What made you want to become a writer?

I became a writer as soon as I learned to write, and in the process discovered that I could think better when I wrote. So it was my drive towards both complexity and clarity, the qualities that have always epitomized the fun of thinking for me, that drove me to become a life-long writer. I’m not saying I was a wunderkind, producing great philosophical treatises as a seven-year old. The complexity and clarity achieved were age-appropriate, but fun nonetheless.

I was a social kid, and enjoyed sharing my fun with others. So even though I did considerable introspective writing in my journals, I also wrote plays, poems, and short stories that my friends and I had fun with. Recently, I reunited with a couple of grade-school friends with whom I’d lost touch when we dispersed for 7^th grade. I was amazed that in our reminiscing, they both quoted passages from an epic play about Andrew Jackson that I’d written for a school project. Though I remembered none of it, they had retained quite a few of my punchier lines: “Unhand him, you scurvy knave!” was a favorite.

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What inspired you to start writing?

Despite, or perhaps because I’m generally a highly focused human, I’ve always enjoyed the occasions when I allow my mind to wander.  I enjoy how my stream of consciousness meanders through concepts I didn’t know were related to one another until I found them intermingling in that stream.  But that stream is evanescent –  by the time I’ve followed it to its end, I’ve forgotten where it started and what twists and turns took me to where it ended. I remember being frustrated by that even as a very young child, before I learned to write, and how similar it was to being unable to remember a dream teasing on the far-side of memory, upon awakening.  From the time that I first learned to write, I recognized it as the tool I’d always longed for, to allow thought chains to be captured and enhanced.

It was that delight in playing inside my own head that first inspired me to write.  Which I did throughout my life, either as a method of self-discovery or artistic expression, or as the foundation of my professional success as a management consultant – a field I entered as a specialist in plain language.

But that’s not what inspired me to start writing Emergence.  The inspiration there was very concrete:  a flashing sign, as I approached my 70^th birthday, saying:  NOW OR NEVER.  I knew that I was a technically accomplished writer.  But I didn’t know if I was capable of what for me, has always been the zenith of accomplishment for a writer:  producing a novel.  Could I prove to myself and whatever portion of the world had the slightest interest, that I could write the kind of book I most like to read? And so I embarked on a project to write a novel of psychological suspense, featuring powerful women, realistic dogs, and a sometimes lyrical voice. Emergence was the output of my Now or Never project.

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Welcome, Ellie. Please tell us a little bit about yourself:
I grew up in a typical Jewish, suburban household in Baltimore, Maryland. As an active participant in the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s (read: hippie-chick,) I cultivated my long-standing dislike of the culture in which I’d been raised, and ran away to the hippie haven Canada was then perceived to be. I loved it then, and have loved it ever since.

Professionally, I spent the majority of my professional career as a management consultant in Ottawa, Ontario. Plain language writing, which I’d started to cultivate in university as a rejection of the academic language with which I’d been very successful but found pretentious, was one of my specialities. So finding a “human voice” in writing, which I think is a key factor in the character of Emergence, has been a constant throughout my adult life.

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