More About Brenda
My professional life has always had writing at its core, but I began to write for fun a quarter century ago.
In 2001, when our young family moved from coastal British Columbia to Halifax, Nova Scotia, I began working remotely—using homing pigeons and MS Lync. To find community, I took flamenco lessons and joined the Theatre Arts Guild (TAG), and to further fill my creative well, I attempted to write a screenplay. I read all the how-to books, came up with a concept I thought was brilliant, invested in feedback from a professional reader, learned otherwise, and went back to the drawing board. By mid-2003, I had a tight screenplay that was unlikely to ever grace a screen, but I had learned a lot. I set it aside and immediately began looking for my next story idea.
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A few days later I discovered the seeds of Mrs. Walford in our backyard: a plate shard bearing a belt-and-buckle logo and the words “Queen Hotel” and “Halifax N.S.” A search of the sparsely populated internet brought me to a transcript entitled “Deaths 1887” from the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union, which included a brief description of a tragedy involving Mrs. Robert Walford at the Queen Hotel in June of 1887. After my shivers abated, I was hooked. During the next decade and a half, I continued to research as time permitted, collecting fragments that would eventually resolve into story ideas.
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Back at the theatre, I graduated to set painting and set design, and then to writing plays. Two plays, both co-written with my dear friend Cheryl Theriault—"Jack and the Beans Talk - A Genetically Modified Fairy Tale" and "The Frog Prince - A Webbed Pantomime"—were produced at TAG in 2007 and 2016 respectively. During that time I also took up painting in acrylics.
In 2018, I finally sat down to write "Mrs. Walford," a one-act play that imagined and dramatized events at the Queen Hotel but ended on a much more hope-filled note. It was produced during the Playwrights at TAG festival in early 2019. My second one-act play, "Mrs. Walford: A Month in Halsey Street," about her imagined time at the home of a compassionate Brooklyn doctor, was produced in late 2021 for a distanced and masked audience. Before I had even completed the second work, I knew I wanted to spend more time with my characters and elaborate on my protagonist's life, and the happy ending I had contrived for her. A six-day stay in a French hospital in 2022—with a severely broken ankle, a notebook and a pen—gave me a "jumpstart" on my first historical fiction novel.
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And this story is continuing...
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