fishing village of Perry’s Harbour, Nova Scotia, is invaded: by the “incident”—which sends local fishermen scrambling to find survivors of an assumed plane crash—and by everything that comes after.
Book Review
By Fiona Lehn
Room Magazine, 2010
An unidentified flying object crashes in the water just offshore of small fishing village Perry’s harbour, Nova Scotia. Perry’s then becomes overrun with secretive government agents, alien lovers, and media. The few locals of Perry’s Harbour try to go about their business of day-to-day living but find that their lives change unalterably by the experience.
It sounds like science fiction, but Anne DeGrace based her third novel, Sounding line, on a historical incident. In 1967, a UFO was reported to have crashed off shore of Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia. A mix of science and historical fiction, Sounding Line offers the best of both subgenres in true literary fashion. DeGrace’s tale focuses on the people of Perry’s Harbour, on Pocket Snow, the teenaged artist whose mother Merle is dying of cancer. On his Uncle Scratch and his father Wilf, who are trying desperately to cope with the loss of Merle as she slips away from their realm and into the beyond. DeGrace’s tale follows the town bully and his lonely friend Ernie, Rodney the rookie journalist sent to cover the story, the storekeeper Shirley, and the psychic Wanda who come to town to communicate with the aliens.
The way in which DeGrace tells this tale is nothing short of exquisite. She begins by defining a sounding line as “a line marked at intervals of fathoms and weighted at one end, used to determine the depth of water.” Thus before the story begins, the reader has already begun to think in terms of darkness and depth, weight and the unknown. The she starts with the lights. Lights over water, movement, and incongruent silence. The crash. The witnesses. The story has begun.
The pace of the novel ambles as slowly as time passes in a small fishing village, but the story is nonetheless compelling. There is breath and breadth in the writing. The telling of the tale is full of space and silence. We feel as if we are standing at the end of the wharf right along with Pocket Snow, staring into the harbour and sounding its depths.
As we delve into the lives of the Perry’s Harbour locals, it becomes clear that DeGrace has written a novel through a perfect metaphor. Her authorial sounding line plunges into the water, into space, into life and death, alien and belonging, human and love.
Wind Tails
Trade paper, 2007
McArthur & Co
At a side-of-the-highway diner on a mountain pass, during one extraordinary, windy day in 1977, the paths of an odd assortment of travellers cross. The stories of each circle around points of departure: what sets one on one’s journey.
Book Review
Review
by Clark Sheldon
Quill & Quire, 2005
Anne DeGrace, author of 2005’s Treading Water, sets her new novel during a single day in 1977 in a remote diner in a B.C. mountain pass. The story is primarily about Jo, a troubled teen waitress still recovering from an unexpected pregnancy, and Cass, the owner of the diner. But the staff at Cass’s Roadside Café are only a launching point for an expansive novel that encompasses each and every person who enters the diner during the day. The full cast totals more than a dozen, with twice as many characters in supporting roles.
DeGrace’s narration begins in the third person, but switches frequently to first, and from character to character. One soon becomes accustomed to the sudden changes. The narrative is anchored to the diner, so when characters leave, something inevitably pulls the story back inside. Much of the time the anchor is a hitchhiker named Pink, who has chosen to travel solely in the direction in which the wind blows. The result is narration that ping-pongs as the wind shifts, constantly catching characters coming from both directions. The cast is varied and interesting, and includes hippies, an adulterous trucker, a dowser, and an old woman who ought to have died but didn’t.
In one way or another we learn their histories, the perspective shifts driving the action along. The interaction between the characters and Jo creates a layered effect in the story. By the end, the novel is much bigger than its “day in a diner” frame. Each individual’s experience sheds light on another’s, and all are bound by a sense of remorse over the irrevocable effects of decisions made (or of the refusal to make any decisions at all).
The combination of these wind tales makes for a riveting read, concluding as Jo finally makes her own decision, one that may save her from sinking into the sense of regret that has shackled so many of the others she’s seen that day.
Treading Water
Trade paper, 2005
McArthur & Co
The voices of the residents of Bear Creek surface in this novel, told in twelve stories that include a trapper, a suffragette, a shell-shocked war veteran and many others in a tale that traces a community from its hopeful beginnings until the day the waters rise.
Book Review
Review:
By W.P. Kinsella
Books in Canada, 2005
Treading Water by Anne DeGrace may at one time have been a story collection, but they have been cunningly and effectively joined together to form a delightful novel.
Inspired by the British Columbia town of Renata, which was flooded for a B.C. Hydro project, the story begins in 1905 and ends in the present. Each episode advances the story of the town and area, and the characters spring to life; they are like old friends revisited every few years, as we follow, among others, the life of the first baby born in the Bear Creek area, whose name is chosen for the town in the novel. A young woman who has been working for social change in Regina, particularly the Suffragette Movement, comes to Bear Creek to look after her sister who has just lost her twin babies. “Isobel Gray, the young woman, and Ace, Jack Armstrong’s new horse, arrived in Bear Creek at the same time.” Isobel is anxious to get back to “making a difference,” but with a lot of help from the strong-minded Ace, falls in love with Armstrong, the local hotel owner and orchardist, and spends the rest of her days in Bear Creek. Both Ace and Jack are buried near Isobel’s home, and in a final show of strength Isobel forces Hydro to cement the graves to protect them from the flood to come. A school teacher, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I, finds he has much in common with a nasty teenager who terrorizes him and disrupts his classes. Both of them have lost someone very dear to them. In another tale, the community stands together to defy a toll for use of the Government Wharf.
The writing is clear as a bell, the language crisp and clean, the stories often very moving. This a remarkable debut.