Tag: Camp Triumph

2023 Highlights

On By janlcoates10 Comments

I hope you’re launching into 2024 with a sense of hope and a heart full of kindness. I’m going to cheat and post only pictures to summarize my 2023. My year was all about our little granddaughters (who are now 2), but they’re still not appearing on social media, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I say they are the most amazing toddlers in the world:)

Saint Simons Island, Georgia – beach walking and pelican watching.

Approaching Quebec City from the ferry out of Levis (easiest way to visit Quebec City without the parking woes).

This picture of my shoes and granddaughter #1 never fails to make me smile. (I got her Keenes at Frenchy’s)

I had such fun spending the winter on this project for Camp Triumph on Prince Edward Island. https://www.camptriumph.ca/why-camp-triumph

Pine Lake, Haliburton Highlands – so happy to spend half the year here!

Sadly, this moose was put down after wandering along highway 118 in the Haliburton Highlands for several days. Not sure why…

Haliburton Sculpture Forest – magical place for a walk.

My Beach Meadows writing women – we’ve been retreating together for over a decade, and we never run out of things to talk about!

Lahave River Books – with surprise guest, Holly Doll, publisher at Fitzhenry & Whiteside (and her furry friend, whose name I’ve forgotten). Such a cozy, warm bookshop.

Squeezed in some sister time with Nance.

Pine Lake in the fall – the tractor mower mulches all the leaves pretty well.

Granddaughter #1 and GP at Benjamin Bridge winery, fall, 2023. Think I can post this one because it’s from the back…

I have to say I do love being able to take pictures with my phone. They’re not the best quality, but it’s so great to have a record of the year since they’re passing by so quickly that they all blur together it seems.

I wish you good health, peace, contentment and plenty of time with your people in 2024. This Neil Gaiman quote is popping up everywhere this year, although he wrote it in 2011.

“May your coming year be filled with magic, and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw, or build or sing, or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”

Time Flies … Summer, 2023

On By janlcoates5 Comments

I’m always a little surprised when I finally make it back to my blog and see when I last posted. Oh, well. I’ve been in the Haliburton Highlands at our family cottage for most of the summer, seeing lots of our grandbabies who will soon be two years old already! Sadly, they’re not appearing on social media, but trust me when I say they are the two sweetest little girls who ever lived😊 They’re so different and changing every week as they’re learning to talk, experimenting with the potty, etc. Grandparenting truly is the best gig ever.

We’ve heard lots of live music here in the Haliburton area, listened to lots of Canoe FM, spent time in the woods as well as in and on Pine Lake most days. I’ve never lived anyplace with so much sunshine! Surprisingly, the lake level doesn’t seem to go down much, even though we’ve had very little rain all summer. We were back in Nova Scotia for a month in the middle of the summer, and people say it rained in Haliburton then, and the grass is still green, so maybe we missed it. While in NS, I got to enjoy my annual week at Beach Meadows with writer friends Marcia Barss, Jackie Halsey and Jill MacLean – lots of fog, but I did a lot of painting and the conversation is always rich. I’ve been busy uploading my soul smiles greeting cards, which you can find here: https://jancoates.ca/soul-smiles/ – I’m happy to mail them out to you (in exchange for an e-transfer:) BIG THANKS to everyone who has supported my fledgling business over the past 4 years. They’re also available at Stirling Farm Market just outside Wolfville.

Just signed a contract with Fitzhenry & Whiteside for a kids’ book about iconic Canadian artist, Doris McCarthy, scheduled for publication in 2026. Doris lived between 1910 and 2010, and I got to be writer-in-residence for a month back in 2015 at her former home on the Scarborough Bluffs, Fool’s Paradise, where I became smitten with all things Doris. As a young artist, Doris spent a lot of time here in the Highlands painting with her friend Ethel Curry, so I’m thinking of her often as I roam about.  I’ve had a couple of nice chats with the CEO of the Haliburton County Public Library system, Chris Stephenson, and his mother was a student of Doris’s in the 1960s at Central Tech – I hope to have tea with her someday since I’ve met few people lucky enough to have known Doris.

1930s Doris McCarthy painting, Haliburton, ON

Sadly, the CEO of Fitzhenry, Sharon Fitzhenry recently passed away. She and her sister Holly Doll (who was nice enough to come to my book event at cozy bookshop, Lahave River Books, in late July, as pictured below) have been the faces of F&W for many years, and their dad started the publishing company back in 1966. A great loss to the CanLit community.

This is a very welcoming place to be, and I’ve so enjoyed our first summer in the Highlands. Haliburton only has about 1000 full-time residents, but there are over 500 lakes in the vicinity, so it’s bustling in the summer. Now that it’s fall, things will quiet down I expect. We just bought the cottage in the fall of 2022, so there’s always lots of work to do. The previous owner built it in 1975, and he basically left everything (EVERYTHING) here when he sold it. We’ve made lots of donations to SIRCH, the local community helper agency, and I’ve become a big fan of FB Marketplace, where I recently found these pinch-pleated drapes for $60, allowing me to get rid of the orange circa 1975 ones, but still use the existing tracks.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the summer of 2023 and had a chance to spend time with the people who matter most to you, as I have. I’ll leave you with the cover of the book I did for Camp Triumph in the spring, and this moose we saw close-up on Highway 118 last week. I hope he made his way back to his family as he looked kind of lost… Cheers!

Playing with Fonts and School Visits

On By janlcoates11 Comments

I’ve been having so much fun working on a picture book I’m doing for Camp Triumph, which is on Prince Edward Island – a nurturing community for kids who have a sibling or parent with a serious chronic illness or disability. Started by the Sheriko family, formerly of Wolfville, almost 20 years ago, this is a dream project for me. The Sherikos ran Wolfville Minor Basketball for many years, and the dad, Tom, lived for almost 20 years with a brain tumor while Kathi and Tom’s three sons, Jordan, Jeffrey and Matthew, were growing up.

As part of the process of creating the book, I’ve been playing around with fonts. Fonts I like include: “Unkempt,” “Aprilia,” “Delius,” and “Lucida Bright.” I wanted to show them to you here, but apparently Word Press doesn’t recognize them. Oh well – each has things I like and things I’m not a big fan of, so we shall see…

It’s amazing how many thousands/millions of fonts there are out there!

Love this poster, spotted at Coldbrook School during a November school visit.

I did a few school visits in January and February, one of them in Stephanie Carver’s grade 6 class at Rockingham Elementary – she’s the daughter of Peter Carver, the now-retired editor of my Red Deer Press books. Her students were completely engaged and had a ton of great questions for me. And I could see her dad in Stephanie’s smile😊 I also spent two snowy mornings at Falmouth & District School with grades P-2 students – always fun to spend time with little ones (in 30-minute increments😊)

My morning with grades 3 and 5 students at Wolfville School was an easy visit – I walked down the hill! The resource teacher, Jenny Collishaw, was my warmly-welcoming host. The grade 3 students were excited to share the bulletin board they’d created with projects they’d done based on some of my picture books. Most of the pictures taken had kids in them, which is a no-no, but here’s their bulletin board, proof that teachers continue to do amazing work in our schools, despite snow days and everything else heaped on their plates. Kids really are the best, and it’s such a treat to spend time with people who have read my books!

And Jenny made me this lovely gift as a memento of my visit. So nice, all of it!

Huge thanks to Linda Hudson of the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia who organizes the Writers in the Schools program. And thanks to you for stopping by. I hope sunshine and warm spring breezes will soon arrive in your corner of the world!