Spice cake!!

My new book-baby is one week old today (never mind the fact that the thing was in process for over a decade!) and we ushered it into the world at a lovely launch last week!

J. and I went for dinner beforehand with friends. We had wine (half-price bottle day at Prairie Ink, who knew?!) but not too much. My friend A. brought me lovely orangey-pink tulips to grace the book table that are only now giving up the ghost in my kitchen.

It is always such a pleasure to talk about a book after spending years and years and years (and, in the case of Following Sea, even more years) more-and-less alone with it and this event was extra special because it happened in my new home terrain, with new(ish) friends.

I wasn’t sure how it would go because, you know, there’s the talking about really personal stuff part, but it was fine. I didn’t speak too much about infertility (I wrote a guest blog post about this aspect which will be out one of these days and Naomi MacKinnon over at Consumed by Ink also delves into that content a bit in her recent post about the book).

Instead, I took my gracious audience on a wee ‘tour’ through the book, talking about genealogy (which I also wrote about recently for Family Locket), history, how we explore where we fit in the world, the tricky questions that arise…

The evening was live-streamed so if you missed it, and you’d like to “attend,” you can view it right here (some technical difficulties at the beginning, but it goes right-side-up after about a minute…):