How Historical Fiction Brings Forgotten Women to Life | Cinda Gault

How can historical fiction bring forgotten women back to life—and what can their courage teach women today?

In this fascinating episode of Women Like Me Stories & Business, Julie Fairhurst sits down with Canadian author and speaker Cinda Gault to explore historical fiction, courageous female characters, women’s history, creative writing, and the power of telling stories that official records left behind.

Cinda shares her remarkable journey from helping establish a rape crisis center and domestic violence shelter to working as a prison guard, earning a PhD in English, teaching Canadian literature, and becoming a published author.

Her historical novels celebrate adventurous women who refuse to accept the lives prescribed for them. Through stories inspired by women such as Isobel Gunn and Marie-Anne Gaboury, Cinda reveals how research and imagination can restore depth, humanity, and possibility to women who were barely acknowledged in historical records.

In this conversation, Julie and Cinda discuss:

• Why brave and unconventional women make compelling characters
• How historical fiction can recover women’s forgotten stories
• Isobel Gunn’s decision to disguise herself as a man in 1806
• Marie-Anne Gaboury’s journey into Canada’s fur-trade country
• Why women’s experiences were often recorded through men’s eyes
• Annie Oakley, Gabriel Dumont, the Jesse James Gang, and the Louis Riel Rebellion
• The difference between wanting to write and becoming a writer
• Why real life cannot simply be placed on a page and called a story
• How structure, editing, and professional guidance strengthen a book
• What rejection taught Cinda about becoming a published author
• Why women sometimes limit themselves through other people’s expectations
• The responsibility that comes with personal freedom
• Artificial intelligence, critical thinking, and the future of storytelling
• What Cinda hopes her granddaughters inherit from earlier generations of women

Cinda also shares candid advice for women who want to write their life stories but feel inexperienced, intimidated, or afraid to begin.

She explains why there is an important difference between journaling for personal healing, writing one meaningful book, and developing the long-term craft required to become a professional writer. Her message is honest: your story matters, but turning life into a book requires choices, structure, skill, and a willingness to leave some things out.

Cinda is the author of:

This Godforsaken Place
A Small Compass
Everything I Hope For
Past Convictions

Her work blends Canadian history, courageous women, adventure, romance, resistance, and the timeless struggle to build a meaningful life. Her official website lists these novels and describes her work as historical fiction centred on women’s adventures, courage, autonomy, and possibility.

If you enjoy conversations about women’s history, historical fiction, writing books, strong female characters, Canadian history, personal freedom, and women finding their voices, this episode is for you.

Subscribe to Women Like Me Stories & Business for inspiring life stories, practical business tools, writing guidance, and honest conversations with experts and courageous women from around the world.

Come for the conversation. Leave with a story, lesson, or idea that helps you move forward.

Learn more about Cinda Gault:
website: https://www.cindagault.com
FB: CindaGault
Instagram: @Cinda Gault
X: Cinda Gault

Story Coaching. Sales Confidence. Podcast Visibility.
Linkedin: Cinda Gault

Subscribe to Julie Fairhurst and Women Like Me:
@juliefairhurstWLM

If this conversation stirred something in you… good. That’s where change begins.

Make sure you’re subscribed, share this with someone who needs it, and if you’re ready to tell your story, step into your voice, or build a life that actually feels like yours… You’re in the right place.

I’m Julie Fairhurst, and this is where stories turn into power.

Go to my website if you would like to be a guest on the Women Like Me Stories & Business in the toolbar click Let's Podcast

Julie's Website

Transcript

Welcome And Big Themes

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Women Like Me Stories in Business. I'm your host, Julie Fairhurst, and today I'm here with Cecinda Galt. Did I spell, did I pronounce that right? Yes, you did. Perfect. Okay. So she is an author, a speaker, whose work celebrates the adventures woman. So I'm interested in getting into that. It's the kind of women who do not simply accept what life has handed them, but they choose to question, they take risks, and sometimes rebel their way into becoming who they really want to be. So today we're going to talk about brave women on the page, the voices history left, too quiet, and the power of telling women's stories and how fiction can reveal a deeper truth than dates and records ever could. So, Cinda, thank you so much for being here and welcome. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Aw, thanks. Okay. So I I like to begin with finding out a little bit more about you and how you became a writer.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Okay, well, it was a circuitous route. I did not start out wanting to be a writer. I have always

