Students at Sacred Heart School were treated to a visit by children’s’ author Erin Bow, who read from her book Plain Kate and explained to them the revision process of writing the novel.
Bow specializes in fantasy and science fiction and stopped in as part of a tour set up for TD Book Week.
“I’m going to be talking about how to succeed by failing at everything. I actually didn’t set out to be an author, I set out to be a physicist and my life has taken a bunch of left turns at every stage of becoming a full-time author, which is nuts,” she said before the presentation.
TD Book Week is a collaboration between TD Bank and the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, she added, and was developed to send authors around the country to talk at schools.
Bow is from Ontario and said she jumped at the opportunity because two of her books are set in Saskatchewan and she said her presentations would resonate well with audiences in the Prairies.
A more important reason she was eager to take part, though, is because the students seem to be more into fiction than older audiences and keen to hear what she has to say.
“They’re so passionate, they’re so there for you, it’s really interesting and they love their fiction. I’m hoping one of them is like, wow, books are produced by actual human beings, maybe I could do that,” she said.
“I hope they get a little bit of a laugh at me too because I tell some truly mortifying stories, but I hope that if there’s somebody who feels like they don’t know what their path is in life and they’re all alone in that, they won’t feel quite as alone.”
During her presentation she told the students how it took her six years to write and then two more years to revise her novel, Plain Kate, a process she described as amazing, snarling and knotty.
The novel is about an orphan girl named Kate who sells her shadow and gets a talking cat; a premise she said resonates well with young readers.
The presentation wasn’t just for the students though, as Bow said there are things she takes away from talking to young fiction fans as well.
She said, “A writer’s book is never done until you meet a reader, and you don’t get a lot of chances to actually look into their faces.”
