Website and social media links:
On Facebook: Looking for Aiktow/Joan Soggiewrites
On LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com>joan-soggie
On bookswelove.com http://bwlpublishing.ca JoanSoggie
On GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com.soggie
On Amazon: http://amazon.ca>joan-soggie
On Instagram: http://www.instagram.com>saskjoan
What genre do you write?
I write mainly eco-historical fiction
and nonfiction that is rooted in my own experience of living in the
prairies. This is the land and the
people I know best. How prairie people interact with and are shaped by the land
is, to me, an endlessly fascinating story. My first published writing was non-fiction
and delved into the What, When and Where of our regional history.
Prairie Grass, my first historical novel, expands on that theme by
exploring the Who and Why of our history. Rikka, my latest novel, is both more
personal and more specific. Rikka’s life spans not only different times (mid
1800s to 1920s) but geographically different places (islands in the Norwegian
Sea to prairie homestead) and vastly different cultures.
Do your reading choices reflect your writing choices?
I try to write the kind of books I like to read - although my reading
choices are much wider than my range of writing! Poetry by Saskatchewan author Carol
Rose GoldenEagle, a Jane Austen novel, and an essay by Malcolm Gladwell might
all share space on my reading table. Long time favourites are the Narnia
Chronicles by C. S. Lewis and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but during
these years of covid I have escaped into the historical novels of Ken Follett.
Which type of characters are your favorite to write?
I enjoy drawing characters who reflect qualities I recognize and appreciate
in my own friends, family, and acquaintances: integrity, creativity, courage,
with a generous dose of idealism often concealed beneath a stoic and impassive
demeanor. My favourite characters live close to the land and derive some of
their qualities from it. I like characters who do not give up easily or become
soured by circumstances. Trying to understand, and to reveal, the how and why
of a character’s development is to me the most challenging and most rewarding
aspect of writing fiction.
Do pictures, real life or plain imagination create the character you
want readers to love?
All three! In Prairie Grass, before ever conceiving of a book, I scrounged
through archives and second-hand bookstore for references to an indigenous 19th
century Peacemaker whose personality shone through the few dry historical sources
I had found. Other characters came about the same way, partly modelled after
real people but coming alive in my imagination as I tried to see them through
their own or their contemporaries’ eyes. In Rikka, I had a few old
photographs showing her at two or three different periods of her life and was
struck by the change in her face and bearing. There was little to go on to gain
an understanding of her personality, other than the bare facts of her life and
a few family stories. Pictures and real life had to be fleshed out with
imagination. As she grew along with the story, I became very fond of her. I
hope I have portrayed her in a way my readers will love, too.
Do your characters come before or after your plot?
The characters come first. The plot grows out of their lives, their relationships
with each other, and their circumstances, constrained and directed by
historical facts. I suppose most writers would say the same thing – I come away
from a few hours of writing feeling that I have not “made-up” a scene but have simply
recorded what inevitably unfolded before my mind’s eye.
How do you choose a villain and how do you make them human?
In my writing, the role of villain is not a person. Instead, the
struggle is with external circumstances or with an aspect of a person’s
character. The people of my writing are neither
consistently villainous nor always heroic. Relationships change; a friend might
unexpectedly become a stranger, almost an enemy. I try to portray life as I see
it, sometimes messy, often challenging. In Rikka, the “villain” might be
a combination of dire events and personality traits rooted in that individual’s
environment.
“Rikka remembered her
teacher’s words. Spirit needs muscle.
Not only muscle of
flesh and bone, she thought, but the muscle of a spirit inured to hardship and suffering.
Surely, we have had enough of that to make us strong!”
From a close-knit
community on the wave-scoured islands of northern Norway to a wind-swept
prairie homestead, Rikka traverses love and loss, joy and sorrow, with passion
and determination.
Rikka’s journey
takes her across an ocean, a continent, and a lifetime. She plumbs the depths
of her own heart and discovers the beauty of life beyond grit and endurance.
This novel is based
on the true story of one of Western Canada’s female immigrant pioneers.
On Books2Read: http://books2read.com/Rikka
PRAIRIE
GRASS
Gabby Mackenzie knows little and cares less about
prairie people or their history. She sees her assignment to interview a
hundred-year-old settler as nothing more than a bump in her hazy career path.
But as she gets to know old Mr. Tollerud and the
land that has been his home, she finds herself drawn into the interwoven
stories of the settlers, the Metis, and the First Nations who came before them.
And her own life changes.
On Books2Read: http://books2read.com/Prairie-Grass
LOOKING FOR AIKTOW
“First came the land. Then came the
people. Elbow’s history grows out of its location.” Just as the water of the
Aiktow still flows unseen through the lake, a current from events long past
moves through life here today.
From the earliest people who flaked
their spear points and fashioned their cooking pots from the clay along the
banks of the South Saskatchewan River more than 4,000 years ago, to the people
who last launched their kayaks into the waters of Lake Diefenbaker in 2013,
this book traces the history and the impact of the people who traveled through
and sometimes settled in this increasingly popular area. The look is both
personal and up-close, inviting the reader to come along and “see” what others
saw before them.
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