A Circuitous Path To Writing

SPEAKER_02 1:38

followed my interests. And that led me in the 70s to be at university undergrad in psychology. And I was one of those young feminists running around setting up rape crisis centers and shelters for victims of domestic violence. So a group of women and I started a university club called Women in Crisis. And that's how we started sort of getting into the issues and understanding them. And I became the first executive director, and it was my job to set up the a shelter, get funding for it, get community support for it, which I did. And when I finished that, I thought I had, you know, spent a lot of time working with victims. I'd like to go check out some perpetrators. So I became a prison guard at a local correctional center for men in the maximum security wing that had sex offenders and arsonists and people just with mental problems. And I did that for just over a year and then went down to U of T and did an MA in criminology. And it would domestic violence was my thesis. And I graduated from that, went out, got the job of my dreams as director of a social service agency, and I hated it. Oh, and what I realized was that I do not like managing people. I do not like it when it's my job to make sure other people are doing their jobs. That strikes me as what a mummy does, and they were just frankly not cute enough to deserve a mummy. So I had to sit down and think, okay, any job is going to be, you know, it's going to come with its challenges that way. And what would be important enough for me to be willing to go through anything because it uh felt that meaningful to me. And I had always loved reading and writing. And so I decided then that I would become a writer. But of course, I needed to figure out how to make a living at the same time. So I decided I would write a romance. And I had never read one before, but that's what people were making, you know, a living doing. So I started consuming them by the dozens. And that came, that became my first, my first novel called Past Convictions. And

Learning Romance And Revising Decades Later

SPEAKER_02 3:38

interestingly, last year I, well, I got my rights back a couple of years ago from Harlequin. I mean, it went all around the world, different languages. It was a it was a lot of fun. And my current publisher said that she would like to republish it. So I had the experience of after 37 years going back and revising my old work. So when I did that original manuscript, there were no computers. I did it on a manual typewriter. So I had, and there were landlines and there were telephone booths and there were tape recorders and all, you know, all the stuff that before the computer revolution. So I needed to update, you know, one no one was texting anyone. You know, you weren't carrying around a telephone. So I needed to revise the technology in it. But one thing that was kind of nice to see was the the love story didn't change. So apparently we fall in love like we always did, which is kind of nice.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

And so that was my first publication. It was it, I decided that I'd become a writer, and that was the first thing that I did about that. Then the second decision I made was I needed to go back to school in English. I had gone through in social sciences, but English is very different. You know, you can't, you don't have your thesis statement up front in your essay. If you said that, they people would know who done it at the beginning of the story and you wouldn't have a

Returning To School And Finding Fire

SPEAKER_02 4:54

story. So I wanted to know my tradition and I wanted to, you know, to go back and learn the classics and that sort of thing, which sent me into going back to school, doing an MA in English instead of criminology. And I caught fire academically, went all the way through and did a PhD in English at York University. And my uh thesis was analyzing Canadian women writers during the identity years of 1965 to 1980, meaning that the social movements that were on everybody's mind then were second-wave feminism and uh Canadian nationalism, aka Pierre Trudeau rather than Justin Trudeau. So the the whole kind of feel-good about being Canadian time. So I analyzed three women writers who were publishing during that time, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, and Marion Engel. Uh so that's what I did academically. And then the third main decision I made at the time was to have my babies. So I had two sons, and we all basically went to school together as I was bringing them up, and then they mercifully went off to university, and I graduated, and so I started teaching, and I had more time to get back to some writing, and that's when I started doing my historical fiction. So that's how I came to it. I my two boys each had a granddaughter and for me, their own daughters in 2023. So I have two little three-year-old granddaughters who I'm very involved with. And so when we talk about women's lives, there's another generation that is directly relevant to me as we go forward. So that's when I started writing and got into the uh creating characters and researching characters that were women I admired for insisting on having the lives they found meaningful.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Wow. And I mean, you had an interesting life. So, and you I'm I'm assuming you were able to draw from all of that. For sure. Your careers and and yeah, they're interesting.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

It gives me a base of information, but plus with my academic work, I'm a Canadianist. So Canadian history became something that was very relevant to my fiction as well.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Wow, that's great. Okay, so you write stories about adventurous women. What draws you to women who are brave, determined, and willing to go against expectations?

SPEAKER_02 7:18

They're interesting. I find that women have interesting lives anyway

Why Adventurous Women Make Great Stories

SPEAKER_02 7:23

because of reproduction. I mean, that's what that's the fly in the ointment for women. They they have a whole extra layer of life to figure out. And they don't necessarily have to have babies to do it. They, you know, women make decisions over whether they're going to reproduce. If they do and they don't, that all has complicating repercussions to it. So I I don't write stories out of any kind of ideology. I just I find interesting stories or they occur to me about women who have interesting lives and who are interesting people. And so that's that's where I start from. I I don't have any even historical fiction. I've read I've written three historical fiction books because I, well, two of them I've I discovered through research. That's the first one that's Godforsaken place, and the second one a small compass. And they are both 19th century stories. So obviously I learned about that world through research. And then the third one, everything I hope for, was in the 70s, and I lived through the 70s. So I was able to create a world in a different way. It was out of my own, my own sensibility and experience of it rather than learning about it historically. And so I just there's those are the three historical ones that I've written. The next story is going to be more contemporary. I've got a children's book coming out this year. So I've and I've done the romance. So I I I have no particular type of book that I feel constrained to write. It's just, it's far as far as I'm concerned, it's the storytelling that drives me. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Wow. So with your with your PhD background, studying women writers, what did that teach you about women's voices and how they have been remembered or forgotten?

