Some Kinda Woman! Stories of Us

"Maybe my story can be a tiny beam of light in a large, dark cave," says Anneke Lucas in the podcast that begins to tell her story, from her book QUEST FOR LOVE.

"Elite pedophilia is the world’s best protected secret.

Your eyes cannot help but see what is here: the sight of someone like yourself

And then you think: How can this be? Is that really all the time there is left?

A chance encounter in the dark winter days of December 2022. A benevolent energy in a hospital room with snaking tubes and mystery signs, the face of a newborn and a lifetime of important people. All gathering for Sebastian. Except for the visitor, who is missing the opportunity to connect.

Naïve but adventurous, twenty-two years young and fresh out of university, Public Health Nurse Marion McKinnon accepts an assignment for a four day, multi stop, two-hundred mile trip from Williams Lake to Anahim Lake into the vast Cariboo-Chilcotin country of British Columbia. It’s December and the first snow has fallen across the land. The year is 1963. The weather forecast: twenty-two degrees below freezing.

The view is breathtaking and the roads treacherous.

And what if she gets lost? Or skids into a snowbank? In 1963, Marion is on her own in the wild but beautiful country, deep in winter - no cell phone, no two way radio. Just a chocolate bar and a candle . . . and the enthusiasm of her youth.

A flight attendant with 25 years seniority works through the early pandemic. An essential worker with close family ties and lots of friends.

Suddenly, her life is upended.

BC author Claudia Cornwall’s discovered almost 30 years ago that she was descended from family murdered in the Holocaust by a Waffen SS Sargent named Arlt. The remaining details were shrouded in the mystery of her grandparents’ last moments, one historical May day in a forest in Minsk. 80 years after their death, Cornwall received their executioner’s first name, his photograph. And many unanswered questions.

What happens to a robust 49-year old 
with Omicron in a BC hospital in 31 days?

A Mother's account of her son's care in a British Columbia hospital between November 2021, and a few days before Christmas.

At 19 weeks pregnant, a young Indigenous woman must make an excruciating decision - within hours - to save the lives of her unborn twins. "I remember being so afraid." This story has it all: fear, love, pain and alienation. Courage, community, and resilience. A generous, joyful storyteller.

Forever changed by her two pregnancies, Amanda Snelson tells of the unpredictable and complicated process of 2 births. As part of the discussion around Women's Choice and Roe v Wade, Amanda's story introduces new considerations to the complex picture of individual soverignty over our bodies.

My Mother's Story is a project that encourages everyone to write the facts of their mothers’ lives. It's a series of anthologies begun by Marilyn Norry. This is the story of DORIS, told by her daughter, Colleen Winton. My Mother's Story: Gone Too Soon is the latest anthology in the series and is now available.

How would your life be different if you couldn't drive a car? If once a week, a steamship arrived at the dock with supplies to keep you going for the next week? If your husband and the father of your children came home on "The Daddy Boat" once a week?

Cynthia Jones Meets The Union Steamship at 1 AM tells of a much simpler time on the Sunshine Coast - when anyone could go out in a sabot and grab a fish with her bare hands, when hospitals were miles from each other, when most lived in float houses by the light of a kerosene lamp.

It’s 1980, two days from the summer solstice in the wild landscape of Northwestern British Columbia. Deanna and her husband, Jay Kawatski, tend their food garden carved out of the wilderness in the Ningunsaw Valley when Deanna realizes that their first child will be born very soon. The couple must hike difficult mountain & bog terrain through clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes for more than two hours to their cabin on Desire Lake. Deanna’s water breaks and she instantly goes into labour. This is the story of their unattended birth, heralded by a family of loons who serenaded them throughout the night.

We Got One! celebrates moments that, whatever else happens in life afterwards, we have, as artists, in those moments, all the meaning we will ever need.  It marks the Cinderella achievement of having been chosen, of having hit the bulls-eye on the dartboard of current social and artistic reality. We can now stand on the world stage and beam our happiness that we matter.

Six Palm Trees is the journey of a family through the emotional landscape of their shared past. Annie Shea, the family clown, provides stand-up entertainment.Annie Shea, the family clown, provides stand-up entertainment. Annie Shea, the family clown, provides stand-up entertainment  at a family reunion, where everyone has gathered to celebrate 24 years of life together. 

“Funny and sad, powerful and whimsical, with mercurial mood changes and punchy humour. . . Six Palm Trees is more than a trip down memory lane . . it is a play (about) the price one woman paid to bear and raise 14 children. . . jewel of a play.”

                       -The Sooke Standard, Vancouver Island, B.C.

“A touching contrast between the comedy of sibling rivalry and the struggle for individual recognition in a large family.”

                                    -CHQM - Vancouver

High school graduate Teresa Feeney becomes pregnant from one encounter with a trusted priest Father Sully, who is leading a choir of students in a showcase of songs from the radical hippie production of HAIR. Annie Shea, herself from an enormous Catholic family where abortion is unthinkable, reluctantly becomes Teresa’s confidante. When Annie realizes Teresa is going to do what she desperately needs to do, she has to make a decision: Will she stand by her schoolmate and offer support during this dangerous, illegal procedure? 

Suddenly, your questions are endless: Who are you? Where is she?

Your father - a threat to national security? Imagine when men in heavy boots came to your home, your garden, to claim him.  An introduction to the story of a family, during World War II, living with the abrupt loss and the mystery of their father. 

"This morning, Lisa gave way to an anxiety she'd been stifling the past several weeks. She was afraid if she got behind the wheel of her red Toyota Tercel wagon, and drove onto the highway, she was going to give into the temptation she'd had lately to steer herself into a telephone pole."

Gramma Ester flies from Wisconsin to California to help with a big family wedding in 1976. Flowers, frozen turkey, chocolate groom's cake. Guests fill the church with summer: pastels and hats, ties and shiny shoes. The congregation murmuring, waits. And waits. If the music would just start to play, if the bride would just walk up the aisle on Daddy's arm, everything else would be vanquished into fairy tale. 

Finally, our mother: we can feel her slow step as she lifts each foot with all her available life force.

How could we be losing her like this? 

A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE = a big Catholic family 1963 in Pasadena. Chapter 7 is set on a warm California night at an enormous event: dinner. Clashing are the noisy and urgent desires of each child in a sprawling group of sixteen. Everyone is famished.

And then, there’s the guest. Who represents everything. God, Church, Community, Family. Everyone vying for his attention and approval. Pre-dinner hunger permeating the visceral experience of more than fifteen bodies, a baby with a dirty diaper in the play pen, and the smoking barbeque outside. 

And then, decades later, my brother brings me back to that haunting event. 

Before Gramma Ester was Gramma, when she was just a little six- year-old girl, in first grade, she had a crush on a family friend named Walter Gaulke (who was 13 years older). She carried this secret hope in her heart for almost two decades before she could have the moment with her sweetheart that she wished for all her life. And yet that moment quickly passed, and their story was lived and told, as you’ll hear in today’s podcast.