AUTHOR ACCESSING THE CHILD WITHIN
When Rachna Gilmore was a small child in the teeming city of Mumbai, India, she was captivated by the stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
The portrayal of a green island surrounded by a deep blue sea had great allure for the curious mind of a bright little girl.
Those books, and many others, sparked a desire to write, but the actual act of putting pen to paper would wait many years.
“When I was growing up I thought I was either going to be a doctor — my mom was a doctor — or a writer. I always loved stories. I was always reading books including Anne of Green Gables, which was one of my favourites, and Little Women. It was mostly Jo, the second-oldest sister who wrote stories; I thought, ‘Wow, this is something I wanted to do.’”
She would obtain a degree in biology in Britain. But that wasn’t for her. Nor was England. She decided to come to Canada because it seemed full of possibilities and, remembering the allure of the Island, she said to herself, “Why not go to P.E.I.?” Along the way she got married and found a life for herself.
“One day I was walking on the beach — probably Cavendish or Brackley — and I was bemoaning to my husband that I had been wanting to write for so long and I wasn’t getting down to it. He said, ‘Well, sometimes we are afraid to start because we are afraid we won’t succeed.’ ” And that was it.
“I had to do it. I don’t want to be 80 and regretting not doing it.”
Gilmore was about 30 and she set to work, writing with a vengeance. Dozens of books later, including picture books for youngsters and novels for teens, Gilmore is a bit of a publishing dynamo. These days, they’re written from her desk in Orléans. She has 23 books to her credit.
She started with children’s books because she read a lot to her kids.
“The cadence of children’s stories was imbued in me. And I had the rich and wonderful material of being a mother.
“My first book was very much out of my own experience. It was called My Mother Is Weird, about a kid watching her mother have a bad day. And then I never looked back.
“Writing a good book, the work that goes into it should be invisible. The story should take precedence,” she says.
She was told, when she started to write, by a P.E.I. poet named Richard Lemm, that writing was a long, slow apprenticeship, and she says she has found that to be true.
“I’ve always remembered that. You can talk about writing, you can read about writing and you can take courses, but in the end the only way to learn how to do it is to do it.
“It is a long process full of dead ends, but that’s OK. It’s just the way it is.”
Her starting point for a book can vary, from an idea that pops into her head to the emergence of a character around which a story can be woven. Her newest book is called Island Morning.
Its story started in P.E.I. — where else? She is back there regularly. One year, her family stayed on the North Shore of the island, and one morning walk was particularly inspirational.
“I thought, ‘I want to write about this, but how do I convey this?’ Writing for children means I must access the child within me.”
And so she did access her young self. When Gilmore was a young girl in Mumbai, a morning walk was a happy part of her routine. These journeys gave her a sense of watching the world and seeing things she would not normally see.
“I realize now that this is about a child and a grandfather taking a quiet walk and seeing the freshness of it all. That silence is full of possibilities.” Possibilities that can be missed in normal, hectic daily life.
Silence is also very important when she writes, she says. And she always walks to “pound out her ideas.”
While picture books for children seem simple and short, there is a lot of work that goes into them. Gilmore spends a lot of time getting the voices of her characters right. It means refinement after refinement of the text.
She carries with her a notebook to jot down ideas when they occur.
“I have learned over the years, that even the most fabulous idea will not linger if you don’t write it down. They can disappear.”
With this book, she is reunited with the artist who illustrated her very first book.
“I thought it was important to get somebody who lived on the Island because they would really get it.” And she knew that Brenda Jones was also very good at landscapes.
The power of books read when one is a child is very great, Gilmore says.
“If you ask adults if they can remember a book they have read in the last year, very few will be able to do so. But all of them will remember a book they read in childhood.”