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Well, the you know, any writer's

Who Gets Remembered In Literature

SPEAKER_02 9:14

greatest fear is obscurity. So, you know, and and there is a generational interest and that in certain authors, and then that passes, and then a very few of them end up being remembered for different things. So in the 80s, I used to read DH Lawrence, every D. H. Lawrence book I could get my hands on. Well, he's not so trendy today. So it's not just something that happens to women, but women have certainly become uh the readers and writers of our day in the sense that, and I really learned this in writing romance, women are the consumers of storytelling and the romance genre, you know, it's huge compared to everything else. And that is all driven by women. Yes. And and that came part and parcel historically as writing became more popular in the popular rather than the elitist sense. And you had people who could actually buy it, you know, women started having money to be able to buy it. But there were lots of many years, even with popular literature, that you could go to a drugstore and you could rent a romance, for example, and and take it back. So it was very cheap to be able to do that. And it's women who have really driven the whole bulk of the reading audience.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Yeah, yeah. So your novels feature women who are trying to live meaningful lives despite consequences. So why is that theme important to you?

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Well, I think that it is, you know, the the assumption about women's lives, and you know,

Freedom, Expectations, And Self Limits

SPEAKER_02 10:54

it comes from somewhere, is that they are constrained by social expectation. And we are lucky to be able to be living in Western civilization where women, especially like in the last 50 years, have had constraints taken off of them. So, you know, back then a woman couldn't get a mortgage, couldn't open up, you know, a bank account, couldn't, if you got married and you were a teacher, you couldn't teach anymore. So there were many constraints at that, you know, before, let's say, the 1950s. But after the 1950s, so much changed legally and policy-wise that today there is little, very little societal structural constraint on women. So I think a lot of the constraint that they might feel is actually social rather than anything that is actually going to be a barrier to them. So that becomes the challenge. And you can be self-limiting as far as what you think other people's expectations are. And in a time like back in the 70s, for example, you'd had everybody else telling you what you were supposed to do, and especially young women, because people were worried about their sexual reproductive capacity. So you had people you knew telling you what to do all the time.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Now, because of technology, you have people you don't know telling you what to do all the time. So the thing in there that is so important to recognize is that you are a volitional creature. And women are volitional individuals now with the more autonomy than they've ever had. So if you are limited, it's because in some way you have bought into that. And it is unnecessary. And when I learned about, for example, Isabel Gunn, she's one of the characters in A Small Compass, that was in 1806. And she was in Orkney, Scotland, 26-year-old young woman, on at that time, all the men were away. They were either gang pressed into fighting a Napoleon's war, or they were working for the Hudson's Bay Company because it was in Strom Nest that the Hudson's Bay hired their employees out of. So she cuts her hair, disguises herself as a man, gets on the ship and comes over here and works as a man for 18 months before she's outed as a woman 1,800 miles inland for a trading post in Pembina. And she was able to do all that because not only did she decide to do it, but she got help from a man. I believe she must have gotten help from a man. I I read another novel that was written about her that assumed that she got on that ship all by herself and nobody knew her. I find that very hard to believe because Stromness is only 2,500 people now. And I don't know if you're from a small town or you know somebody from a small town, but they get up in your business pretty fast. Yes. And they want to know who you are and who you're connected to. And everybody knows someone who knows someone who knows someone connected, whatever. So I do believe that she had helped getting on that ship and and came over here. And that was very much against what social expectations were at the time. And uh she was still uh willing to take whatever consequences she needed to take for that.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Yeah. Wow. When you were when you were talking, I I thought back to I I was in sales, I was a realtor in my past life for 34 years, and I've retired from that now. And I remember pulling title searches from houses where people had lived for 40, 50 years of their life, and it would say, you know, John Smith Masonary or whatever he did. Yeah. Rose Smith, his wife.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

Yes. Yes. And she would be called Mrs. John Smith. That's right. You know, that's right. Yes. So yes, the the the the changes that we have seen in our lifetime are are just dramatic. So it it you can't be you can't be complaining about the same things now as 50, 60 years ago, because life for women is dramatically different and there are new problems now that have have come up. And because I mean, studies show that women are less happy now than they were then. Why? You know, you have you have generations of children that are having anxiety problems and depression problems. Why? You have women who are having a very difficult time managing both a family and a career. There are still only 24 hours in a day, you know, no matter what your aspirations are. And if you aren't there taking care of kids, somebody else is taking care of them. So those are all challenges I see my daughter-in-law's struggling with, you know, because it is very much a challenge to do that. Women want an intellectual life as well as a family life, as well as a romantic life. That's a hard bunch of stuff to fit into one life.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Yes, absolutely. How much of becoming ourselves comes from deciding who we will and will not listen to?

