Ann Shortell
Celtic Knot
Toronto Public Library

Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Like the storied knot in my novel’s title, I am a weaving of Celtic strands. 

My father descended from Irish Catholics who crossed the Atlantic beginning in the late 1700s. They built new lives at the confluence of three great bodies of water—Lake Ontario, the Rideau Canal, and the St. Lawrence River—farming in the Thousand Islands region that would become a fluid element of the U.S.-Canadian border. 

My Welsh mother was one of almost 50,000 women who arrived in Canada as ‘War Brides’ of World War II soldiers.

Both cherished their roots, family lore, and the lessons of history, yet their viewpoints were as diverse as fact and fiction. My father, a social conservative, economic socialist, and union activist, loved the cut and thrust of political debate. My mother was a storyteller, a woman of faeries and sendings and the power of intuition. 

As a youth, I wished she would cease yearning for her homeland, under the misapprehension that longing meant she didn’t fully embrace her chosen path. Now I identify with the outlander’s duality. I’ve been an active citizen of Canada’s largest city, Toronto, for more than 40 years—happily married and surrounded by family here for almost three of those decades. This in no way diminishes the truth that I too have never left my past behind. 

Whether it’s town and country, historical and quotidian, reportage or fable, corporeal and intangible, my parents inculcated in me that all our borders are fluid.

Tell us a little bit about your winning book.

CELTIC KNOT A Clara Swift Tale is a twist of history which reimagines the 1868 assassination of Irish rebel and Canadian poet-statesman T. D’Arcy McGee—Canada’s great unsolved murder mystery.

It is also the debut of a series of Clara Swift Tales, which will feature hinge-points in North American history reimagined through the lens of this bright, young, female Irish immigrant. 

This coming-of-age tale has been described by readers as ‘Alias Grace meets a dark, twisty Anne of Green Gables.’ 

The novel won Canada’s answer to the Rubery Award, the Whistler Independent Book Award for Fiction. 

It has also earned more than 30 other award honours, in categories such as Literary Fiction, Multicultural Fiction, Women’s Fiction, Spiritual Fiction, Regional Fiction, and Historical Fiction, from organizations including the Florida Writers Association, Crime Writers of Canada, the Colorado Independent Publishers Association, Writers Digest, the Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPYs), and the Sarton Women’s Book Awards. 

CELTIC KNOT has been cited as a strong candidate for adaptation by the ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition and three film festivals, and a Canadian director is now exploring series development. A publisher is considering the novel for a Chinese translation, and an animated webisode is under production by the L.A. Neo Noir Novel, Script & Film Festival. 

Reviewers and judges have been kind. “Clara is an appealing protagonist in this skillfully-constructed historical mystery,” said Whistler judge Evelyn Lau. “. . . I was engaged by the polished writing and the finely chosen details…breathtaking revelations…made for a satisfying, wholly unexpected conclusion.”

“Shortell vividly conveys the atmosphere that surrounded the murder and examines the profound impact that McGee’s death had on the development of the fledgling nation,” wrote Publisher’s Weekly. “This is a lively and fascinating story, well told.” 

“One of the best opening lines I’ve seen in a long time: ‘I’m wasting my new beeswax candles, staring at the pages of the past.’ That’s stunning in so many sensory and symbolic ways, with a dash of intrigue . . .” commented a judge for Writers Digest’s 27th Self-Published Book Awards. “. . . Reimagining an historic moment carries with it tremendous risk to be found true to the facts, and also to entertain. We can look to the musical Hamilton for the pinnacle of getting it right. This story’s pinning to fact strikes some of the same bells. Well done.”

In Clara Swift’s next tale-in-development, An Irish Goodbye, she survives the 1869-70 Red River Resistance, only to become embroiled in an attempt to drag President Grant into the Irish battle against Britain—with the new country of Canada as the target.

What inspired you to write this book?

We all meet with moments in life that set us on a new path. Three weeks after my mother’s death, I dreamed of a girl, writing by candlelight, “I was on the other side of the door when Mr. McGee was shot.” I knew she meant Canadian Father of Confederation T. D’Arcy McGee, who was struck down while Canada was in the crucible that would shape its nationhood. Unlike Lincoln’s assassination three years earlier, there were no witnesses. Irish rebels were blamed, and the one hanged for the crime maintained he did not pull the trigger. To this day, his relatives maintain his innocence. 

When I was but a girl myself, my father recounted how our fellow Irish-Canadian had been shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night, while on the threshold of his Sparks St. boarding house in Ottawa—at the very spot where we stood as he spun the tale. 

I looked upon this dream-girl. and her echo of that long-buried story, as a sending. The kind of vision of which my mother used to speak. The gifting of a character, one who would lead me into my people’s and my country’s past. Whatever had conjured Clara Swift for me, I set aside everything else, to reimagine history—and attempt to create a heroine akin to those who lived in the stories I’d always loved to read.

What made you want to be a writer?

