Norval, one of the many former homes of Lucy Maud Montgomery, is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the national literary icon’s birth until December.
And author Melanie Fishbane is gearing up to join the festivities. She penned a novel based on the Anne of Green Gables author’s life and will be in the hamlet this weekend for a talk.
The presentation - entitled Find my Fictional Maud: A Conversation with Melanie J. Fishbane - is set for Oct. 19 at 2 p.m. in the Norval Art Studios and Gallery. There, the author will be chatting about her writing process and inspiration in Maud, and hopes that attendees will come with lots of questions for her to answer.
Fishbane wrote Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery and says she first read Anne of Green Gables when she was 12. But her interest in Montgomery only grew when her muse’s journals became publicly available.
“I always love to see the author behind the material,” Fishbane said. “She had such a keen insight into the ways in which people interact with each other and she had such an ability to be on the outside looking in on society.”
“She was published at 16. This is a very ambitious person,” she added, also noting that Montgomery had to navigate the societal restrictions on women and girls of her time.
Fishbane’s book, which she will do a reading of during her visit to Norval, is a partly fictional, partly biographical account of Maud’s life.
The plot centres around a 14-year-old Maud dreaming about going to college to become a writer, emulating her American novelist role model Louisa Alcott.
But she's being raised by her grandparents, and her hyper-traditionalist grandfather does not want to spend money on sending her to college.
“She was essentially on her own as a young person,” Fishbane explained. “She was a person who realized that if she wasn’t going to do it, no one was going to help her.”
Fishbane said she hopes attendees will take away a deep understanding of Montgomery as a young writer.
Along with that, she plans to instill a sense of “her influence on and connection with Canadian culture or literature as a whole.”
The author will have works available for purchase and will be signing books as well. There will also be refreshments.
For more information on Fishbane, check out her website.