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Well, that is understanding who you are. And that's your job, you know. If you

Taking Responsibility For Your Choices

SPEAKER_02 16:17

if you know what you want that comes from knowing who you are, and someone's telling you you can't be that, then the problem is mechanical. You know, how am I going to support myself? Or how am I going to go and do what I want to do if someone is able to put some kind of obstacle in my way. But if you if you know who you are and you know what you want, there's really no excuse to not do that and be that. And so I think part of what we're reckoning with now as women is the responsibility of freedom. If you can do whatever you want and you are now responsible to do whatever you want, uh who are you going to blame if you're not happy? You know, there there are there are all kinds of, you know, you can have hardship in romance. Well, if you're if you're if you have the freedom to pick who you want, you know, it can always be bad luck, bad choice, bad decision making, but you know, it's yours. And so, and and I think there are consequences to making decisions, having enough power to make decisions, and part of uh kind of being a fully fledged human being is to take responsibility for your own freedom. And yeah, we always thought in the women's movement, the whole point of the women's movement was to make it so that it wasn't necessary. We're all human beings, and as long as we can all be autonomous human beings, you don't need a women's movement. So, you know, things have changed dramatically as far as the women's movement in many ways, some good, some bad. Yeah, but I don't think anyone would deny that women have far more freedom and autonomy and personal power now than they did 50 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Yeah, can you tell us how you decide on which woman you're going to focus on in history?

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Well, it's it it is not a um a decision-making

Discovering Isabel Gunn And Marie Anne

SPEAKER_02 18:22

process so much as a discovery. When I, for example, in I was reading a 19th century journal for a fur trader, and I was actually reading it for research for my first book, which is called This God Forsaken Place, which was later in the century, it was 1885. So this was much earlier, 1806. And the fur trader, his name was Alexander Henry, and by all accounts, he was uh he was he was quite a character, but it was his job as the head of the fur trading company for the Northwest fur trading company in Pambina to keep a journal of everything that happened at at the fur trading post every day. So what what the the you know what the hunting was, what the trading was, what you know, the what the chores were around the place. They had to make their own furniture, they had to make grow their own food. I mean, they were really on their own. And so one day there was an asterisk up at the top of the page, and down at the bottom in a footnote, it said an extraordinary thing happened today. After dinner, one they had invited some Hudson's Bay Company employees over for Christmas dinner. It was because it was just after Christmas. And he said, one of the Orkney lads, which were the young men who were hired by Hudson's Bay Company as their employees, asked if he could stay behind and warm himself on the hearth. So I said that was fine, but I was going off to bed. And then a short time later, there were lamentations from this room, and one of my men came up and said, You need to come down here. And I walked into the room, and instead of it being an Orkney lad, it was a young woman giving birth on the hearth. Well, my head exploded when I read that because I thought, oh my God, here's a story that's just dying to be told. Yes. So I researched who it was, and it was Isabel Gunn. And to my dismay, I learned that another writer had already written a book called a novel called Isabel Gunn. So I went and read it, and I was shocked at how differently that writer saw this story compared to how I saw the story. And so I thought, all right, I'll just write it the way I imagine it. And I was well along the research path for that when I discovered there was another woman, Marie Anne Gabry, who was from Masquinanger, Quebec. And her husband, uh Jean-Baptiste Lagimondiere, worked for the uh Northwest Company. So that was, they were rivals to the Hudson's Bay Company. And he had been out there for seven years and had his pay, and he wanted to come back and buy a farm. So he came back to Masquinanger, where Marie Ann had remained unmarried. She was 26, that was very old, to not be married, but she swore she was not going to be a farmer's wife. Her father had been a farmer and he died in a farming accident, and her mother remarried a merchant in the village. Much nicer life. So she just decided I'm not going back to the farm. And so apparently she was drop dead gorgeous, and everybody had uh proposed to her, and she would rather be a spinster than have to live that kind of life. Well, in comes Jean-Baptiste from the West, long hair, sexy leather jacket with fringes telling about adventure and swept her off her feet. They got married quickly, and then he learned that he couldn't buy a farm because Napoleon's war made it so that the wood on people's farms was more lucrative, so they weren't selling farms. And so he had to go out west again. And she said, if you don't take me with you, she's probably pregnant by this time, you don't take me with you, you don't ever see me again. So she became the first passenger to go to be paddled by the voyageurs out west. And when I discovered that she and Isabel were in the same place, Pembana, just across the tiny Pembana River from each other, like spitting distance, seriously. And they had their babies within a week of each other. And there's no historical record of them ever having met. So there's my story. I mean, this is I'm discovering my story as I go. So I imagine them meeting and I and and have a whole, you know, as they say, hijinks and Sue once they do meet in Pembina. So that story is not me deciding who I'm going to write about. You know, I I I fumble around and and stumble over them and discover them. And then the challenge is to make something out of that.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

