The Port Moody Public Library created the White Pines Local Author Collection to highlight and support local authors, poets, and illustrators from our community. We launched the collection in May 2019 with 12 inaugural authors.
Now, with over 50 authors, the collection has grown to house even more thought-provoking and unique submissions from members of our community. We’re introducing four of the most recent authors to our collection, who shared with us some of their personal journeys with writing.
You can browse our White Pines Collection online to place holds on items, or in person.
We are introducing four authors from our collection, who shared with us some of their writing processes. To start off, we have our two newest authors.
Natalia is a local Port Moody author who loves iced coffee, graphic design, and poetry. She wants to inspire and encourage her readers to see the best in themselves and in what life has to offer. Natalia's writing style has an easy flow from one line to the next. Her first published works are What Do Animals Dream About? and Ocean Deep: A Poetry Collection.
This sweet bedtime story lets us in on what cute little animals dream about. The colourful pages and adorable characters can make any child forget the worries of the day and be ready for bed. This book includes cute and easy rhymes, vibrant illustrations, and a sweet ending that will make kids want to see what they will dream about.
Borrow What Do Animals Dream About? from the Library.
Natalia’s favourite part about writing is discovering the story while she writes it and following where it leads her. During the writing process, she also discovers the underlying message that she intends her work to have.
She has been writing poetry since she learned how to hold a pen, and hoped to share her poems with the world someday. Being a published writer means that a lot of people get to discover her work and she gets to leave her mark with this simple message: Life is beautiful.
Pamela K. Turner, has an M.Sc. in Clinical Psychology and has been a counsellor working with children and families for over two decades. She is also a mother of three who has lived on the West Coast of Canada since 1992. She has been writing stories since she was a teen and decided to work at publishing her writing, in addition to her work as a counsellor and as a jewelry maker and silversmith. Her first published children’s book combines her experience as a counsellor and as a mom, to provide a sweet message of how to not overlook special family moments. She is currently putting the finishing touches on her second children’s picture book and is in the first editing phase of her debut YA novel.
Rain for Christmas tells the story of a young girl named Chloe who is tired of rain and soggy, grey holidays on the West Coast. She yearns for a white snowy Christmas and decides to elicit help from the "big man" himself to ensure that Christmas is perfect. Her efforts to get the Christmas she desires comes with unforeseen consequences as she learns about the limits and power of Christmas magic.
Borrow Rain for Christmas from the Library.
Pamela's favourite part about writing is the process of transporting herself to an imaginary world where anything is possible, creating that world, and then seeing others transported to the places that she has created. She thinks writing, and by extension reading, is an immensely important self-care activity that is a great way to reduce stress and feel inspired in your own life.
Pamela has been writing and journaling stories since she was 10 years old. It has always been a creative outlet for her. After she became a mother, she found that her children would often say cute things or ask sweet or funny questions that she would eventually turn into stories. Her kids often asked her for a bedtime story from her “mind”, rather than from a book. Eventually, she turned one into a paper version that her oldest asked her to read to her grade two class for show and tell. The response from the kids was wonderful and so her journey to being an author began. This journey has been protracted due to car accident injuries to her back and brain, but she is determined to follow this dream.
We also have two returning authors who have added some of their newest works to our collection.
Lyn E. Ayre has been writing poetry for sixty-two years. She’s been published in a few anthologies (A Summer’s Day in 2001 and New Beginnings in 2020) and has published her memoir—Fragments of a Shattered Soul Made Whole (2018). After her husband passed, she wrote her feelings down and now has also published a book of 55 essays and poems—Waking Up to the Life Left in Me (2016). Lyn is the author of 50 books. She has two children and three grandchildren, and has called Coquitlam her home for the last 28 years.
Lyn and her husband enjoyed watching mysteries and crime scene investigation shows, so she began writing one. Six years later, she finished her first foray into fiction and began a six-book series called the McClintock/Miller Murder Mysteries. Book one came out in November 2021. You can find Lyn online at https://lynayre.com/, on Twitter, on Instagram, or on Facebook.
