The past is a different place - as different as any unfamiliar part of the world. The food people ate, the way they lived, the games they played, and the politics and economic systems that sustained them. All are different and foreign even to those of us who live now in those places.

Yet human nature - our capacity to love, worry, hate, and fear are universal and follow us across time and across oceans.

I'll take you on a winding journey as I share some of my own discoveries while researching the historical novel and short stories I'm currently working on, set in early Vancouver of the late 1800's.

Would there be wallpaper in the house of my protagonist in 1885? How long  was the  wagon ride from New Westminster to Vancouver?  Which streets had sidewalks and how far did they go before petering out into dirt, mud, and skunk-cabbage?

Five Days in November is a woman's story about early Vancouver - the other side of the coin to stories about millyards, saloon-keepers, and the railroad.

The story came to me while working at the Vancouver Archives  helping researchers uncover documents about a vast range of events in the city’s history and imagining the people who experienced them.