Wow, that is so interesting. It must have taken so much courage back in was the 1800s. 1806. Yeah. Oh, 1806.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

No, it must have. And and those they must have been very determined women. And they didn't care what the cons consequences were. They were going to have their meet and lives according to their own star. And they were willing to take whatever consequences. And then and so look what they were able to do. I mean, Marie Ann was the first passenger uh in those canoes. Well, if one had just said, oh, well, you can't do that, and she had, you know, very dutifully gone home and said, Well, I better not try then, then that whole story would not have happened. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Yeah. Wow. So interesting. So do you think fiction gives writers a way to restore women to history when the official records leave them out?

SPEAKER_02 23:45

Well, on its deepest level, as far as I'm concerned, fiction, I mean, fiction

What Storytelling Is Really For

SPEAKER_02 23:51

is storytelling. And it's the one thing every single culture on this planet does. It's the one thing basically that unifies every country because we all tell stories about ourselves. And I believe that the role of fiction and storytelling in our in our society is to make being human seem important and worthwhile. That you haul your sorry butt out of bed every morning and you know you're going to die. And somehow you need to be making this a meaningful thing over the course of your life, however long or short it's going to be. And storytelling makes people seem worthwhile. So whether that's women or men or them interacting or whatever, I think ultimately it amounts to the same thing. Historically, women have not been writers, you know, except for the last, you know, 100 years or so. So the the kinds of stories that were told, it's not as if women weren't in stories, it's was but it was women stories told by men. There were there were women writers back then, but they were not the norm. And so now you just have more women's stories coming into the into the culture and and enriching enriching it as far as as I can see.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Wow. So you I think it's your third historical novel, The God Forsaken Place. That was the first one. Oh, that was the first one. Okay. So Abigail hears her mother say that she regrets being not being

Building A Novel From True History

SPEAKER_01 25:24

adventurous enough. Yes. So that's why is that such a powerful starting point?

SPEAKER_02 25:31

Well, that was Abigail hearing that. Now Abigail is a fictional character. I had historical characters in that story, one of whom was Annie Oakley, who I have always found very uh intriguing because she was with a rifle like Wayne Gretzky was with a hockey stick. You know, she was just so much better than everybody else around her. And here she was a woman beating men at their own game. I imagine she was born with some kind of perceptual gift that she could just do this. Like and I think probably Wayne Gretzky has the same thing. So she was one of two historical characters that that people that book. But Abigail was a an invention of mine, and she was uh she and her father came over here as as teachers after Abigail's mother died, because Abigail's mother said, I lived my life in too small a compass. I just I didn't I didn't have the whatever it was, the bravery or the insistence or the determination or whatever to go beyond that. And so Abigail decides that she's going to take that as a lesson from her mother and she's going to do something more adventurous. And so she, after her mother dies, she and her father decide to go to northwestern Ontario to teach in 1885. And I chose that time because in the background on the prairies was the Louis Riel Rebellion. And I made I had them go up to a place in northwestern Ontario called Wabagoon because that's where my husband's from. And it it was the middle of nowhere back then. It's the middle of nowhere now still. And I knew the landscape. So I could have her go out and this story actually started in pieces after I had done spent 20 years bringing up my kids and a long time, you know, nine years doing my PhD. I felt like I had these two huge projects over my shoulder. So I just wanted to feel free. I wanted to imagine myself on a horse with the wind in my hair galloping over the prairies. And so I just thought for fun, I'm gonna research the Jesse James gang because they got to ride horses and do whatever they wanted. If they wanted to rob a bank, they went and rob a so I started researching them. And I was very surprised by how close Canadian and American history was at that time. That you had the Jesse James gang in Minnesota, just over the border from where Louis Riel was having his rebellion. And the the other historical figure that I was interested in was Gabriel Dumont, who was Louis Riel's right-hand general. And I found him interesting because you think of a military man being very insistent and rigid on what he wanted to do. And he was apparently a wonderful tactician to scope out what his plan would be for a military exercise. And Louis Riel kept saying to him, God doesn't want you to do that. Well, you would think that that would be a point of conflict between the two of them, but he but it wasn't. Dumont just stood down and and let Louis Riel tell him what to do. And if if Dumont had been able to do the kind of stuff he wanted to do, that could have turned out very differently. So when it failed, he he rode south and and was a sort of a refugee in the US. And then I found out that both he and Annie Oakley wound up at the Wild Bill Cody show in New York at the same time. So again, that was a discovery, you know, my head blowing up discovery. And so that gave me a uh structure for the epic journey I was gonna send Abigail on. So she's up in in Wabagoon at this time. She her father falls ill with consumption, and she's thinking, oh my god, I'm gonna get stranded out here all by myself. And the the shop owner is paying way too much attention to her. So she feels trapped, and so she buys a rifle just so that she can shoot something out back, just feel like she can act as her father is is fading. And one day she stumbles over a wounded Jesse James gang member. And as she's bending over, trying to figure out who he is, she gets shot from at from behind, shot at from behind. She wheels around with her rifle and she shoots dead the Pinkerton cop who was tracking him. So now she has a big problem on her hands, and that is what's going to launch her into her major journey. That's I'm going to take her out to Winnipeg, down through Manitoba, into the States in New York, and she is going to meet up with Annie Oakley and Gabrielle Dumont and High Jinx and Sue. So I discovered her, what her journey would be when I discovered these two historical characters that I was so I was so interested in actually were in this place at this time. And then that's just a synchronicity that you you you work with to create the story.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Wow. So interesting the way you come up with your stories and and you find your characters. So I have women like me, Stories in Business, is a I have a program for women and they write and they write their true life stories. So what kind of advice would you would you give them that are they've never written in their lives? They're

