The Toronto-based publisher, Dundurn Group, has recently produced a new print run of WFNB member Valerie Sherrard’s 2007 young adult novel, Three Million Acres of Flame, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Great Miramichi Fire of 1825.
We chatted with Valerie about her long and successful writing career, a recent prestigious award win, and why she thinks the solution to having trouble finishing a manuscript is to simply keep writing.
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IF you ask Valerie Sherrard if writers are born or made, she’ll say it’s a little bit of both. The signs of raw talent in Valerie’s life were evident by middle school, but the recipe which produced her impressive career required more ingredients that just natural interest and ability. Here are some of the elements that build a writer:
A nurturing formative environment.
“I think that people know if they have stories to tell and if they have the desire to do it right. And I think that's born in you—not everybody wants to tell stories. However, I think that we are influenced probably from a very young age, a growth that’s fostered in your childhood. It’s obvious that you’re born with it, and you develop it.”
Reading was always a big deal in Valerie’s house. Her parents read voraciously, especially poetry, and it taught Valerie to love the way stories were told, and to hear the rhythm and flow of words. Now, she can recognize if a sentence is falling flat. “I know it because it doesn't have something—there’s a pulse to the story that, you know, is missing?”
A champion who recognizes and encourages raw talent.
When Valerie was a kid, she used to amuse herself by playing pretend with an imaginary friend. But her affinity for imaginary play gradually progressed to the written word. When Valerie’s grade six teacher, Mr. Lower, read a writing assignment, he was impressed.
“Valerie, this is really good,” Mr. Lower said. “You could be a writer someday.”
His encouragement had an instant, powerful effect. “I can’t even describe for you…I can still feel that moment, almost frightened, trembling. That was the first time in my recollection that anybody ever told me I was good at anything.”
Mr. Lower encouraged her to continue writing for extra-curricular activities like poetry for the Christmas play, or working on the junior high newsletter, and by the end of the school year, her path was set in her mind. “I’m going to be a writer someday,” she said to herself.
Valerie remembered him in one of her early books. “It says, ‘This book is dedicated with love and thanks to my Grade 6 teacher, Alf Lower, for planting the seed that grew.” Valerie visited him in Ontario during her book tours and travels, and she was happy to be able to thank him for his early confidence which hummed and percolated through her self-perception.
Rich lifetime experiences.
“We have ideas, and then life comes along, and you know: it’s finish school, get married, have jobs and have children. It seemed like I was always busy. I was in my late thirties I guess, when I took stock a little bit. I said, if I'm gonna write a book, I better do it now.”
By this time, Valerie had begun fostering teenagers (she and her husband fostered seventy teenagers over the years), and for 12 years, she also worked as the Executive director of a group home in Miramichi. “I had spent a lot of time around young teenagers, and it just seemed like a natural fit when I started to write for that age group.”
Hard work and discipline at the right time.
Valerie began rising in the early morning to write for a couple of hours before her regular day began, when her daughter was about 13. “Something woke up in me,” she said. “If someone forced me now, it would have to be at gunpoint, but back then, I got up every morning at five and I made a cup of coffee or tea and came to my computer.”
Valerie’s first manuscript was about a girl with an inoperable brain tumour, and she was planning to kill her off at the end of the story. She approached her daughter Pam to read the first few chapters and thought Pam’s reaction would tell her if she was moving in the right direction.
Pam agreed to read her chapters, and a few days later, she returned the pages to her mother and said, “more.”
When the draft was complete, she mailed three chapters, a cover letter and synopsis to 18 Canadian publishers who publish books for young people. She received a response from three. An editor from Dundurn Group really liked it, but the board felt that, though the book was humorous, it was too dark a story to publish straightaway. But Valerie had another idea.
“Because of my work with young people, I had exposure to their different issues, and some of the background experiences that are often behind their negative behaviors and choices.” She sent the editor a note, offering to write a mystery series about crimes committed by a young person, because of something that happened to them. The editor liked that idea. “So I wrote the first story called Out of the Ashes, and it's about a girl who's a fire setter.”
Valerie explained that often, young people who set fires have been victims of sexual abuse. Her writing regularly deals with heavy subjects, but she does so without graphic descriptions.
Dundurn responded in only a couple of weeks after receiving the finished manuscript. Out of the Ashes (Dundurn, 2002) turned out to be the first of six books in Valerie’s Shelby Belgarden mystery series for middle graders. Out of the Ashes was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Award and the Red Maple Award (Ontario).
“I was mildly excited,” she says, laughing. “It was just such a thrilling thing. ‘I'm actually going to have a book published?!”
By then Valerie had written the second book in the Shelby series, called In Too Deep, which. Dundurn signed right away. In Too Deep was published in 2003, followed by her original manuscript, Kate, the same year.
“Kate was the first book I wrote, but it was the third one I published. It did really well. In fact, I think I received more email, from readers about Kate than anything else I've ever written.”
Since that time, Valerie has published 34 books with a variety of publishers, including Three Million Acres of Flame (Dundurn, 2007), a historical novel about the Great Miramichi Fire of 1825. Dundurn has created a new print run of the book in honour of the 200th anniversary of this little-known piece of New Brunswick, pre-Confederation history. The Miramichi Fire burned one-fifth of the province to the ground overnight, wiping out whole communities, and killing 160 people.
In her prolific career, Valerie has won or been shortlisted for at least 50 awards, including being the most recent winner of the prestigious Lieutenant Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Arts. Valerie has the distinction of being the first children’s author named to this award, and it was particularly special because it referenced her entire body of work.
“I hope my win inspires a lot of other people to consider writing for young people. We have some remarkably good children's writers here in New Brunswick. There are people that have achieved things that I haven't... Like Riel Nason, for example, who won the Commonwealth Award for her first book (The Town that Drowned, Goose Lane, 2011). This is a fantastic, magical thing!”
