O.R. Melling Canada Day Guest Post

 HAPPY CANADA DAY!

I'm not sure if all of my followers know who O.R. Melling is... but I hope that after reading this post and learning a bit about her books, that many of you will pick one up and fall into a magical world of folklore and faeries.

The Chronicles of Faerie is made up of four books (which can be read as standalone books or a series. I read them as a series a few years ago and honestly it's worth reading them all together.

I would really like to thank Ms. Melling for guest posting today about what it means to be Canadian! It has been a dream come true to have her write something for my blog. She is such a lovely person and I hope that you all fall in love with her writing from even this small post.

Canada Day – O.R. Melling July 1, 2011

Alas, I’m missing my family’s Canada Day barbecue here in Ireland as I am off to a retreat in the heart of the countryside. But this request to write a post for the day itself leads me to think about what it means to be Canadian and how it has affected my writing. Most of my books to date are set in Ireland, the country of my birth, a place to which I have a deep mystical connection. But Canada is where I grew up, where all my childhood memories belong, where I first fell in love (mon amour québecois), where I went to university, and where I was an officer in the Armed Forces Naval Reserve for several years. Canada played a huge part in my life and continues to call me over the ocean!

The Chronicles of Faerie is a series that can be read in any order and, in fact, each book is a stand alone. The first three books in the series are set in Ireland but the final and the biggest – The Book of Dreams – is set in Canada. I call it my love song to Canada. When I began writing it I set out, like my character Dana, to find out if there was any magic in Canada. Could I possibly feel the same deep mystical connection with Canada that I had with Ireland? It wasn’t long before I discovered that the answer was “yes!”. To begin with, I had been away from Canada for several years. The longing of the exile, normally felt for the land of my birth, had come upon me, but this time for the land where I grew up. Images of green forests, golden plains and rocky mountains began to haunt me in dreams and brief visions. Long-lost friends suddenly turned up – via the Internet – to influence the book, including Bette, a Native American who had left Toronto to live on reserve lands and Jean-Francois, a Québecois. They told me stories, sent me books, invited me to visit. Then the Canadian Children’s Book Centre invited me to tour the Northwest Territories for Children’s Book Week in the middle of the winter. I stood on a frozen lake and watched the Northern Lights weave colours through the night sky. From a small propeller plane, I saw a wolf run across a snowy field and into the forest. It was all part of the magic. Canadian magic. And it all went into my book.

            I don’t know if I will ever return to live in Canada or if I will only continue to visit. Who knows what the future holds? This I do know, however: Canadian dreams and Canadian magic are part of the very fabric of my being.

You can find O.R. Melling at her offical website, her author blog, or her book blog.