Practical Advice For New Writers

SPEAKER_01 30:47

just getting started. And some of the ladies have actually gone on to write children's stories and a couple others have written novels. But what advice would you give to a woman that wants to write but but has never done it and is fearful?

SPEAKER_02 31:03

Well, I would say be clear about what you want to do, because there's a whole raft of things that you could do depending on what you're looking for. If you're looking for kind of a self-expression, wanting to get something down on paper so you can stand back and look at your life, look at your choices, look at whatever, that's kind of journaling, you know, and you don't ever have to show that to anybody. That is something that's almost your own therapy that you're doing for yourself. And and and that is worthwhile just in its own way. There's a big difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write a book. Because if you want to be a writer, that's gonna take a very long time. And it is, I mean, you know, it's it's the the joke is people say, well, when I retire, I'm going to be a writer, and at the cocktail party, and somebody says, Yeah, when I retire, I'm gonna be a surgeon. You know, the thing is it it takes there, there's skill involved, there's knowledge involved, and it takes a very long time to create the skills to be able to do that. And not everybody wants to be a writer, but rather has a story maybe of their own life or something that they've been thinking of, and they just want to get that story done. So if that is what they want, I mean, if you want to be a writer, fair enough, but you know, you're in for a long haul and it it better be important to you. But if you just want to write a book because you have a story you want to get out, then I would suggest people hire an editor or a ghostwriter or somebody to help them. They provide the content and they hire somebody to help them with the with the structure and with the sort of the the the nuts and bolts skill skills that a writer needs. And then they can focus on the the the woman can focus on what is important to her, which is the content, which is you know, telling what happened in their lives, and they can she can tell it to somebody who can actually translate that into a story structure. In my book, Everything I Hope For, I've been writing that story for 40 years because I'll never write a more autobiographically inspired story than that. And that has been the problem because you can't just write life and expect that to be a story, because life is and then and then and then it's got all kinds of stuff thrown into the bucket that that is not germane to the story. So when you're when you're writing a story, it's about the choices that you're making, the details you're going to put in, what you leave out is just as important as what you put in. And it has a structure up to a climax, you know, there's a there's a point to it, there's there's a lot of uh skill that that goes into it. So I would suggest hiring somebody who has those skills. For my first book, the uh The Romance, I I had sent off three chapters and an outline three times to Harlequin. And each time I got a rejection letter back, a form letter, just a different form letter rejecting it. So I was now had my fourth three chapters in an outline, and I just thought, oh my God, I can't bear rejection one more time. So I phoned the local commun community college that had a romance writing course, and I left my name and asked if the instructor could call me back because she had been a Harlequin editor at one time. Ah, and so she called me back. I told her what I was looking for, and so I she read it, and it wasn't nearly as expect as expensive as I thought it would be. She would I she charged by the hour a reasonable fee, and she read three chapters in a very short period of time, and she could come back to me and say, Yes, this one's going to be rejected too. And she had a context and a knowledge base that I didn't have. This was back in the 80s, so she said, You make him a working class hero, because people are sick of middle class heroes. So don't make him a painter, make him a house painter, because Bruce Springsteen was the cool guy at the time, right? So it was stuff I couldn't have known. She was able to say, now go back to the beginning and put that together. And that's when I, you know, my heroine was a youth bureau police officer, and my hero was a an owner of a group home. So, you know, I had the the them reverse roles here because she was the cop and he was the social worker. And I said it in Guelph because apparently Americans find Canadian destinations exotic. When Guelph became an exotic place. She'd read them and she'd tell me if I was on the right track or not. And that's the one that worked. So I don't know how long I would have spent flailing around and wasting my time, but I got her, it did not, I didn't have any money at the time, but it ended up being the best money I could have spent, and it was not very much. So I I just think that that could save people a lot of uh grief and hardship about trying to expect something of themselves that they have not been trained for.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

