In response to: “Where did you get the idea for the story, or book, or play? Is it true, are the characters real people, is the whole thing from your imagination?” a synthesis of experiences takes place.

Shortly after our marriage, my wife and I had summer jobs at a chalet or special camp in Quebec’s mountain-lake Northern area where the observation of the guilt mothers shouldered for their children’s handicaps stayed with us

Here is an excerpt from my China journal entry after dining at the home of a university colleague who later appeared in a book:
By all medical logic, the older girl should have been dead years ago. After dinner the last time we were there…Mr. Zhang…held the girl in his arms to spoon feed her, looked up at us and said: ‘She should be dead, but it is my will and love that keeps her alive.’ A miracle defying medical diagnosis and prognosis. I think she was 17 years old, very thin, unable to walk or talk, always carried, she could have passed for four years old. She never grew physically or mentally.

On a bus one day where passengers crowded on, looking up from a book I was reading, coming down the aisle, I noticed a young woman with severe Down Syndrome, and just behind her, a lovely, slim, blond lady of cool and calm demeanour, probably her mother, and the interaction between them.

These moments I have just shared happened a long time ago. Their clarity and impact never faded. When I was asked to create a short story during a writing workshop years later, all of the above merged finding their way from mind to heart to pen to manuscript. Encouraged to expand it into a novel, a play evolved for possible staging. The protagonist and her dilemma, along with a few secondary characters continue to elicit quiet sympathy and fondness from me. I hope attending the reading and the representative cast will have the same effect.