The title of this book is taken from a poem I wrote in my late twenties, a time of uncertainty. The opening lines are:

In solitude I stood

on the windswept brink

Not long after, I moved with my family from rural Ontario to a coastal community in Newfoundland.

How do we know when change is necessary? Sometimes, all we can know is that something is hidden, urging us to strike out in a new direction. Set in 1968 and the early 1940s, Windswept begins with Teri Withers faced with a dilemma when a note and airline ticket arrive from her family in Withers Cove, Newfoundland, summoning her home to see her beloved grandfather before he passes. Withers Cove is a place Teri hasn’t seen in more than a decade and has no desire to return to. Newfoundland is where her estranged father lives and where memories of the mother she lost at sixteen are too powerful. But all is not well in her Toronto life. As she recognizes she has no firm plans for the future and the man she thought cared about her has abruptly moved on, Teri sets out on her adventure home.

The genesis of Windswept was an idea that arose after publishing Dear Billie. My father went off to war leaving his girl behind and she wrote to him faithfully. Although I can only speculate, I suspect those letters helped my father face the hardships, uncertainty, and wounding that he endured in England and Normandy during the time he served. So, the question presented itself. What if a young man went off to war and didn’t have the connection of letters from his girl back home? How would that shape him? How would he pick up the life he left behind? And who would be impacted? In Windswept, that possibility is examined.

Teri Withers returns to the small Newfoundland community where she was born and to the name she was given at birth, Tara. To a grandfather she and her mother had lived with until she was four and her father whisked them away. But the Carl Withers she is estranged from is not the one her grandfather remembers. As the two stories, one set in 1968 and the other in the 1940s, emerge, Tara must address memories and feelings she has long held in light of new, conflicting evidence ― and the discovery of a cruel secret that shaped her parents’ future as well as her own. In the end, will she return to her Toronto life or is there a path forward in her home province with the father she never understood?

War exerts a long pull. It doesn’t end on a certain date with the generation that lived through it. As a child of a former Canadian Army tank gunner, I witnessed the toll it took on my father. He never spoke of it except to remember those who were lost. At those times, his hands would tremble and his emotions were very near the surface. He suffered nightmares for the rest of his life. He found solace in alcohol as so many did. Fortunately, not to the extent that it destroyed him as it sometimes did others. He functioned as a provider and was a good, though imperfect, father. Aren’t we all imperfect in some ways?

Windswept is an exploration of all that is perfect and imperfect in all of us. If we can see through the fog of our long-held beliefs, there might just be a path forward. Dare we take it?