Yes, absolutely. And I think when when they, you know, getting started and then yeah, just going through it, but you're so right because we don't know what we don't know, just like exactly you didn't know until she brought that forward, and you're like, oh, that makes sense, and away you go. Yeah, but yeah, and so it's difficult to come up with those things that you just don't know. That's what do you think about people and AI these days?

SPEAKER_02 36:43

Well, AI is obviously going to be a force. Like it that would be like saying asking me in the 80s when I was writing my romance, what do you think about this whole computer

AI, Culture, And Critical Thinking

SPEAKER_02 36:54

thing? Oh you know, oh no, I feel like it's aging. As people did back then. I don't know, I don't trust it. You know. The thing is, whether you like it or not, or whether you trust it or not, you know, it is the whole social media thing and everything has all caused all kinds of trouble, but it's also been an incredible boost to human productivity. I mean, we can do stuff now that we've just never been able to do. So I look at my three-year-old granddaughters and I'm thinking, okay, AI is going to be your world. And I hope at one time they roll the rise at their millennial parents and say, Oh God, dad, you just don't understand this because I have had from my millennials boomer for a very long time. So now it I don't think AI is ever going to be human. You know, I don't think that it's ever going to take the place of being human, but it's going to be smarter in a lot of ways than human. You know, I find just I I can tell to a certain extent when I'm getting, you know, emails from people who want me to hire them to market my stuff. And I can tell it's been written by AI. And oftentimes these are people who can't really speak English very well. And you can tell the kind of AI that comes out of that. So people will become very sophisticated, being able to identify what's being done by AI. I also notice that I'm on LinkedIn and I get fed constantly jobs for people for writers, which there never used to be, creative writers, to contribute to AI, to make the the AI better culturally in being able to assess people's what people produce as far as their own stories and you know, that's that sort of thing. And it's worthwhile remembering that these are people who are being hired to do this and lay down, you know, an information base. They don't have jobs and they're being paid not very much money to do this. So whenever, you know, I've played around with with AI, and whenever you say anything about women in AI, what you get back is, oh, they're so oppressed and isolated and everybody's forgotten them and left them behind. And then I put in, don't make women look so much like victims, and they say, Good call. No, women are this blah blah blah. So they go down a different track. So it's it's not as if there isn't that great need for critical thinking and independent thinking as there always have been and there always will be. People will become more sophisticated in in using it and understanding it and and that sort of thing. And you know, it's beyond it's as beyond my imagination now what that will look like as it was in the 80s, thinking of social media on a phone that can fit in your hand. You know, there are I mean it's fantastic in in many ways. And of course, like anything else, it brings its dangers with it.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Yes, yes, for sure. Yeah. What do you hope that women of the future inherit from women of the past?

SPEAKER_02 39:58

Well, I am very much an old-fashioned feminist now. I don't think I would be a feminist in in this day and age because

Brave, Careful, And Old School Feminism

SPEAKER_02 40:07

what we wanted in the in the 70s was leave me alone. I will take my own risks. You don't need to protect me. You know, make the laws fair and equal to everybody. But don't because you want to protect me, make me have a curfew at university in residence, you know, and and those sorts of things. I will take my risks, thank you very much. That's that's the whole thing that we fought for. And I find in more recent times that, you know, probably, you know, the Me Too movement was when you really saw a bifurcation between old feminists and new feminists. But there is a more of a sense that it's society's job to protect women. And it at times seems almost Victorian to me that if you are going to protect women from anything bad that can happen to them, what do you need? A chaperone? You know, how how does that happen? Or do you just stay in your house and not take risks? So there's there's something about that that makes me very uncomfortable. So when I am now teaching my granddaughters things, you know, I am, I want them to be brave, careful, but brave. And when they're six years old, I'm going to put them in Krav Maga so that they can handle themselves physically and teach them that if something, what it is that's some that wouldn't feel right, and to get it out on the table, because it's the shock that makes a lot of pe a lot of women more vulnerable if you don't know what's happened to you and you don't know how to. Well, there are women cops, they know very well what's going on when this happens, and they're more than capable of responding to it. And I would like my granddaughters to have that kind of sensibility. I'm strong and I'm brave, and I'll take my own risks, and I have the skills to do something about it if anybody gives me a hard time. That that would be what I would like. I I don't want the the the narrative to be uh you need to protect me more and more. I I I that I just that that's not the way I would want to live my life. Because then you've got people whose job it is to protect you. And that would drive me nuts. Yes, you know, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

