Author CJ Frederick asks readers to question if home is a place or a feeling in first novel
'If you listen, there are stories all around us,' author says of inspiration for novel
A new book tells the story of a young boy's journey from India to southern Ontario and asks readers to contemplate what the word "home" means to them.
CJ Frederick's historical fiction novel is Rooted and Remembered and is based on the true story set in Middlesex County.
Frederick began writing the book during the pandemic in her home office in Cambridge. She now lives in Tillsonburg.
She joined CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition host Craig Norris to talk about the story.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Audio of the interview can be found at the bottom of the story.
Craig Norris: Tell us what your book Rooted and Remembered is about.
CJ Frederick: It's a coming of age story … It's based on the true story about a real person, Ellwyne Ballantine, who was born in British India — when India was still a British colony.
At a young age, he becomes orphaned and he's first taken to Europe and then ends up all the way in North America in a small farming community in southwestern Ontario, right near my hometown in the early 1900s.
He ends up being informally adopted or taken in by a Scottish settler family. And he learns how to farm and how to survive in these conditions and, I think, begins to discover again what home really is and what it means to be a part of the family.
Then, of course, World War One breaks out and everything in his life changes.
Norris: This is, as you said, based on a true story. How did you come to find out about this story?
Frederick: My father loves stories and always has his ear to the ground for good ones.
He saw a very small newspaper article in a local paper about a magnificent tree dedicated to the life of a World War One soldier and he told me that, 'Gosh, this sounds like there's more to it than just a two-paragraph story.' And I started to begin researching it and managed to land into the ears of the storykeeper. I call him the storykeeper, the man who heard the story at the knee of his grandmother.
So his grandmother was the one who took in Ellwyne Ballantine and she treasured his life and wanted to make sure that his story was passed on to his relatives and to generations beyond that.
I was lucky enough to land into that gentlemen's home and find out the story from him.
Norris: What drove you to want to share this story with others?
Frederick: It's a touching story based on a time, an important time in Canada's history, right? So when Canada was becoming more of a nation during World War One.
I've also read that family stories, if they're not recorded, they disappear within three generations. And it turns out that the storykeeper, he was very much hoping that someone, perhaps in his own family, would take interest in the story and help preserve it.
But then one day, a stranger landed on his doorstep asking about it. And at first we were just going to try to craft a short story about it, but because it's so complex, it ended up blooming into a novel.
Norris: Talk a bit more about that. I mean, you have written short stories in the past. Talk a bit about the evolution and what you discovered when you wrote your first full length novel.
Frederick: This involved a lot of genealogical research and also the gentleman who ended up looking up with — the storykeeper — is pretty much in his heart a museum curator. His home is like a museum. He has lived his whole life with the story and he has artifacts and he has letters and he has photographs.
We basically just sat at his table for 10s upon 10s of hours constructing this tale. And then I got his permission to try to fictionalize it because we were missing pieces of it, right? So we can't say that it's completely true. So I fictionalized it to make it into a story arch. That's how it came to be.
Norris: What did you discover about yourself out of this?
Frederick: Very much that I love to do research. My day job is as a technical writer. So I do construct stories, perhaps not interesting ones, but there are stories. And I also have at my base, I grew up as the proud granddaughter of a World War One veteran myself. So this has been a part of my life and interest in that time period to discover more about that.
So it's always been very important for me to discover more about it and also to help make sure that next generations that follow us understand the sacrifice that this generation went through.
Norris: What do you hope people take away from Rooted and Remembered?
Frederick: I think it's very much the concept that we are all connected and we are all connected to the land. And if you listen, there are stories all around us.
Also, if you think that your life is small, or if you wonder if you'll be remembered once you're gone, this story will prove that one very small ripple can have a really far reaching effect.
This story came to be simply because there is a memorial plaque on a tree in a very, very small intersection in southwestern Ontario.
Norris: What is next for you?
Frederick: I'm writing a series of more stories based on true crimes that have occurred in the southwestern Ontario area. They're not told either from the victim's perspective or in some cases from the murderer's perspective, but sometimes from the murder weapon's perspective or from an inanimate object.
LISTEN | Rooted and Remembered is the story of a young Indian boy who moves to southern Ontario: