Gracious!

Last month, I felt privileged to be a guest on the “Because Fiction” podcast with author Chautona Havig. Chautona’s insatiable appetite for stories and her unabashed enthusiasm for books made her easy to talk to. Although officially discussing my latest release, she had recently finished reading Rose Among Thornes (released in 2021) and we spent time on that as well.

What made Rose’s story especially poignant for Chautona was that, coincidentally,

Photo credit Manzanar National Historic Site

around the time she read the book, she toured Manzanar National Historic Site near her home in California. Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten camps where the US government incarcerated Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens during World War II. Canadians did the same here, as you’ll know if you’ve read my book or others. Many of my American readers were previously unaware that the Canadian government took the same action. Though I researched several of these camps, I did not have the opportunity to visit one.

Chautona told me that what struck her most while touring the site was not the primitive conditions under which internees were forced to live—the overcrowding, the lack of privacy, the injustice. What moved her was reading, over and over, the stories recorded by those who ran the camp, about how gracious and lovely the Japanese people remained throughout their incarceration. She said, “All I could think about was, if we put Christians in an internment camp today, would people say we were lovely and gracious? Eighty years later, would we be remembered for behaving graciously?”

Whoa. Loaded question.

How about you? Imagine yourself, born here in Canada but your parents immigrated from a country now suddenly at war with us. Forced to leave your home and most of your possessions, you don’t know when or if you’ll return. For three years, you share rustic barracks with strangers. The surrounding barbed wire fences and guard towers prevent you from leaving. You’re reminded that your countrymen who’ve been taken prisoner by your parents’ country of origin are being treated far worse than you. You should be thankful, you’re told.

Would your guards be impressed with how you exhibited the fruit of the Spirit we Christians are supposedly known for? (If you need a refresher, that fruit, according to Galatians 5, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.)

None of us knows how we would behave because we haven’t encountered this level of injustice. Perhaps that question can best be answered by how we respond when our “rights” are stepped on. When someone cuts us off in traffic. When we’re left out. When someone else gets the promotion or the contract or the last piece of dessert. When our parcel is delivered to the wrong address. When we’re required to pay too much tax. Or wear a face mask. Or wait in line.

If we can’t display patience and self-control in these smaller situations, how would we be remembered 80 years after our unjust incarceration?

Am I suggesting we shouldn’t stand up for what’s right? Of course not. But if we call ourselves followers of Jesus, we need to look at whose rights Jesus fought for. Always, it was for others. Not his own. Just the opposite, in fact. He willingly remained quiet under abuse, “like a sheep to the slaughter.”

I pray for the level of maturity that makes me become more gracious, like Jesus, each day.

Lazy Farmers Don't Grow Sugar Beets

Ask almost anyone where sugar comes from and they’ll probably tell you the sugar cane. Obviously, they are not wrong. In fact, not until the 19th century did alternate sources of sugar become known.

One of these was the humble sugar beet, or Beta vulgaris. If you’ve ever worked a physically taxing job, multiply that effort by fifty and you’ll begin to grasp the difficulty of getting a sugar beet from seed to processing plant.

If you were a child of a migrant worker during the first half of the 20th century, you might be all too familiar with the whole process as you were forced to work alongside the adults in your family. Though it got you out of school by the end of April, you’d feel giddy to return in October after harvest. Long days in a hot field, bending over the entire time whether planting, thinning, weeding, or harvesting, would make a day in the classroom feel like a piece of cake.

Cake for which the world needed its sugar.

Each multi-germ seed was a tiny pod containing five or six separate beet plants. Once planting by hand was complete, it was time to thin the plants. Workers, on hands and knees, had to carefully pull out all but one tiny seedling without damaging the one left to grow. Monogerm seeds were not developed for use until 1967 and became the biggest breakthrough for this challenging industry.

Harvesting proved no easier. Many a finger was lost to the sinister-looking sugar beet knife, which came to North America with German and Russian immigrants. Here in Manitoba, farmers from across the southern half of the province manually unloaded their sugar beets into train cars which transported them to the Manitoba Sugar refinery in Winnipeg.

During World War II when cane sugar became difficult to import and rationing went into effect, the sugar beet industry thrived despite the intensive labor required. Among the laborers were many Japanese Canadians, relocated from their homes along the west coast to farms on the prairies to fill the gap left by young men off fighting the war. The industry would not have survived without the help of First Nations laborers, German prisoners of war, and the interned Japanese.

Though sugar beet farming eventually grew easier with the advancement of machinery, seeds, and irrigation systems, demand diminished as more economic and efficient sources of sugar took over.

The characters in my new novel, Rose Among Thornes, are subjected to the rigors of sugar beet farming during WWII. Much of my research came from a book called Sugar Farmers of Manitoba by Heather Robertson, loaned to me by Kelly and Cheryl Ronald who farm east of Portage la Prairie. Kelly used to raise sugar beets like his father before him. Bill Ronald served as president of the Manitoba Beet Growers’ Association.

One aspect I love about being a writer of historical fiction is how, every time I learn more about life in the 1940’s, I’m more grateful for modern-day conveniences. These hot summer days, I feel privileged to sit on a comfy chair in my air-conditioned home, describing for you the challenges of backbreaking work—as though I’d experienced it myself. While I hope we’re all learning to consume less sugar, I hope we’re also learning to appreciate the effort and history behind all the many, easy treats we enjoy.

Happy Labor Day!

