Emma Pivato

Finding a five-dollar bill in a vacant lot when I was ten and realizing that I could now buy the beautiful circle skirt with the carnival pictures on it that I had been longing for so much!

When I was 3 my mother started reading to me from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and I just loved it! I looked at those poems over and over and by the time I was five I was reading them on my own. I remember that I was so impressed by the way the author had been able to create his own special world.

My husband, by far. He has always told me that he loves me for who I am and wants me to explore and utilize whatever writing talent I have.

I have had experience with both. I have never paid to have a book published but I did explore that possibility about doing so with from Friesen Press when I was writing my memoir. I was very impressed with what they had to offer in terms of professional editing, promotion and distribution. My Claire Burke mystery series is published with Cozy Cat Press in Chicago. If offers a form of profit sharing. They undertake all the production and promotion costs but keep the profits from the paperback version. I get the profits from the e-books and they are all on Amazon. Also, I can order as many paperback books as I like at cost, place them in Canadian bookstores and keep whatever profits are left over from the bookseller’s take. My memoir, …and along came Alexis is being published by Guernica Editions here in Canada. I received professional editorial assistance and the artist did an excellent job on the cover. Also the distribution network through University of Toronto Press will hopefully be very effective in reaching a wide audience, both popular and academic.

I always admired authors and could not imagine how they were able to do what they did. When I finally started writing I was both thrilled and surprised to find out that I could do that, too, of course not at the level t which some of them were operating.

I only wrote poems initially. I published a few in our university poetry book but never tried to publish them anywhere else. It was only much later in my adult life when I attended a conference on Italian-Canadian literature with my husband that I thought about writing a book. It took almost 15 years from that point before I actually finished it and got it published in 2013 as Blindsight Solutions, the first in the Claire Burke mystery series. So I am definitely a late starter!

Tia is a composite of two close friends of mine with a pinch of certain others thrown in. One friend is an amazing housekeeper. For example, when her white kitchen tiles got a few knife nicks in them she took an extra tile to a paint store and got the color matched. Then she came home and carefully painted the nicks. Her always clean, shining floor looks like it was put in new yesterday and you would never know that it is about 30 years old and that she, herself, is 96!

The other part of Tia, the spunky, adventurous, determined part, is based on my friend, Debbie, who worked by my side to get our profoundly disabled children all the help they needed and deserved to have through all their growing up years.

I had been working on the idea of a wheelchair with a built-in lift system for many years. But then my quirky, high-spirited aunt ended up in a dependent living situation and two weeks later was placed in diapers! I watched her and the other clients who lived there gradually become demoralized and hopeless.

They did not last long after that and I was outraged by the perpetuation of a dehumanizing system because of logistical problems and the lack of the necessary imagination to overcome them. So I wrote that book as a way to promote my wheelchair and to preserve the sense of personal dignity and self-efficacy that all people need.

I am afraid I am not very organized or professional in my approach. A story just bubbles up in my brain and then I just start working on it. I really don’t know where it comes from or what is going to happen next and sometimes I surprise even myself when I find out who the killer is!

My husband and I spend a lot of time and energy preparing meals for our daughter. We do this because she really appreciates good food and there are very few things she can enjoy in life given the extent of her limitations. My cookbook, Gourmet Puree: What do do when you can’t chew!, is meant to address this issue. It is not as easy to prepare purees as you might think and through the years (Alexis is now 43!) I have developed a variety of tricks and techniques to facilitate the process. It seems to me that they are worth sharing and also some of the recipes we have developed along the way could be enjoyed in their pre-puree form by anyone, so the cookbook is not just for a specialized audience.

I am very interested in ethnic and regional cooking, particularly Italian and Asian. I also like to experiment with different cooking styles, slow cooking or poaching, for example. And I am interested in nutrition in general and the different dietary approaches various authors have taken like vegetarian or low carbohydrate or anti-gluten. I don’t have much interest in the latter though because I like to bake, particularly different bread styles. Books about different cooking tricks and techniques also intrigue me. I have been reading cookbooks and experimenting with recipes throughout my entire adult life and I have found it to be an entertaining and rewarding hobby.

I do have one concern in seeking out sources. I have read some of the same recipes with only slight variations in many different books so how does that square with the clear warning in every cookbook not to copy recipes without citing your source and getting written permission to reprint? Sometimes the recipes I produce are completely novel but sometimes they are simply variations of existing recipes with the changes being quite minor. Yes, I could site the source where I first discovered them, but since I know many also exist elsewhere in various forms and nobody else has done any of this source-citing what does that mean? What is my responsibility? If anyone has an answer, I would like to know about it.

Writing a cookbook is more challenging because it has to have some basis in reality or the cooks preparing it will be very disappointed and the people obliged to eat it will be very disgusted!

I like to run away to a Super 8 motel in our neighbouring city, Leduc. The staff there know me and do their best to keep me comfortable and undisturbed. That way I can move right in with my characters and live their lives and get on with weaving the story!

It is called Justice for All and I hope it is finished soon, maybe even this week, so I can get on with focusing on the cookbook. After that I am thinking of a different kind of book outside the disability world but it is too early to talk about it yet.

I am very bad at promotion and am in fact quite grumpy about it. It seems to me that it is enough work to write my books and after that they should magically promote themselves – but of course that does not happen! The AllAuthor site is good in that it keeps bringing this promotion issue to my attention and pestering me to do certain things, like the present questionnaire, that I would otherwise blithely ignore!