“Not only was my dad a teacher, but so were my mother and my stepmother. All my parents’ friends were teachers, and when I was a kid, I thought you finished school and then you became a teacher. My mom taught my sister for two years in about grade six and seven, and then my sister went to a bigger school in town. When I got to the place where I was going to be in my mom’s class, she said, ‘I’m not teaching another one of my kids,’ and she quit and got a different job.”

“I thought my childhood was fantastic. I can remember being eight and thinking, ‘Life does not get any better than this.’ We lived out in the country on a bit of a hobby farm where we had about a hundred acres. My dad was always trying to find new ways to make extra money. He was frugal and entrepreneurial at the same time. At one point, his scheme was to make and sell fence posts from our cedar forest. For many years, we were always loading up the pickup truck with firewood and selling the wood to his teacher friends in town. When I was about 10, my dad saw a documentary on Christmas tree farms, and the next day we were in the bush digging out saplings and putting them in the field.”

“I don’t know that we ever made much money, but I guess we saved money because we heated our house with a wood furnace. A century home, it didn’t have great windows or insulation, and so we were forever cutting and piling wood. We’d cut it in the bush, pile it up, go get it in the summer, bring it to the house, pile it up again, and then all winter you had to take it from outside to inside to dry it out by the furnace. My dad raised cows for beef, and we made our own hay and oats, plus we had our own garden. My dad didn’t like to sit still very long, and he’s in his seventies and still doesn’t like to sit still very long.”

“My mom, while she was teaching and helping out on the farm and doing the canning and the pickling and everything like that, was also finishing her degree. My dad had done his degree when we were babies, but my mom had never finished. She’d gone to teachers college, but, in those days, you didn’t have to have had your degree first. Since saws didn’t change much over the years, my dad’s lesson plans didn’t have to change much either, but my mom was teaching four grades, and things were constantly changing. Also, my dad didn’t have to mark every day, and when he did, it was marking like a coffee table, but my mom was always marking or studying.”

“I just always wanted to be an author. Because our little school didn’t have a librarian, a librarian used to come out to our school. Once she brought a collection of poems that kids had written, and I was just dumbfounded. I remember going home and saying to my mom and my grandfather, ‘Kids can get books published. I’m going to get a book published one day.’ And they were both like, ‘Well, you write one that’s good enough, and, yes, you can get it published.’ That was it, and from that day forward, being an author was always one of the things I was going to do, and I was always going to dedicate my first book to my mom, which I did.”

Not surprisingly, Christina’s practical father didn’t think that her wanting to be an author was a great career choice, but Christina understands his concern..”I think like anything in the arts, people are like, ‘OK, that’s great. You want to be a musician or a writer or a painter, but what are you going to do to make money?’ As a parent, that’s a fairly real concern as you don’t want to support your kids forever. But my dad’s reaction is funny though because he’s a huge storyteller with great comedic timing. A hunter-fisher guy, he tells the same stories every year, and they get better every time as the deer’s antlers have extra points or the fight to land the fish takes 20 minutes longer. He’s proud though, and now likes the fact that I write, but we don’t really talk about it at home. When you’re together, you don’t talk about your day jobs. You just get on with doing the family stuff.”

“I was a reader as a child, but, in hindsight, I’m a little surprised, seeing that my parents were both teachers, that we had so few books in the house. Partly that can be explained by the fact that we lived out in the country and there wasn’t a book store in our town. There was a public library, but we only went there once every other week. I didn’t get into town a lot, but when I did, my mom did take me to a library. However, there were never enough books, and I can remember one time that the church had a box of books and I brought them home that summer. Every night, after I was told to go to bed, I stayed up with a flashlight just to read. Today, I probably wouldn’t like those books, but they were just books to read. I went through the few books that we had, and I was trying to read adult books. They were way beyond me, but I would try to read them just because it was a book.”

“As I mentioned earlier, the librarian from the larger school in town would come out to our two-room school. I don’t recall exactly how often she would come, likely every other week. She would read us a story, tell us about some new books, and then she would leave a few books with us. It wouldn’t take me very long to get through all those books, and then I’d have to wait two weeks until the next batch of books.. By the time I was in about grade five, the librarian didn’t come out any more, and I don’t know why. But I can remember her reading us ‘Alligator Pie,’ and I was, ‘Wow, this poem was so much fun.’ Her visits were our window into all things literary.”

