Writing Projects

I spent this past summer re-working Amber Stone (tentative title). It will be the third book in my series which follows the life of Katya Halter from about 1930 onwards. It’s inspired by my mother’s tumultuous youth beginning as a kulak in the Soviet Union. Amber Stone focuses on the years just before the Second World War. It’s set in East Prussia, which in those years was Germany’s most eastern province. 

(Map created by Matthead based on East_Prussia_1939.kpg from English Wikipedia)

After the war, East Prussia was divided amongst Lithuania, Russia and Poland. My mom’s territory around Königsberg (now called Kaliningrad) now belongs to the Russian Federation. I’m saving my dollars for a trip over there…hopefully by the fall of 2018.  (Fingers crossed that unexpected expenses stay away!) Traveling is such a great way to research…even if the country is no longer a political reality and its people all expelled and by now mostly dead. Memories stay caught in the trees, the stones along the beach, and in the very soil of the land.  

I learned a lot while exploring the 1930s in Nazi Germany. What a     frightening time…especially because we all know what happened later. It’s hard to keep the shadow of the imposing future out of the story…but I tried my best to look at it from their shoes…from Katya’s view.

The image of the East Prussian coat of arms, which I found while wandering through Manitoba's Interlake this summer, proves that East Prussian memories still exist more than seventy years later...and a continent away.

Now I’ll spend the winter revising my fourth book of the series. Tentatively titled Crow Stone, it begins in January, 1945 as the Third Reich collapses. It follows Katya into Soviet captivity and explores her more than two years in the Ural Mountains. It’s been a lot harder to find information about women prisoners in the Soviet Union and I’m relying a lot on my mom’s memories.  Of course I’d love to visit the Urals and see some of the former prisoner of war camps. That’ll be my next savings goal. For now, I have books, the internet, Mom’s stories, and my imagination.

German female prisoners of war being released July, 1947 in Soviet Union. My mom could possibly be part of this group.

Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1983-0422-308 / Donath, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0