In my book ‘The Winter Sea,’ set north of Aberdeen, I couldn’t just ignore the fact some people there – especially the people in the past – would speak the Doric. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don’t blame them. I’ve read books myself that I’ve had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
People didn’t just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn’t hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit’s incomplete. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they’ve sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
Even a writer like me, who, in ‘The Firebird,’ is telling the story of people who’ve been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
I was born in the city of Brantford, Ontario, Canada – but by the time I’d left high school, I’d moved seven times with my family, my father’s engineering work taking us to places as far-flung as Bay City, Texas, and Wolnae-Ri in South Korea. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but ‘Little Women’ has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