“Beverly Cleary was one of my favourite authors. I think what I liked about her books were her characters. I loved Ramona. Maybe I was a little Ramona-like when I was young. I was a pest. My older brother and sister certainly saw me as nothing but a pain in their sides, and then finally there’s this book about this kid who’s just like me.”

“Though I always wanted to be a writer, I think I let people discourage me because everyone was like, ‘You want to be a writer? You’re never going to make any money as a writer.’ I never do that to kids. If they want to be a writer, I’m like, ‘Yah! Go be a writer!’ At a certain point, I decided I wanted to be an archeologist, and I followed through with that notion for a few years until I tried it and got a summer job while I was in university. The University of Western Ontario is affiliated with an Indian Museum of Archeology that offers summer jobs. My first summer I spent cross-checking their catalogue.”

“I was given a long printout of all the items that they had catalogued in a storage room. My task was to go through this printout and make sure that I found everything in the storage room. Now, when they showed me the job, it was like arrowheads and all this really cool stuff. Well, the cool stuff took about the first hour to locate, and then it was boxes of charcoal and burnt corn and things like that. The list was five inches high, and I spent two months before going into my supervisor and asking, ‘Do you think I’m going to get through this whole collection this summer?’ When he replied, ‘I don’t know,’ I went back and started writing short stories instead because nobody really cared if I got through.”

“The next year I got a job actually excavating. I was so excited. I had been dreaming about this since I was a kid. However, because it was a very wet summer, we spent a lot of time in Tim Horton’s waiting for it to stop raining, which is just not me. I‘d rather have been out digging. I liked being outside, but we spent so much time just shaking dirt and going, ‘Here’s a piece of charcoal,’ and putting it inside a bag and writing a number and plotting it on the graph. ‘Here’s another piece of charcoal.’ Just doing it was so repetitive. I’m really bad with repetitive tasks, and at the end of that summer, I went, ‘I need something different.’ But I still love archeology and all things old.”

“I don’t know what initiated this interest in archeology. It may have been that, when I was in about grade five, a traveling exhibit on King Tut came to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. One kid from every school got to go. In our school, if you were interested in being chosen, you had to stand up in front of the class and make a case for why it should be you. As I recall, there were only two or three of us that were interested, but I just had to go that trip,. The kids all voted for me, and so I did get to go. I’ve always been interested in Egypt and excavating, and I still find it fascinating.”

“When I finished high school, I wanted to do a degree in archeology, but I really wanted to go to the University of Western Ontario in London, ON. By this point, my parents were separated, and I was living with my dad and my mom was living in London. I wanted to be near my mom, and UWO was a sort of a family school in that my brother had also gone there. As well, my grandmother lived there, and I had some ties to London. The problem was that UWO didn’t have an archeology program. You had to major in anthropology and could take archeology courses along the way. Given my later cataloguing and excavating experiences, it’s just as well I didn’t actually do a degree in archeology. I ultimately did a double major honours degree in Anthropology and English.”

“In my second or third year at UWO, I had a friend ask, “What are you going to do after you finish your degree?’ and she added, ‘I’m going to take a Master’s degree in creative writing.’ I was just like, ‘They have such a thing?’ It was like I was destined to meet this person who could give me this piece of information so that I could get on with my life. That was it. I knew that was what I really wanted to go and do. Plus, by then, I’d had my summer of sifting dirt.”

“I applied to a whole bunch of schools, basically looking for anything in Ontario. I wasn’t picky - whoever would take me. I had two stumbling blocks, one being that I had a lousy portfolio. The other was that I really only had a half a degree in English. Consequently, while the University of Windsor finally accepted me, they made me take a whole makeup year since their Master’s degree is actually Creative Writing and English literature. As a result, it took me two years to do the degree. Of course, I’d never done a creative writing course, and I had to do the fourth year creative writing course before I could do the Master’s creative writing course.”

“Both creative writing courses went the whole year, but with the master’s level course, at its conclusion, you had to come up with a thesis. Throughout the year then, you were basically writing what was your thesis - a collection of poetry, a collection of short stories, or a novel - and every week you got the feedback. I did a collection of short stories that also hung together as a short novel. The weekly critiques were painful at first, but invaluable. Maybe that was an intentional part of the process, just to toughen you up. But there was really no coddling. Nobody was sitting there saying,’ Yah, you’re awesome.’ No one ever said things like that.”

