Dear Reader
When I read Jean Little's Orphan at My Door, my first question was why hadn't there been awesome diary novels like this when I was a kid? My second was, could I write a Dear Canada novel too?
When I was asked to write Prisoners in the Promised Land it was a dream come true!
I am a librarian as well as an author and in case you don't know, that means that I am a detective. I track down secret bits of history and bring them back to life.
My family had a secret. My grandfather, as a teen, had been interned by Canada in World War I – not for anything he'd done, but because he'd been born in the wrong place. As bad as his experience was, when I found that some children had been interned too, I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I imagined a 12-year-old girl, Anya Soloniuk, and wondered what internment would be like for her.
I travelled to Montreal and walked through the streets where my Anya would have lived before she was arrested. I checked old maps and records to recreate Anya's world.
I flew to Spirit Lake and explored. I'm glad I did. I found out something that had never been written in history books. When Anya's camp was built, the government forced out a group of First Nations people who had lived at Spirit Lake for centuries. That secret bit of history became central to Anya's story in Prisoners in the Promised Land.
That is what is so wonderful about the Dear Canada diaries. They allow each of us — writers and readers alike — to step back into time and to unlock those secret doors.
- Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