Writing has saved Lyn’s spirit from a crushing blow. Faith, family and friends are her three other constants - a trinity of lighted candles illuminating the way. Her husband of 29 years passed away at the end of 2016 after an eight-year pilgrimage with cancer. But somehow, she didn’t go with him. She had another chapter waiting for her. She hopes that sharing it will help someone along the way. Now that her life has grown and expanded beyond the confines of that one horrific point in time, she has discovered that even though her grief is always there, her world has become bigger. Her outside life has outpaced the inner grief so that it is just a part of her world and not the whole thing.
Borrow Waking Up to the Life Left in Me from the Library.
Who doesn’t like a good mystery or heart-pounding romance? Now you can have both in Murder on Belcut Mountain. It has everything you could want – two assailants, several victims, three detectives, and a few romances steeping and brewing on the periphery. The scenic setting of the fictional town of Artson is a vibrant backdrop to the activities of our two lead detectives, Iain McClintock and Susan Miller. They couldn’t be more different, yet they work so well together. When Iain goes out of town on family business, George O’Donnell steps in to partner with Susan who is on the trail of a serial killer. Romance blooms as the dead bodies pile up. Iain’s love for his wife, Rosie, deepens as they join forces to fight an unseen foe and come to terms with a devastating medical diagnosis. This is book one in a six-part series.
Borrow Murder on Belcut Mountain from the Library.
Everything. Here’s a few examples of things she has written about: A pile of vegetable peelings; opening her curtain in the morning and being shocked to see snow and branches piled against it; walking out to her van and the beauty of the dew drops hanging from the Japanese maple almost causing her to weep. Life is startling, intriguing, frustrating, and it all comes out in poetry. She writes real life.
Lyn also writes fiction and finds it wonderful just to spin a yarn, make it up as she goes along, and be fanciful in a believable way. Her topic of choice is romantic suspense and loves the balance of these two opposing forces. She is inspired by snippets of conversation she hears while walking about on her daily round. She sees something slightly suspicious and spins it to the end in her head and then writes a story about it.
Life inspires her.
Lyn has multiple health challenges and most of them come with energy and pain issues. She has set aside Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as her writing days but that only happens if she is able to sit up, type or use the dictate function, and can tolerate the light from the computer screen. She finds it frustrating to be so blocked but it’s something she needs to accept and not waste her energy on.
As far as ideas, she’s full of them. Lyn has an online journal where she puts all of the topics or sentences that have come to her so she can use them at a later date. She doesn’t worry about a blank screen as there are so many aspects of writing to work on that she just does something else until the flow is back for the main story. Worry is the thing she needs to be worried about. The other aspects she might work on include: character profiles, evidence sheets, alibi sheets, timeline chart, and townspeople outlines.
Life challenges her.
Jim Peacock has been a resident of Port Moody for 60 years. Born in High River, Alberta in 1931, he had a 15-year career in journalism in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver and New York before starting in public relations in 1965 in Vancouver. He has written and published three books: the first being a memoir Remember the Good Times (2019) and the second was a collection of heteronyms and homonyms Fun with Words (2020). The third is Hey, Mister Bear (2022), the story of an encounter with a black bear in downtown Port Coquitlam. The latter two are illustrated by Dawn Mattson.
A true story about an encounter with a black bear in downtown Port Coquitlam while the author was riding a mobility scooter on his way to breakfast.
Borrow Hey, Mister Bear! from the Library.
Writing has been part of his career from his first full-time job in journalism as a junior sports reporter. He can’t point to any one thing that inspired him to write the books now in the White Pines collection. The memoir was completed after a little goading from a fellow resident in his Port Coquitlam retirement residence. Fun with Words resulted from years of discussing words with two grand children and Hey, Mister Bear! was prompted by the encounter with a black bear in the heart of the city, as described in the book.
He finds writing to be a fun way to spend time. The main challenge to writing is the research process to ensure accuracy.
The Port Moody Public Library created the White Pines Local Author Collection to highlight and support local authors, poets, and illustrators from our community. We launched the collection in May 2019 with 12 inaugural authors. Learn more about this collection and how you can become a White Pines Local Author.