“I had two years of that constant feedback process, and what it got me to do was to be able to self-edit. At first, every sentence you write is brilliant, and you can’t imagine that you would ever cut even a single one of those brilliant ‘little pearls.’ Then eventually you realize that, ‘Ok, I’m probably going to cut out a third of this,’ and you just get ruthless. Now I’ve finally got to the place where I can sort of edit it before I even get it on the paper, and so I find I have to do a lot less cutting later. This learning to self-edit was such a valuable experience. That’s something that you can’t read theoretically. It just takes practice.”

Christina says that she one of the places she had always wanted to visit was South America. “When I was finishing up my degree, I said to my dad, ‘I’m going to South America.’ And he replied, ‘You’re not going to South America. It’s way too dangerous. If you go to Africa and do one of those organized trips, I’ll help pay for your trip.’ Now, I had actually wanted to go to Africa, but I thought it was a little too intimidating for my first big trip given that I’d never been past Hawaii or Florida. It was the best unintended reverse psychology ever.”

“I signed up with a British company that was based out of London, England, and did various length trips. Mine was a four-month trip, and we left by truck from London and essentially drove down to Tanzania. We had a lot of truck breakdowns and border problems so that we ended up taking five months. They were 20 of us from all over the world in the truck. We left London in January, and it was really cold because you were sitting outside essentially, driving along. The good thing is that you’ve picked a trip based on a general itinerary. You know what the highlights are, but, in between, the groups are to decide, with the driver ultimately being in charge. For me, I really wanted to see the culture. A lot of the other people came for the game parks.”

“We drove all the way down the west coast of Africa before we got to the game parks. which were the last two weeks of the trip. You have all your camping gear in this big truck so that, when you get to the safari parks, you roll up the vinyl sides and can see the animals. We camped and hit towns or cities every five to ten days. At night, we’d pull off the road and camp in the bush or a field. We shopped at local markets and were grouped into cooking teams. The expedition leader would give cooking teams money and say, ‘You have to do the cooking tomorrow.’ You’d get to the market and find meat and hope it’s the kind of meat that you like because it doesn’t say it’s chicken or beef. It could be monkey. You don’t know what it is. There was suspicious tasting meat on that trip.”

“It was on that trip I met my husband-to-be. He was the expedition leader, and this was his last trip. He’d been doing it for about eight years by then, and I think he was like, ‘OK. You can only do this for so long.’ Leading’s tiring and exhausting, and there were a lot of problems on that trip - medical emergencies, and all sorts of things that happened. After the trip was over, he said, ‘Do you want to go to South America? And I’m like ‘Hey, what a coincidence.’ He’d led a number of those expeditions trips through South America, and so I had my own personal expedition guide, but we took public transport - buses , boats, planes and trains - and did about a six month expedition. We did it all backpacking and went down right to the tip of Chile.”

“Between trips, I had to come back to Canada and make money, but he already had money so he would just come and hang out and wait for me to save enough money for the next trip. We thought we’d go and set up life in New Zealand, and so we went for a year. I think after about the 325th day of me crying, he said, ‘OK, let’s go back to Canada.’ I was homesick and had left family, a network of friends, a decent job. I had belongings back in Canada, but he’d been traveling for nine years. For him, going to New Zealand was going home, but he brought with him a backpack with three pairs of socks and a change of underwear. In Canada, I had my nest and everything. We decided to come back, and he went to an adult college and did a computer networking diploma. I had a good enough a job that I could support us awhile he did a fast track one year thing. That also was a bit of an incentive because I got offered a job that could support us for the year.”

Even while Christina was travelling, she was still writing. “I did write some great letters home. That was before email, and they would photocopy the letters and mail them on to everybody else. It was like a travel blog, only it was on paper, and we did it by fax and snail mail. In between all those trips, I was always working on writing and getting feedback. The writer-in-residence that I’d met at the University of Windsor, Peter Robinson, is a crime writer. I was contacting him and getting feedback and continuing on with the process. I started to send queries and was getting rejections, but some of them were really nice rejections where they were giving me some extra feedback, not just the form letter, and that encouraged me. I was submitting what I thought was a novel, but then I realized it wasn’t quite a novel and needed to be worked on more. In the beginning, you think it’s perfect but it really isn’t.”

