Local author Anne Theresa Halsall was inspired by her favourite place to create a world for readers and hope for young people.
She recently self-published The Willow Trail, a juvenile fiction novel named for a trail on Scout Island in Williams Lake, which until a recent fall, she visited every day.
“It all started when I was walking along the causeway on a cold winter morning,” she said.
“I looked over to the Willow Trail and the words just came like that.”
The book took about seven years to complete, interspersed with other projects, but the inspiration was definitely local.
She began to take notes and invent characters on her walks and the story continued to flow.
“I would come and sit by the water and I would come and write eight or nine pages single-spaced without hardly lifting my pen off the paper,” she said. “It would just pour out of me.”
“The characters just kept coming knocking on my door.”
The story is a tale of two friends on fantastic adventures with a variety of themes and messages, according to Halsall.
“I’m constantly getting messages from that book,” she said.
From real-life connections like addressing the heavy growth of weeds in Williams Lake, to more insubstantial themes like the power of love to overcome fear, readers of different ages will likely take away something different, said Halsall.
The novel is classified as juvenile fiction for ages 10 and up.
It actually began as a children’s picture book, but when she shared her draft of the book at the Surrey Writer’s Festival one year, she met with an author there who told her the characters were so rich they needed more space and she should expand it into a novel.
“I had to elaborate and elongate,” explains Halsall.
Writing is something Halsall has been doing her whole life.
Until The Willow Trail, she wrote non-fiction, but through her daily walks, she said she felt a connection to the magical unknown aspects of nature and she became even more inspired when she was teaching some creative writing classes at Scout Island.
Halsall has said she will donate part of the proceeds of her book to the place she loves so much, so once the book sells enough copies to cover the costs of printing, she plans on donating to Scout Island.
In the new year, she plans to finish an adult novel she is working on which will rely on some of the same themes of parallel worlds and traveling through dreams.