By: Jim Blundell, Editor
West Side Story
WeCan@cogeco.ca
December 2009
LITERATURE OUR NEW INDUSTRY
A new cottage industry has taken root in West St. Catharines, not to bottle strawberry jam nor to knit woollen wussy warmers, but to produce superior literature.
Rosalind Went was born in Britain and spent a good part of her childhood in Wales and England before coming to Canada. Twenty years ago, she settled in West St. Catharines where she lives with her husband and daughters. She is the driving force behind this literary cottage industry.
Rosalind has written computer courseware and taught computer-related courses since 1985. In the 1990s she wrote articles and reviews that appeared in a Canadian trade publication.
Although writing is her prime focus, she is also a digital photography enthusiast, self-publishing softcover and hardcover books of her many and varied collections.
A keen interest in music inspired her CD, “The India & China Tea Company,” a collection of digitally-created instrumentals. The short score for Harbinger of Secrets was composed to accompany the book’s trailer (see her website at www.rosalindwent.ca).
She might have gone the traditional route in publishing her recent first novel, Harbinger of Secrets, but the publishing industry these days is a tough nut to crack, especially with the myriad options now available to authors through reputable self-publishing sites. Even after noted Canadian author and biographer Elspeth Cameron wrote a glowing foreword for her novel, Rosalind eventually decided to take matters into her own hands and make things happen. For that reason, she chose to self-publish and says now that she would certainly not hesitate to do so again.
Wrote Elspeth Cameron of the book, “This story of a woman who proves equal to her risky job in a man’s world is not only a vivid recreation of the war years in England, it is surprisingly relevant for today’s world where women must often navigate the demands of career at the same time as battling the forces of passion within.”
Rosalind is effusive in her appreciation of another West End woman, Allison MacIntosh, who helped greatly with preparation of Harbinger of Secrets. She noted she is grateful to, among others: Allison MacIntosh and Ryan Izokaitis, graphic designers extraordinaire, for the book’s cover design, and to Ms MacIntosh for her “painstaking care for all text designs and typesetting.”
Apart from being a wonderful example of one person’s ability to challenge the existing literary system, Harbinger of Secrets is a great read. This novel is based during the Second World War and all the key characters are involved in wartime espionage, but beyond those points, it is less a war story than a study of human interactions in very stressful situations. The author has been extremely skillful in weaving her fictional wartime events around factual wartime occurrences. Striving for realism and authenticity through detailed research was of the utmost importance.
In the story itself, one unanticipated kiss on a rainy London night between a Royal Navy Captain and the story’s heroine sets off a series of events for which no-one was prepared. That tryst is of more importance to the novel’s plot than is the chapter detailing the sinking of the Navy’s newest battleship because it dramatically alters the lives of the key characters.
Harbinger of Secrets is a captivating novel, difficult to put down once you’ve started.
To order Harbinger of Secrets you can go to the author’s website at www.rosalindwent.ca.
It is also available through all Amazon.com sites: the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan. It is also available through Barnes & Noble as well as Target in the U.S.A., Lulu.com, and distribution giant, Baker & Taylor. It will also be available in eBook format.
Rosalind is currently writing a non-fiction book titled, In the Shade. This pictorial essay is the story of the late Bruce Bradley, a 1940s St. Catharines Collegiate teenager who shot remarkably artistic photographs while in the early stages of Schizophrenia.
The author is also contemplating her next (untitled) novel, about a woman within the French Resistance in German-occupied France.