“I think the first success I had was when I sent out some sample chapters and had Arsenal or somebody send something back saying they wanted to see the rest of it. It was like, ‘Yahoo! Eureka.’ I thought I was on my way. I quit my job. In the end, they didn’t publish it, but they had given me some really valuable advice and encouragement. Somewhere along the line, just looking for publishers to send something to, I figured I would target the small Canadian presses because I thought I was going to have a better chance of having anyone even read my manuscript.”

“I found this contest that was for writers who had never been published. It was sponsored by Broken Jaw Press in Fredericton, NB. I submitted my manuscript, and like a year later, I got the call, ‘Oh, you won, and we’re going to publish the book as a trade paperback.’ That was fantastic because that suddenly gave me the foot in the door to be able to apply for grants and join the Writer’s Union and say. ‘I have a published book.’”

“The book, an adult novel entitled Day of the Dog-tooth Violets came out three weeks after my son was born, so it wasn’t the ideal time. In the meantime, I was still always writing, and shortly after that, I started trying to hit literary agents. I had a literary agent pick up one of the manuscripts, and again I was ready to quit my job. Unfortunately, this was just around the time of 9/11 and everybody stopped taking chances on new writers. Doubleday in Canada was ready to publish the book if the agent could find somebody in the States to co-publish it so that it would have more exposure. She couldn’t find anyone, and that was the end of that. That was in 2001, and that manuscript was never published, and I finally posted it on my website as a free download. Then I stumbled on BookLand Press, and they published The Roads of Go Home Lake, a sequel to my Broken Jaw winner.”

“I have good luck in at least getting agents to engage in a conversation with me. I had contacted an agent who had left an agency and was just starting his own business. He really loved Dear Jo and said, ‘This has to be a series. Can you write a second and a third book?’ And I responded, ‘Oh yes, and really quickly. Here you go.’ He tried really, really hard, but he never did sell it. Very apologetically, he said, ‘I’ve tried everybody I can try.’ The reality is that agents aren’t interested in the smaller presses because they want to make money, and they’re not going to make money because there’s no big advance from the smaller presses. They’re looking for the $20,000.00 advances, not $1,500.00”

“I then went on-line and looked for publishers that were publishing for that age group and were accepting manuscripts, and I stumbled on Lobster. I sent it to them, and very quickly they got back to me. I think they were just expanding into the young adult area , having just done picture books up until then. I had originally thought I was targeting Dear Jo at 15-16-year-olds, but Lobster said, ‘No, we’re going to target it at 10-year-olds.’ I was like, ‘You can’t do that!’but it’s turned out really well. Lobster’s argument was, ‘What’s the point of giving it to a 15-year-old. Something bad could have already have happened by then. You need to get them when they are 10, before they have discovered the Internet so they know what’s happening.’ After we had that discussion, I was still really nervous, but it made sense and Lobster seemed to know what they were doing. And so I agreed , plus it was the best offer I had.’

Dear Jo was actually an outcome of Christina’s second go at participating in a three-day writing marathon that’s a fundraiser to solicit money to help illiterate individuals learn how to read. “You get sponsors, and everyone is expected to raise a certain amount of money. We were allowed to take in one page of notes, and during the first one, I wrote the first third of The Roads of Go Home Lake novel. Going into the second writing marathon, I knew I needed to write something shorter. I didn’t have the stamina, the will power or whatever was necessary to get something written of adult novel length. So, just being practical, I decided I’d aim for a young person’s book because it would be shorter. As well, I’d always been told, ‘Oh, you’d make a great YA writer.’ I’d never thought of it myself. At the same time as I was trying to come up with what my outline was going to be. I knew I wanted it planned out, and I wanted to have my outline. A little 10-year-old girl, Holly Jones, went missing in Toronto, and she was later found murdered. Because I was a new mom, I had this new perspective on the amount of energy and love it takes to get a kid from zero to walking and taking, and her going missing and then being found murdered really hit home hard.”

“When I decided I would have to probably use a missing child’s case for my novel, that’s about the time Max’s voice came to me. I had been wanting to do something in first person, and her voice came to me as a diary entry. I put together the missing kid’s case and the diary entry, and I started to do research on missing kids’ cases and issues facing young people and came up with the whole Internet predator angle. In my original manuscript, I didn’t have Max and Leah know each other. It wasn’t until I was working with the agent later and he said, ‘You know, you need to make the story more immediate. There has to be more in it for Max than just that she hears about this kid. They need to know each other,’ that I put them in the same circle of friends. It was later that I went, ‘That’s great because you know, when kids go missing, you hear from their parents, but you don’t hear from their friends. And when you’re 10, 12 and 14, your friends are everything to you, probably more than your siblings or your parents, and it would just be so hard to lose a friend.’”

