Heather Latter
Many know her as “Wendi with an ‘eye’” from her weekly column in the Fort Frances Times, but now Wendi Stewart can add “author” to her list of accomplishments.
The former local resident, who now lives in Nova Scotia, has returned here to launch the fictional novel where the story is based.
Released on Sept. 15, “Meadowlark,” officially will be launched tomorrow (Sept. 24) at Betty’s from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and Friday at the Fort Frances Public Library at 6:30 p.m.
“It’s my first novel that’s been published but I did write another novel first that now I am working on again,” Stewart noted.
Stewart finished that novel in about 2002 but didn’t publish it because she wasn’t “ready to let go of it.”
“I think I knew I wasn’t a very good writer yet,” she conceded, adding she then started writing “Meadowlark,” which originally was titled “Frozen.”
When she chose that title nine years ago, Disney’s animated feature had not yet debuted. But before the book was published, Stewart had to change it.
“I had two hours to come up with a new name, so as I’m reading through the book and just writing words down that associated, “meadowlark” just popped out,” she recalled.
“And I actually like it a lot better because it’s more hopeful than ‘Frozen.’
“And I think it is a hopeful book even though it’s sad,” she added.
Stewart’s book “tells the luminous, deeply-imagined story of a young woman’s hard-won triumph over heart-breaking personal tragedy.”
As revealed in the blurb, the story is about the protagonist, Rebecca, who at six years old is the only person her father is able to save when her family’s car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake in March, 1962.
Having lost her mother and baby brother, she is raised by a man left nearly paralyzed with grief.
As she grows up, Rebecca finds solace in the company of her two friends, Chuck and Lissie.
The book follows the trio through high school graduation and as they support one another, Rebecca learns by saving her friends, she also may save herself.
While the book isn’t about Stewart’s own life, there is a parallel meaning embedded in it.
“My dad died when I was youngish, I was 19 so I wasn’t a little kid, but I was totally lost without him,” Stewart admitted.
“I didn’t know who I was without his framework around me and I think that was the case for most of my adult life,” she added.
“The longing for him never stopped.”
Stewart also said she never wanted to leave the family farm—she wanted to be a farmer with her father.
“He said I had to have an education so I went to the University of Manitoba,” she noted. “And he died two weeks after I started school.
“Like Rebecca, I just felt like this untethered balloon,” Stewart recalled.
“So I started writing about grief, not really associating it with myself, but I realize now that I’m finished that I had to write this book.
“And I think I was writing it for myself to work through that loss—even though the characters are different and the father in the book isn’t anything like the father I had,” she acknowledged.
“Death is a fact of life,” Stewart reasoned. “Yes, it does come at inconvenient times and people lose their lives far too early, but it’s just part of living.”
She said the idea for the book just came to her.
“I woke up in the night and I wrote the prologue much how it is now . . . and that just got me going,” Stewart recalled.
“It kind of wrote itself,” she added. “You hear writers say that but it did.
“I feel like I was just this vessel along for the ride.”
The story takes place in the fictional town of Roddick but it is based on Fort Frances.
“It’s very important to me that it take place here,” she stressed.
From the farm she grew up on along Highway 602 to references of the Five-Mile Dock and the new causeway, Stewart said local readers are sure to catch the similarities.
“I think I physically put myself on the farm which is on the Rainy River,” she remarked. “I had such a wonderful childhood that there was so much richness to draw from that.
“There are borrowed things from Fort Frances, of course, the library, the post office, the hardware store,” she noted.
“[But] it was more just the essence of Fort Frances.
“I didn’t want to call it Fort Frances because that seemed almost disrespectful to borrow a truth that I’m telling out of a fictional story.”
But Stewart said many of the characters in the novel incorporate bits of people she’s encountered.
In fact, she drew on her great love and respect of Annie Lahti, her former neighbour, to create Rebecca.
And there actually are some “real” characters in the book, too—Louis Quesnel, Stewart’s homeroom teacher, Gladys Curr from the high school cafeteria, and Norma and Don Law who owned the hardware store.
“I got permission to use their names,” she revealed. “They fit in seamlessly and I am so grateful that the let themselves be in my book.”
Stewart said she knew when she wrote “Meadowlark” that she would try to get it published.
“I felt I put enough effort into it,” she explained, noting she got an Ontario Arts Council grant and an Arts Nova Scotia grant for that purpose.
She indicated it took about seven years to write, but she made a very polished manuscript that required very little editing once the publisher received it.
When Stewart started writing the book, she was working and wrote every free chance she got.
But in 2006, she left her job as an accountant and became a full-time writer.
“I wrote every day, all day,” she recounted, noting her children knew she was a writer before she did.
She recalled hearing one of her daughters telling a friend that her mom was a writer.
“I remember taking it very seriously after that,” Stewart said. “It feels like such a privilege to write. I feel very fortunate.
“I took every criticism from every reader and went to work with that,” she added.
“Compliments are nice . . . but it’s the things that don’t work that people are forthright enough to tell you that gives you something to work with.”
Lisa Moore, author of “Caught and “February,” had worked with Stewart and wrote a letter of introduction for her.
“Wendi Stewart’s ‘Meadowlark’ is lyrical and vivid, startlingly fresh writing about childhood and loss, decaying dreams, bravery, and the every-day brutality that is sometimes visited upon the damaged and the innocent alike,” Moore wrote in her review.
“It is about the fast, inviolate friendships that see us through.”
Stewart said she sent the manuscript out electronically to five agents, and within a few hours had a positive response back from Transatlantic Agency.
From there, the small independent press of NeWest Press jumped on it.
Having left the district at age 19, Stewart is thrilled to be back to launch “Meadowlark.”
“I couldn’t do it anywhere else,” she stressed, noting she didn’t want to launch the book in Wolfville, where she currently lives, because she said that’s not home.
“Fort Frances is home and it’s set here, but I just wanted to be here.
“I’m excited about the launch,” Stewart added, noting the book is like a tribute to her childhood.
“I just wish my dad was here to be part of this.”