Well, your granddaughters are lucky to have you, absolutely, because I think that's I think that's uh if we could have if if we could have learned that. Yeah. Yeah, if somebody could have instilled that in us. Well, Cinda, where can listeners find your books, connect with you, learn more about your work?

SPEAKER_02 42:33

Well, Google my name and uh it'll take you to my website and my socials, and

Where To Find The Books

SPEAKER_02 42:39

and uh you'll be able to find out information about it. My books are on Amazon. My publisher is Grey Goose Press, so you can always that's in Alberta, right beside you. And so you can always uh find them there or on Amazon. But probably my website is where you'll have most of the information all collected together.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

Yeah, we'll make sure that we have that in the show notes so that if anybody's interested, that's easily Lee, they can go ahead and they can find that. Well, I have just really enjoyed our conversation and thank you so much for doing that. And it's it's got, you know, it just helps to expand our minds a bit when we talk to others that are doing some pretty pretty interesting things. Can I just ask before we go? I'm curious about how much this is probably a loaded question, but how much research are you having to do with with your books? Which are are you just like res like do you research for a year and or do you

Research, Real Life, And New Stories

SPEAKER_01 43:37

there's there's no there's no there's no formula to it.

SPEAKER_02 43:42

For the the first two, I did a tremendous amount of research. For everything I hoped for, I didn't do any research because I lived it. So that the the kind of story I was telling you, it was more how it smelled and it felt and it, you know, the there were historical things that happened at the time, but I was showing how they have the personal sort of integration of that.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 44:07

Uh, you know, the more Mordecai Richler was bringing Canada to its knees over the abortion law at the time. So there's abortion as an issue, figures into it. There's you know, marriage is a big discussion in the story. So marriage has gone through a lot of changes, but it was because I lived through it, I didn't need to do any research about it. And the the next book I'm going to do is contemporary one. I I thought in when I was around 60, I thought that my teaching was going to dry up. So I thought, oh my God, I have to do something else. And so I bought what turned out to be three little rental properties in Hamilton, an hour away from here. And that was now a big learning curve for me. To they were just little two-bedroom little houses in the ghetto. And I had to learn how to. I mean, I am the the the handyman of our household. My my father taught my brother all of that stuff and not me, like not only because I was a girl, but because I wasn't interested in it. I didn't become interested in the handyman stuff till I had a house, and then you do it or you pay for it.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 45:11

Uh, so I'm the one with all the power tools now. And so I learned, you know, from HGTV, and my brother ended up teaching me, you know, it went through my dad to me. Yeah. And so I I uh renovated the the houses in in Hamilton and became a landlord. I'm still a landlord, and there are a lot of interesting stories that come up from that. And so my challenge, my as a writer, my challenge is going to be how do I put those sort of stories that aren't related to each other into a larger story structure so that it's it's integrated. And so that that's what the challenge uh that will expand my chops as a writer will be.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 45:51

Uh, I have content that I don't I won't have to research because again, I've lived through a lot of that stuff. But as a writer, it will continue to stretch me. And that's going to be a contemporary story. So I have so many story ideas. I will die long before I ever get all of those stories out. I've never, I've never confronted a blank page. I've never uh not had ideas. And that was as an academic as well as a fiction writer. So it's just the way I seem to be built. Yes. Yeah. So I mean, I will, I I know the story after that that I want to write. So I'm running out of time, not stories.

SPEAKER_01 46:27

That's the problem for all of us, isn't it? Yeah. Well, thank you very much for sharing that and for sharing your your the history of your life and and and what brought you to writing. I think that it for a lot of the a lot of my audience, this is going to be a very, very important podcast for them to listen to because I think it'll just really help to understand what it takes, you know, like what you said. If you if you want to be a writer, you can be one, but but but yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 46:59

But don't don't be a writer or do a PhD or have a kid unless you really want to. Want to, because it's gonna take a lot of time and energy to do that.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Exactly. Yes, yes. Well, Cinda, thank you so much and thank all of you for being here for another episode of Women Like Me Stories in Business. And we'll see you all again next time. Take care, everybody. Bye.