Christina admits to crying while writing parts of Dear Jo and acknowledges still tearing up while doing public readings. “Reading the poem that Max writes about Leah gets me every single time as does the funeral scene. I also get quite emotional with the little sister, Molly, because it must have also been hard on her. Leah was her older sister’s friend, and I think we, as adults, underestimate that even a five-year-old can experience the same amount of loss. Those kind of aspects still choke me up. There’s this one scene I always used to pick to read. It’s the one where Max comes home from school and her mom is really freaked out and says, ‘Sweetie, Leah is missing.” I had to stop reading that one because I kept getting chocked up in front of all these kids.” Of They Called Me Red, Christina says, “I think I was just numb while writing this one. The only passage that really gets me is when Devon comes home and comes back to his foster family. He sees that they have taken his dad’s picture and his possessions out of storage and put them in his room. That kind of thing really gets me.”

“Max’s two siblings in Dear Jo are modeled after my own two children who were at that age at the time I went to the writing marathon. They looked the same, acted the same. My red-headed son doesn’t run around naked any more, but, until he got into grade one, he would still come home, and the first thing he would do is strip off his clothes. I’d come home from work, and there would be his clothes. I hope he’s never going to read this, but he liked to run around naked and to pick his nose all the time. My daughter was always like, ‘Oh, it’s so gross.’ And she really did ask, ‘Do I get to take my bones to Heaven?’ It seemed such an odd thing to say, and it happened right when I was editing, and so I had to stick it in the book. The dog Finn who appears in Dear Jo is really our dog. We still have him. He’s getting aged, but he’s very much the dog in the book.”

The photo of girl who appears on the cover of Dear Jo is Christina’s children’s daycare girl. Christina explains, “I was looking at Lisa and thought, ‘She could be Max. She looks exactly like how I described her.’ At the time, Lisa was taking a modeling course, and I said, ‘Oh, perfect, Lisa. Do you want to come and pose?’ She was thrilled. I have a friend, Jonathan Cliff, who is a professional photographer, and he came out, and we did a photo shoot, taking a whole series of shots throughout our house. He really likes to take these backlit natural light pictures. Jonathan took reams of pictures and sent me the top 100. It was hard to pick just one. Originally, I was going to self-publish it, but then I got the offer from Lobster. I told them, ‘Hey, I have some cover shots. Are you interested?’ And they were. I do love the cover, partly because my friend took it. and partly because I just it works.”

“When I first queried Lobster, I sent in three books. I had one called ‘Losing Leah’ and one called ‘Missing Molly’ because, in the second book, Molly goes missing. I sent out a synopsis of the three stories. I called the series ‘Dear Jo’ with the individual title being ‘Losing Leah.’ I did write the other two books, and they’re sitting on my computer, but I have a contract that says that I would never publish anything with the same characters and in the same format with anybody else. Lobster thinks it would take away from the importance of Dear Jo to do a series. I kind of get that, but, at the same time, ....”

“Early on, the Toronto, Globe and Mail reviewed Dear Jo, and the reviewer said, ‘It’s too scary for kids. You shouldn’t let them read it.’ There was quite a bit of backlash to that review saying, ‘Would you rather you didn’t tell your kids that it could happen to them and then let it happen to them?’ I’m a parent, and I’m hesitant to want to have to tell my kids the ugly truth, but I’m the first one that’s going to tell them the information they need to protect themselves. I guess there’s a balance: tell them enough to make them aware without scaring them.”

After writing Dear Jo,/i>, Christina says that it was her intent to rework a fairy tale. “I love Shrek, and I love the way they used the whole fairy tale convention in Shrek and all the fairy tale creatures. So, with the greatest of respect, I wanted to do something as wonderful and monumental as Shrek. I picked Cinderella because who doesn’t love Cinderella? Who hasn’t felt being misunderstood and misaligned in their lives? But then I thought, ‘I’m going to turn it all upside down. Cinderella will be a boy, and instead of having stepsisters, there will a stepbrother, and there’s going to be an evil stepmother.’ Somehow I went from that to human trafficking.”