On May 23, 2013, the Kawartha Lakes Public Library hosted Dorothy Thompson, author of Threads From The Loom Of Time, as part of the Local Author Series. Chief Librarian Linda Kent introduced Thompson to a crowded, eager roomful. Thompson captivated the audience with passages read aloud from her book and photos of her ancestors.

Threads From The Loom Of Time is a fictionalized account of the life and times of Thompson’s ancestors. Her book could be considered part of a genre with the freshly-coined term “faction”, meaning fiction based on facts, for Thompson’s book is made up of the stories about her grandparents handed down through the generations.

Her story also covers a fair bit of history in Ontario. Ever heard of The Battle of Crysler’s Farm? When Thompson’s Casselman ancestors emigrated to Canada, they owned land along the St. Lawrence. They sold this land to a man named Crysler.

Another of Thompson’s ancestors was Elizabeth Ware, who Florence Nightingale helped get a job as a nurse, and who then went on to become the first woman to be named head of a hospital. At the age of 52 she married Richard Thorton and moved to Muskoka. She always envisioned the land they owned in Muskoka as vacation land. When she got too old to see that dream happen herself, she sold the land to a developer interested in creating a resort. You’ve perhaps heard of it: the Deerhurst Resort.

Then there was Thompson’s grandmother, Beatrice, who was stillborn, but her father, a brilliant man who was a doctor, a surgeon, a dentist and many, many other things, wouldn’t give up. Beatrice recovered miraculously, and with a gift of accurate premonitions and a startlingly near-perfect memory. In one such premonition, Beatrice saved her family from fire.

These were just a few of the interesting details about Dorothy Thompson’s family. There are many more stories like this in her book, Threads From The Loom Of Time. You can purchase the book at Kent Bookstore, or borrow it from the Kawartha Lakes Public Library.

Read more about Dorothy Lenore Thompson.

The City of Kawartha Lakes Library presents Dorothy Thompson as part of the Local Author Series on Thursday, May 23 at 7 pm.

Dorothy Thompson’s book Threads From the Loom of Time is the history of Huntsville, Muskoka, as seen through the eventful lives of two grant land pioneer families from disparate backgrounds.

In the early 1860’s, the government of Upper Canada advertised free grant lands in the district of Muskoka and anyone could apply. Two intrepid families, the Casselmans and the Wares, took up the challenge and became neighbours on the twin sister lakes, Fairy and Peninsula. In 1901, their granddaughter, Beatrice Casselman was born with the gift of second sight in the burgeoning pioneer town of Huntsville. She was an eager receptacle for both her paternal and maternal grandfather’s family histories, taking us back to the 1700’s in Germany and the 1800’s in England and Ireland. Beatrice spent a lifetime collecting the stories of the early settlers. Now her daughter has taken the family histories and her mother’s memories of her remarkable life and woven it into a compelling epic celebrating the courage and determination of the people who built the new world.

Copies of the book can be ordered from the Kent Bookstore.

Read more about Dorothy Thompson. 

Last night the City of Kawartha Lakes Public Library (CKLPL) hosted Virginia Winters as part of the Spring session of the Local Authors Series.

The evening began with an introduction by Diane Lansdell of the CKLPL, and then Virginia Winters took the stage and spoke about her newest book, how she writes, writing advice, and the book she’s currently working on.

Virginia Winters has always had a love for literature, but she began writing in 1998 after being disappointed in the latest offering from a favourite author. She thought she could do better. Though the result was terrible, she’d been bitten by the writing bug and decided to learn to revise and make her story better. The final product was her debut novel, Murderous Roots, published by Write Words, Inc. in 2010.

Despite what you may think about authors, or even how other authors might work, Virginia doesn’t sit in front of a keyboard for eight hours a day. She rises early and begins her day with a cup of coffee, the Globe and Mail, Facebook and Twitter. Then, once caught up with reality, she reviews the writing she completed the day before and plunges in. On a good day, she’ll accumulate 1000 words, but when the writing is not flowing, she finds other writing-related tasks: submitting a manuscript, or working on a short story. Though she stops writing at noon to carry on with her daily life, the book is always on her mind no matter the task at hand. She enjoys reading every afternoon, usually mysteries, literary fiction, nonfiction for research and books about writing.

Virginia makes a daily commitment to write and in this way has been able to see three novels to publication. While she is happy with her publisher in general, she didn’t feel the covers of her first two novels adequately represented the books, so for her third book in the Dangerous Journeys series, No Motive For Murder, she designed the cover herself.

At last night’s event, Virginia read a passage from No Motive for Murder, a book for which she received the following compliment from an audience member: even though the book is part of a series, No Motive For Murder reads well on its own. A reader doesn’t have to read all the books in the series to understand what’s going on in the story.

At the moment, Virginia Winters is not working on the next book in the Dangerous Journeys series. Her latest project has an art historian for a protagonist and involves theft, art history and restoration, centring around a painting lost in 1945 in the last days of the War.

Visit Virginia Winter’s website and find her on Facebook.

Read our biography of Virginia Winters.