Naïve but adventurous, twenty-two years young and fresh out of university, Public Health Nurse Marion McKinnon accepts an assignment for a four day, multi stop, two-hundred mile trip from Williams Lake to Anahim Lake into the vast Cariboo-Chilcotin country of British Columbia. It’s December and the first snow has fallen across the land. The year is 1963. The weather forecast: twenty-two degrees below freezing.

The view is breathtaking and the roads treacherous.

And what if she gets lost? Or skids into a snowbank? In 1963, Marion is on her own in the wild but beautiful country, deep in winter – no cell phone, no two way radio. Just a chocolate bar and a candle . . . and the enthusiasm of her youth.

Marion Crook’s book ALWAYS PACK A CANDLE held its own on BC’s Bestseller List for one year and won the 2022 Lieutenant-Governor’s Community History Award. Here is a glimpse into the adventures of a frontline worker holding her own and bringing health care to far-flung homesteads, one-room schools and small town residents – decades before developments in modern technology would put her in communication with the world she served.

My first book, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, takes place in the famous ‘Sixties’ specifically, 1963. It’s full of anecdotes observing the emerging consciousness that the decade is famous for. There is a quality to both books – THEORY and ALWAYS PACK A CANDLE, capturing the unique and distinct worlds of young women stepping out into life and society. The audiobook just won DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE IN the NEW YORK CITY BIG BOOK AWARD.

My second novel, KENNEDY GIRL, soon to be released by Sunbury Press, takes place at the end of the decade – and much of the second half is an adventure up the coast to Canada, a political haven for many Anti War draft-age immigrants. Annie Shea, who is the upstart voice in A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, turns 17 in 1968 in KENNEDY GIRL, and her world expands, intersecting with many historical events of 1968. In the US and Canada, in the Sixties, freedom of speech, freedom of choice and especially freedom of bodily integrity were guaranteed citizens’ rights. Today these questions persist: whose freedom? Whose risk? Whose body? Whose control?