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Three authors speak about inspiration at brunch By Melanie Cummings SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER 21 · Wednesday, May 26, 2010 OAKVILLE BEAVER · www.oakvillebeaver.com It's never to late to become an author, or tell a story longing to be told. A trio of women can attest to that -- Helen Simonsen, Judy Fong Bates and Bridget Stutchbury. They were the latest invitees to a recent author's brunch organized by Bookers. Simonsen did a masters in fine arts as a way of giving herself permission to write. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is the result. She sent eight chapters to an agent on a Tuesday and by the Friday of that week it was sold. She got into writing through ballroom dancing, oddly enough. There was an accountant in that class who told her he was taking two weeks off from work (and dancing class) to write a screenplay. "He gave himself permission to write, why didn't I?" Simonsen signed up for a writing class at the local YMCA and proceeded to write a short story that "pretty much plagiarized" a short story by American writer O. Henry. For 12 years the Brooklynite CLAUDIO CUGLIARI / SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER AUTHOR TALK: Authors Judy Fong Bates, Helen Simonson and Bridget Stutchbury pose for a photo during Authors brunch reading and signing event hosted by the Bookers Bookstore held at The Oakville Golf Club recently. wrote part-time while raising two boys. "I'm a terrible procrastinator," Simonsen confessed to the 100 book lovers at the Bookers event. "Finally publishing a novel is a dream come true for me," she added. And in the spirit of fostering the same dreams in others she urged those would-be authors in the room to write daily -- even if badly -- because somewhere in the middle of three pages might be a paragraph worth keeping. "Don't let your head tell you not to do it or that you don't have permission." Finding such inspiration did not come easily for Fong Bates who was the only non-white girl living in Acton, Ontario when she moved there from China in 1954. "I wanted myself to be reflected somewhere," said Fong Bates. All of the powerful people in her life: teachers, doctors, firefighters and television actors were white. She looked for a Chinese person who spoke English, to model herself after, and at age 16 she discovered writer James Baldwin. The prolific and sometimes controversial author's books Giovanni's Room and Another Country, which both explored the previous taboos of homosexuality, were Fong Bates's favourites. "I can't remember a word of the books, but I remember devouring them because he was a black writer and people loved his books." Her latest work The Year of Finding Memory is Fong Bates' third novel. In a sense, it's a story that took the 61-year-old writer 45 years to complete. "At age 16 I told my friend I would write a book one day about my mom because I knew my mom's early life had all the elements of a dramatic story," said Fong Bates. At age three her mom was betrothed to a well-to-do farmer, but by the time she married him, he was an opium addict who mistreated her. She fled from him and later escaped another catastrophe when the Japanese invaded her town. She got out on the last train departing Nanking and the last boat out of Canton, narrowly escaping death. Bridget Stutchbury's The Bird Detective is also a lament of sorts for creatures of flight in a time of climate change. The professor of biology at York University welcomes the break from the conformist world of scientific writing to the narrative of the natural world. She said she is as passionate about writing on birds in book form as she is about her work in the field. "I hope that my passion is infectious and inspires others," said Stutchbury whose interest stems from childhoods spent in the outdoors and summers in the Adirondacks. Sex, sexism, violence and "divorce" in the bird world are rife in The Bird Detective. The secret life of birds is astounding, said Stutchbury, and to study the bird world is to understand nature, including human nature.