Yvonne Wilson
Position: Vice President and Senior Editor
Yvonne Wilson has been teacher, editor, and writer. In Canada she has lived and worked in Quebec and British Columbia as well as in her native New Brunswick. She has also lived and worked in Australia and New Zealand.
Since leaving the University of New Brunswick Saint John, where she helped establish the Writing Lab, she has given courses for the New Brunswick Consortium of Writers and edited fiction manuscripts for Consortium members.
At present she is the Senior Editor of Trinity Enterprise Inc. in Saint John. She has four novels and a book on how to write so that a publisher will be interested, coauthored by Allison Mitcham. She teaches writing at seminars, and is happiest in that role.
Q: What inspired you to write your books?
A: The first book I ever wrote has never been published, but whenever I read it, I still think its pretty good, and maybe I’ll make an e–book out of it one of these days. Its theme is social justice, which I must have been interested in at a very young age, as the story is based on childhood memories of a refugee who spent a summer in the New Brunswick village where I lived.
Red Dragon Square took thirty years to write. I began it when I was a teacher in a small outback high school in Western Australia. The boy Egan is based on a beautiful, tragic figure, an Aboriginal boy I met in that school. I thought I was going to write only about that boy, but the other characters took over, and the years took over, and after three rewrites to get the point of view right, the book was finished and published in the year 2000. The first of the three parts is the Australian part. The middle part was inspired by wanderings in various places. The final part, in the mountains, was inspired by the Southern Alps of New Zealand.
Setting is always important to my stories and every place is based on my experience, but they are not "real" places in the sense that a reader could go there and take a photograph. They are amalgams of real places I have experienced. I never, however, try to write about a specific place I have never seen, nor do I try to imagine a fantastic place. I stick to real geography and physical realities.
While Red Dragon Square was incubating, one year I went to a Christmas party where there were five children. They functioned as a group, just like one family, and solved their little problems neatly. Their problems included the fact that two of them shared the name Heather so, Heather and who Heather.
As with Red Dragon Square, I thought I was writing a short story about the Christmas party, but my stories always turn out to be short novels. The party became the last chapter of Slipper Hbr. which was published by Wildthings in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1990.
While I was writing Slipper Hbr., which is a very happy, summer story for children, I began to think about isolated communities and how people who have been isolated for a long time react to new ideas. The result was A Light Above the Sun, a story for readers of all ages. The main characters are children, but the theme concerns people of all ages, and all places. Slipper Hbr. has become Sinjin Station (Coast Guard) a thousand years in the future.
After A Light Above the Sun I knew I was going to write a novel about climate change, but that was all I knew; the setting, characters, plot – no idea, till Boxing Day, 2000, which came in with gale winds to add to the strongest tides in a hundred years. I stood in my eighth floor window at the top of the town and watched the sea surge over the Partridge Island breakwater and pound the shore. When the light failed about four in the afternoon, I sat down and wrote the first chapter of Come to Say Good–Bye. The place would be based on Saint John, New Brunswick, the characters had presented themselves and I knew where the story would begin that afternoon in the window and end, in the Arctic ice.
The Editor Makes House Calls, with Allison Mitcham, came next, my only entry into the world of non–fiction. That book grew out of a need to have reference material for writers that the publishing house could use to teach would–be authors, most of whom make the same mistakes as all the others. I was tired of teaching the same lessons over and over again.
Allison and I had great fun writing that book.
The Trinity Romances were sandwiched in among the other books. I wrote Double Takeout to see if I could do it. I found I could. Writing romances was relaxing fun. Nine White Horses, Twenty–Seven Hours in September, Islands in a Bay, and Blackberry Light followed. And there’s a sixth partly finished.
The Trinity Romances take place in Trinity Royal (Saint John, NB) and nearby Hamilton Harbour (Dipper Harbour) and tell stories about a single set of characters, though the main characters are always new and all the stories stand alone.
I use the pseudonym Briann Stuart for these stories.
Three more stories are in the making besides the romances. A Deeper Sea, almost finished, probably contains the best I’ll ever do, but Beyond the Reef will run that a close second. The titles give away the influences. After all, I was born in this old, port city.
Titles By This Author:
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Yvonne Wilson 
