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The spoon had belonged to her grandmother‘s friend, who claimed a relative had saved it from the Titanic, and led to a story about the woman‘s other relatives, who died on the Empress of Ireland when it sank in the St. Lawrence River in 1914. “When I found out it was Canada‘s worst nautical disaster in peacetime, I couldn‘t believe I‘d never heard of it,” says Autio. She began researching the ship and discovered it had brought more than 100,000 European immigrants to Canada. “That ship was huge in Canada‘s history and to have it completely forgotten was so intriguing to me,” she says. “So then I realized, wow, there‘s a lot of material here. Maybe it could be a novel.” Autio wrote the first page in a creative writing class at Okanagan College a decade ago. Seven years later it was released by Sono Nis Press, a small West Coast publisher, as Second Watch. Autio‘s second novel, Saara‘s Passage, was released last month and continues the next chapter of her heroine‘s life, telling an engaging story about caring for a baby whose mother had tuberculosis. It was inspired by the experience of Autio‘s grandmother, who had to leave her husband and baby, Autio‘s mother, at their farm near Thunder Bay while she was in a Toronto sanatorium. Her grandmother never talked about that experience, but Autio pieced together the story from other family members. Her grandmother, who had emigrated from Finland only five years earlier, was so unhappy in Toronto that she eventually discharged herself against her doctor‘s orders and went home, living alone in the barn so no one else would be infected. “She had to spend the next couple of years apart from my mother, watching other women care for her daughter, and not be able to have any contact with her,” says Autio. Autio‘s grandmother eventually recovered. After she died at 86, they found letters she had written to the baby when she expected to die. “It was just soul-bearing,” says Autio, her voice choking with emotion at the memory. “My mom translated them for me into English so I could read these letters. At that point, I had to know more about what had happened.” The book offers an authentic portrayal of time and place, including the socialist history of many Finnish immigrants in Northern Ontario, an unusual subject in children‘s literature. “I am a stickler for the details and being accurate to the time period,” says Autio. Although she created characters and plots from her imagination, details about daily life came from interviews with seniors as well as research in Thunder Bay‘s museum and the archives at Lakehead University, where she studied newspapers, diaries, letters and photographs. Autio only started writing seriously in her 40s although she loved drawing as a child in Thunder Bay, and wrote stories then so she could illustrate them. But she studied math and computer science at the University of Waterloo, which led to jobs in software development for major corporations, including Shell Canada and MacDonald, Dettwiler, an information-services company. “I really took a detour,” says Autio, who moved to Kelowna in 1996, after living in Calgary and the Lower Mainland with her husband, Will, a software developer. She decided not to return to work after their first child, Annaliis, 21, was born. When son, Stefan, now 16, entered Grade One, she decided she would try writing and see where it led. “I just started to realize that I needed a more creative outlet,” says Autio, who works part-time editing educational software products. She is planning to write another book, although she‘s not sure if she will continue the series or take a new tack by exploring Okanagan history. Top of Page |
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September 2, 2010, 2:48 pm |