Local Citizen Inspires Novel

 In 1942, a young girl named Osono and her family left her father’s farm in the Vancouver area to live in an internment camp in the interior of British Columbia—along with thousands of other Japanese Canadians. The children did not understand what was happening, only that their parents felt unhappy about the move. Born in Canada, the kids had no reason to think they were different than any other Canadians. They didn’t understand that Japan had dropped bombs on Hawaii, or how that act made them suspect. They couldn’t grasp that both American and Canadian governments had decided their parents could no longer be trusted. They were innocent of the prejudice all too prevalent in the world around them.

Internment Camp at New Denver, BC, 1943

Once in the internment communities, many of the children reported that they enjoyed the time as though they were off at summer camp. School and recreational activities were provided, and they spent plenty of time with other kids—all of whom looked like they did. While the kids knew that “somewhere, far away,” a war was being fought, it had little to do with them. The biggest downside was that, for many, their fathers were away, working in lumber camps.

Meanwhile, here in Manitoba, farmers were overwhelmed because so much of our workforce had joined or been drafted into military service, leaving farms without laborers to bring in the harvest. The Canadian government decided it could solve two problems by offering the Japanese Canadians the opportunity to come to Manitoba to work on farms. The incentive was that they could keep their families together. To Osono’s parents and many others, it sounded like a better alternative in a horribly confusing time. They’d already lost their homes, property, businesses, and dignity. How could this be any worse?

Osono remembers making the long trip by train and how she had no desire to work on a farm or be separated from her friends. She recalls her dismay at seeing miles and miles of “nothing.” Her family ended up on the Tully family’s sugar beet farm near Oakville, Manitoba. What Osono could not possibly have known is that Mr. Tully endured ridicule from neighboring farmers for taking so many of these workers. Or that she would eventually elope with one of the Tully sons. Or that doing so would cause a major scandal in the community. Or that the birth of her twin boys would restore peace and bring the families together.

By the 1970s, younger Japanese Canadians, most of whom had been sheltered from the reasons behind the move to Manitoba, began uncovering the truth of their family history. More than 22,000 Japanese Canadians had been forced into this situation, and returning to their former lives, even after the war ended, had become impossible. Their properties had been sold to cover the cost of their own internment and relocation.

In 1988, after years of negotiations, the Japanese Canadian community received an apology from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and a redress entitlement of $21,000 for each individual who had been relocated during the war. Many used the funds to send their children or grandchildren to university, reversing the cycle of poverty they’d been thrust into because of their government’s choices. Osono’s story inspired me to do more research and write a novel about a young girl named Rose. In the book, the farmer’s son is simultaneously imprisoned in a Japanese P.O.W. camp, further complicating the colliding of their separate journeys. I’m pleased to announce that Rose Among Thornes releases July 31 for Kindle and August 31 for everything else. It’s available now for pre-ordering anywhere you buy books.

A Little Good News Today

Everybody needs a little good news. I’d love to tell you the pandemic is over or that our city is having a crime-free year or that cancer has been eradicated. Can’t say any of that and you wouldn’t believe me if I tried.

I do have a morsel of good news, though.

You may recall reading about my journey with a novel I titled Rose Among Thornes. In it, a young Japanese Canadian girl named Rose is relocated from her home in Vancouver to a Manitoba sugar beet farm during World War II. It’s also the story of Private Russell Thorne, a Canadian soldier who spends most of the war in a Japanese P.O.W. camp, wishing more than anything that he was still on his family’s sugar beet farm back in Manitoba.

In a blog post a year ago, I told about how I fought writing this book, believing it wasn’t my story to tell. How the idea wouldn’t let me go. How God showed me that it was mine to write, though it meant more research and study than I’d ever tackled. How I finally completed the 100,000-word manuscript, not knowing whether it would ever be picked up by a publisher.

Backtrack a bit further to spring of 2019. My agent encouraged me to participate in something called a Twitter Pitch. I hate Twitter. I can’t make sense of it and rarely use it. But I had three different stories to pitch, one of them Rose Among Thornes. I wrote four different pitches for each book (12 in all, each limited to 280 characters) and added appropriate hashtags. Then, as the rules allowed, I tweeted these pitches, scattering them throughout the twelve-hour window of opportunity. Here’s how it works: if any editors are interested in seeing more, they “like” your pitch, which is an invitation to send them more information about your book.

I didn’t get one “like.” Not one. I thought I must be messing up with the technology, but when I tweeted a question, one of the organizers confirmed I’d done it correctly. So much for Twitter pitches. I chalked it up to a dreadful waste of a day.

In reality, I guess it was a case of right place, wrong time.

When a whole year went by and my agent still hadn’t found a home for any of these novels, I initially ignored the Twitter pitch when it came around again this past June. Why waste my time? But for some reason, I changed my mind—with stipulations. I would pitch ONLY Rose Among Thornes, and I would use the exact pitches I’d used the previous year. I didn’t want to waste a minute reworking them, and I didn’t know how to improve them in any case.

I anticipated zero responses because, as we all know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting different results.

I may need to redefine insanity.

By the end of the day, five editors had “liked” my rerun pitches.

By the next day, two had asked to see the full manuscript.

By the following week, I was offered a contract.

And so, my good news is, Rose Among Thornes is set to release from Iron Stream Media next summer. I’m more excited to see this book in readers’ hands than anything I’ve written.

The lesson here? God’s timing. There’s no earthly explanation for why my same old Twitter pitches should have generated interest in the midst of a pandemic when they had not done so in 2019, except for one truth. It’s wrapped up in Habakkuk 2:3. “But these things I plan won’t happen right away. Slowly, steadily, surely, the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, do not despair, for these things will surely come to pass. Just be patient! They will not be overdue a single day!” (The Message)

I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but take heart. You can trust God’s timing. He’s never late. He knows best. He’s on your side.

Take it from my little bit of good news.