The Battlefords News-Optimist/Regional Optimist is announcing the addition of a new columnist for online readers.
Wartime Wednesdays is a weekly blog researched and written by Elinor Florence of Invermere, B.C., who started her journalism career in 1973 at the Battlefords Advertiser-Post.
Florence grew up on a farm near Brada, attended the University of Saskatchewan and completed her journalism degree at Carleton University in Ottawa.
She has worked for the Western Producer in Saskatoon, the Red Deer Advocate, the Winnipeg Sun and the Vancouver Province. She also wrote regularly for Reader's Digest Canada, and even published her own weekly newspaper called the Columbia Valley Pioneer.
Florence recently completed her first historical novel, Bird's Eye View, about a young woman from Saskatchewan who goes overseas during the Second World War, joins the air force and becomes an interpreter of aerial photographs.
Bird's Eye View will appear in bookstores in October 2014. In the meantime, Florence will write weekly about interesting wartime facts and anecdotes she picked up during her research, some of them involving area residents.
To read Wartime Wednesdays, visit www.newsoptimist.ca. Click on the Opinion tab, then the Columnists tag. Click on the link www.elinorflorence.com/blog.
The word "blog" is short for "web log" and is the digital equivalent of an old-fashioned newspaper column.
