Writer Fay’s fifth book is therapy after hurricane
Stirling-born author Fay Knowles started writing at age nine - and now, at 75, she doesn’t plan stopping any time soon.
She has just released her fifth book, ‘Moonbeams from The Soul: A Collection of Fourteen Provocative Short Stories’, available on Amazon as an e-book and in paperback.
The novelist, journalist and author of a number of short stories and poetry has lived in Nassau on New Providence Island in The Bahamas for many years but is a former pupil of Balfron Primary School and has family connections to Aberfoyle.
Her attention has, however, recently been focused on the natural disaster which struck her adopted home in September.
She told the Observer: “Dorian, a category five hurricane, struck the Grand Bahama and Abaco islands with maximum sustained winds of 185mph, gusting to over 200mph. It caused death, destruction, injuries and much homelessness for the inhabitants of those islands. There are still hundreds of people declared missing.”
Fay said many of the evacuees fled to Nassau while others relocated to various Family Islands and some were taken in temporarily by the US and Canada.
New Providence and the rest of the islands throughout the archipelago were, however, untouched by Hurricane Dorian, and since then Prime Minister Hubert Minnis has emphasised to the world that The Bahamas, a popular tourist destination, was “still open for business”.
Fay said: “We did have some heavy rain and a little flooding in low areas on New Providence from Dorian’s outer bands.
“This catastrophe will no doubt have very far-reaching effects for The Bahamas, well into the distant future. Fortunately, we have had an unprecedented outpouring of love and help, not only locally but from overseas. However, this little country will need assistance and support for many years to come.”
The disaster has deeply saddened residents of The Bahamas, who continue to hear shocking stories from Dorian survivors, but Fay keeps on writing, describing it as “therapeutic”.
‘Moonbeams from the Soul’ is Fay’s second book of short stories. The first was ‘Sunbeams from The Heart: A Collection of Twelve Romantic Short Stories’, which made Amazon’s top 100 paid best-sellers list in the literature and fiction/short stories category shortly after it was first released, next to Stephen King’s ‘Hearts in Atlantis’ and alongside Agatha Christie’s ‘Miss Marple - The Complete Short Stories’.
Among her other books and short stories is ‘The Scottish Connection: A Journey Back – Mini-memoir’ – based on a visit to Scotland with her mother and two sons – which features Aberfoyle, Killearn and Balfron.
Fay is currently working on a new novel ‘Oleanders End’, which will be her sixth book and second in her Buchanan mystery romance series. She says her training as a newspaper reporter in her teens gave her much food for thought when it comes to writing suspense.
She said style of writing, characterisation and description was helped by having lived in places such as Scotland, Australia and England as a child and travelling abroad when she became an adult.
Her father, the late William Alfred Johanson, was in the Australian Air Force during the Second World War. He met her Scottish WRAF mother, the late Josephine McMurtrie MacDonald, in Scotland, where they married.
At age 20, Fay emigrated to Canada and worked for a while in Toronto as an editorial assistant. Then, to avoid a Canadian winter, she travelled by Greyhound coach from Toronto to Miami and flew to Nassau, Bahamas, where she intended staying for only three months. However, she met her husband Erskine, a Long Island Bahamian, a month later and they were married the next year.
Fay said: “Apart from several years living twice in the UK with my husband and sons, I have actually lived in the Bahamas more years than anywhere else, but I still feel a close affinity with Scotland.”
‘Moonbeams from the Soul’ can be purchased online as an e-book and in paperback at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/ B07Y6V694F . The universal link is mybook.to/MOONBEAMS. More details at amazon. com/author/fayknowles and fayknowles.blogspot.com.
To help The Bahamas’ Hurricane Dorian Relief go to www.npcconline.org/hurricane. NPCC (New Providence Community Centre/Church) has partnered with Rotary and many other hurricane relief organisations to assist the victims of Hurricane Dorian, and is coordinating a lot of the relief effort.
This catastrophe will no doubt have very far-reaching effects for The Bahamas