WEYBURN – The first novel for Weyburn resident Tara Keating-Jaap is a murder mystery set in Wales, entitled “Birdie’s Lullaby”.
The inspiration for her book arose from a memorable trip she and her best friend had to Wales, and secondly from a writing class she took with local writer Anne Lazurko, and a follow-up book-writing club where some of the ideas were born and fleshed out.
Tara arranged with her best friend, Heather Wagner, to meet up in England for a holiday, and they spent a week in London. She was contacted by a distant cousin, Cath Lucas, who had spent some time in Weyburn with Tara’s uncle, Neil and Diane Eddy, about coming to Wales for a visit.
The two took a train and were picked up in Swansea, and were then taken to Cath’s town, Llantwit-Major, where they stayed with Cath’s grandmother, Katherine. Cath, her boyfriend and other friends were all around the same age as Tara and Heather, so they ended up spending a full week in the farming town.
“It was an interesting time, because Tony Blair was the prime minister at the time, and they were dealing with foot-and-mouth disease,” Tara explained.
“It was a really memorable time in my life, and I’ve always reflected back on it. I hope to go back there one day. That is how the book came to have this setting,” she added.
She took a writing class with Lazurko in 2019 at the Signal Hill Arts Centre, and afterward they formed a small book-writing club that often met at Tara’s house, including Griffin-area writer Leeann Minogue.
“Anne gave us homework projects that we’d write short things and discuss and critique each other’s work at our meetings,” said Tara.
She began the story based in Wales as a short story, hoping to submit to a short story writing contest, but it didn’t feel finished to her and she kept on writing.
“Once I got 100 pages in, I just kept going,” she said, noting she replaced the last three chapters and the ending because she wasn’t happy with her initial ending.
The story became a murder mystery as she thought about what was happening in the plot, and thus she rewrote it by inserting the murder of a woman named Birdie early on in the novel.
Tara was able to draw on her memories of the town, such as the big stone house Katherine lived in, heating only by a large coal stove, and farming activity in the area that included people having sheep next to their homes.
She also drew some on Katherine herself, and other people she met in Wales, including some of their terms and slang. She has added explanatory notes in the book in case some of the words and place names are unfamiliar to Canadian readers.
Of Katherine, she said, “She was very matter-of-fact and no-nonsense, and she cooked meals for shifts of people. They worked hard at farming jobs and she’d cook entire slabs of meat, like pork or lamb, and stick it right on the plate in the stove, and people would come in shifts to eat. She’d invite anybody in for tea.”
The two main characters are Birdie, who is murdered early on, and her best friend Edith, both living and raising daughters together in the town of Llantwit-Major.
Tara noted her mother, Jan Keating, and her sister Trenna have both been reading and editing her copy for the past year, and her mother helped her a lot with the publishing process as she has also published two books through Amazon.
There’s been early interest in her book, as she sold 10 copies just in the first two days after she had it published through Amazon. She’s ordered a box of 50 books, and hopes to possibly hold a reading or a book-signing at a future date.
The books are available through Amazon and is on Kindle as well.
