Susanna Moodie: Roughing It in the Bush is a project over a decade in the making. First-time filmmaker Patrick Crowe met Carol Shields in 1994, when he was interviewing her for a documentary about Susanna Moodie, a British writer who emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832. Many contemporary Canadian writers have found inspiration in Moodie's work, and Shields and Crowe ended up collaborating on a film script based on her memoir Roughing It in the Bush.

The project was put on hold when Shields passed away in 2003, but Crowe recently returned to Moodie's story, transforming the script-in-progress into a graphic novel and interactive online story.

This is a part of history that isn't very well known to people, even though it's considered by many to be a cornerstone of English Canadian literature. The reason for that is that the original text is hard to relate to — Susanna's point of view as an upper-middle-class English immigrant to Canada comes across as snobby, and she's really hard to like.

At the heart of her story is the fact that she was an abolitionist, an anti-slavery activist. She had these ideals, and had no issue speaking her mind about them. We were trying to make the story accessible. It's a very interesting story and her experiences were really difficult. We have to look at it today and ask ourselves, would we have done as well under the same circumstances?

I first met Carol Shields around 1994, before she'd really had her great fame with The Stone Diaries. I was interviewing her for a documentary film I was making about Susanna Moodie and the Canadian authors she influenced. Years later, Carol was asked to write a film script about the Susanna Moodie story. She accepted the challenge before she realized that she didn't actually know how to write for film. So she phoned me up, to see if I would work on this theatrical feature film script with her.

We worked on the script from about 1998 to 2001. Carol was first diagnosed with cancer during this time. When the cancer came back, we set the work aside. When she died, I put the project away for about a decade; I didn't really have the heart to continue the project. But then I was getting really interested in graphic novels, especially interactive graphic novels. I thought that would be a great way to take that project and turn it into something very rich.

"I was very honoured by the experience, but also very hesitant to put myself on eye level with so celebrated an author. And yet, when we started to work together, Carol was an absolute joy to work with. She was so gracious and respectful of the ideas of others. And she had great confidence in her own intellectual process, which was wonderful to be around! I'd never had a mentor, when I was first working in film. And then by following the subjects that I was interested in authentically, I ended up with the best mentor I could have ever found in my life."