Monday 18 June 2012

Melanie Murray's place


Melanie Murray is the author of For Your Tomorrow: The Way of an Unlikely Soldier, which follows her family as they try to make sense of their profound loss after her nephew, Jeff, is killed on a road in Afghanistan. Quill and Quire says of her book, "Murray's powerful work contains the emotional resonance currently lacking in much of the writing about our involvement in the Afghan conflict..." Melanie lives in Kelowna and teaches at Okanagan College. You can read more about Melanie here. Below, she describes her productive place to write.



Alma-Cliff Cottage in Malagash, Nova Scotia

My writer’s haven for six weeks every summer is a small cottage on the Northumberland Strait. I write at a table in the screened-in front porch overlooking the water. It’s quiet, but for the ever-changing symphony of wind rustling through saltwater maples, waves rushing on the rocky shore, and seagulls screeching over the blue-grey sea. My days are planned around the time of the low tide when I can walk the wide sandbar that stretches for a kilometre to McInnis’s Point. These solitary strolls in the sun, wind and rain are my meditation and inspiration.  As if borne in on the waves themselves, ideas surface, images appear, sentences take shape. And I can’t wait to get back and write them down. 

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