Seems like I’m busy this summer, first with our son’s July 13th wedding in Toronto – all went well, other than the torrential downpour that started just as the venue got the outdoor seating set up. Being pros, they quickly got us under cover, and although the aisle was shorter than the outdoor one would have been, it was lovely, and we danced until the restaurant, The Granite Brewery, was ready for us to leave at 1:00 am. One of my hips is still sore:) One of the best parts, other than Liam’s new wife, Rachel, was that he had 8 friends stand with him, many of whom we’ve known for literally decades, since they were toddlers. Many of them flew in from Nova Scotia, as well as one from Rhode Island. The official pics aren’t in, yet, but here’s one my sister took after the “dudes” got ready. Thank you!
I also have two new books this summer, so those have kept me busy, too. DANCING WITH DAISY will launch this coming Saturday at the lovely Wolfville Library. It’s with a lovely small press in Newfoundland, Running the Goat Press & Broadsides. This blurb in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, had me smiling. “Bisaillon’s pictures perfectly match the exuberance and high spirits of Coates’s story, which is sure to inspire young readers to tell tall tales of their own summer adventures.” My local independent bookstore, The Box of Delights, will be on hand to sell books, and Celeste, one of their summer employees, is responsible for the very cool piece of art pictured above. Thank you!
My second book is a middle grade novel, SAY WHAT YOU MEAN (Mean What You Say), and it features a fairy dogmother, as well as dealing with soup kitchens and mental health struggles. It’s with a new Nova Scotia publisher, Nevermore Press, in Lunenburg, and they’ve been absolutely wonderful to work with. Launch date hasn’t been set yet, but hopefully sometime in September. This is my first novel cover that’s 100% original art, and in Nevermore’s spirit of collaboration, I got to be in on their chat with the artist, Valerie Gagnon, as the cover was being developed. She’s really captured the essence of the story. Thank you!
Hope you’re enjoying summer. Here in Nova Scotia it didn’t arrive until the first week of July, and we’ve had lots of humidity, but I like the heat so I’m not complaining.
from “The Cloud”
During that month, living in the space she’d so lovingly crafted over her lifetime, I became fascinated with all things Doris, and set about writing her story for young readers. She was a woman ahead of her time in so many ways, determined to succeed in what was largely a man’s world in the 1930s and 1940s. For Doris, nothing was impossible, and anything was possible. Alongside a 40-year teaching career, she spent her life creating 6,000 works of art, telling Canada’s story, sharing her joy and love for life and the wild.
I worked for weeks putting together a PowerPoint presentation to go along with my lyrical version of Doris’s life story. 
Along with the other eleven presenters, I was happy to meet some of the significant people in Doris’s life, including her long-time agent, Lynn Wynick, and two daughters of Doris’s dearest friend, Marjorie Beer Woods. At the end of the symposium, the five of us who had been artists-in-residence at Fool’s Paradise had a panel discussion about living in that magical space, which was super interesting; all of us felt Doris’s spirit which is still strongly present in her home.
A bright student, Knight had a fairly stable upbringing in rural Maine before moving to the Boston area to train as an electrician. His self-analysis in the book is fascinating; “I did examine myself. Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there… There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