As Leonard Cohen crooned in Tower of Song, “I was born like this, I had no choice.”

I was the child my parents would discover carefully laying playing cards on the dining room table, while introducing each newly-named character to their mates. Or else perched on the staircase, making up stories of the denizens who inhabited the realm underneath the treads and risers. That secret world was discovered when my older sister Susan plopped down next to me one day, and I cried out, “You’re sitting on Noonan!”

By age six, I read everything that came over the transom. Even the military humor page in Reader’s Digest, though I never got the jokes. A few years later, I asked my mother why people’s names were listed in magazines. “Those people write the stories,” she said. I replied, “That will be my job.” 

Then I discovered Emily Byrd Starr, the heroine of a series of books by Canada’s L. M. Montgomery. I also loved her Anne Shirley, a.k.a. Anne of Green Gables. Emily, though is a special creature: a girl who must write. The plots of the trilogy are built around her need to spin stories. I learned from these books that someone else felt that thrill of creation; how I should react to naysayers and learn from editors, how to value my work, and how the community would respect writing when it was a paying job.

I applied to journalism school in order to be a writer, just as All The President’s Men was released and investigative reporting became the rage. As a business journalist, I did my share of uncovering the dark side of high-stakes decision-making. I worked for dailies, weeklies, and magazines, coauthored two books, then wrote one by myself: a serious study of how the Canadian business landscape was being shaken up by the push for globalization.

A few years later, a switch flipped in my mind. Whether through burnout or epiphany, I needed to leave my successful career in journalism and return to my storytelling roots. I’d written non-fiction books; now I would finally publish a novel.

Well, I failed. Then I failed again. The tale of my road to published fiction is one of those windy, picaresque sagas that involves inspiration, an agent, hubris, multiple drafts, another agent, surgery, family crises, love and marriage, a diversion into Latin paleography, the loss of parents, a reeducation, concussion, CBD oil, gamer glasses, and all the usual suspects. In short: I have two unpublished manuscripts in drawers. Number One is a mystery set in the 1990s in Palm Beach Florida. Number Two is a saga of women in medieval France and England healing as a community, after a devastating battle, by creating a timeless work of art. 

When Clara Swift arrived in my life, I knew that I needed to learn how best to write her novel. And I knew that once it was properly written, I would self-publish, on the 150th anniversary of McGee’s assassination.

CELTIC KNOT was workshopped through a transformative two-year online novel-writing course at Stanford University. After my 2016 graduation, I suffered a severe concussion. My plans were revived the following spring, spurred on by a finalist placement in a mystery manuscript contest. The gamer glasses and CBD oil allowed me to once again focus on words typed on a screen. And the book was launched at exactly the right moment in time.

How have libraries played a role in your writing journey?

Like most writers of my acquaintance, I breathe deeply when entering a library; then, transported, relax into a smile. A library is a portal to so many worlds. Turn one way, you are surrounded by the knowledge of ages. Turn another, you meet up with old friends, flirt with new fantasies. This love affair began early, of course. When I was nine, we moved. I was told only one thing about my new home: it would be closer to the library.

Large swathes of CELTIC KNOT were researched and written at the Toronto Reference Library. I was that person madly writing in their ground-floor Balzac’s Café; the woman looking for a carrel in the stacks with a view of the ravine’s autumn leaves; the figure in a blue woolen cape rolling a red leather computer case through the double-glass doors into the climate-controlled Baillie archives. 

My book is mainly set in Ottawa, our nation’s capital. After the local newspaper ran my anniversary homage to McGee, noting my upcoming launch, the Ottawa Library phoned in an order for four copies of CELTIC KNOT. My indie bookseller and I agreed: this was my novel’s true arrival. 

Happily, this pattern was repeated in my hometown. Letting the broader library community know about an indie book is, of course, a much tougher job. I secured a three-minute pitch as part of Crime Writers of Canada at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference, as well as a place on a few mystery-writing library panel presentations But libraries in cities like Toronto are inundated with local indie authors. 

When I returned to the Reference Library, this time in search of my Publishers Weekly print review, the magazine’s issue hadn’t yet made it to Canada. The librarians I chatted up checked it out online, though, and suggested CELTIC KNOT be added to Toronto’s collection. And so I learned how reviews and award placements could make a huge difference: I tracked when hardcover sales spiked, while both WorldCat and local Canadian library listings increased following award honours. 

Canada has a Public Lending Rights program, which measures and compensates writers for library usage. I was ecstatic this spring when my PLR cheque showed CELTIC KNOT in the collections of half the libraries randomly sampled.

Still, my novel’s eBook wasn’t readily available to libraries, and I didn’t know how to bridge that barrier. Until I heard about the Indie Author Program. Becoming part of the Select Commercial Curation was a huge boost, and I’ve been proudly promoting my eBook’s availability through IAP and Biblioboard. 

Come Indie Author Day, I tuned in to find out which of my indie colleagues would be chosen 2020’s Ontario Adult Fiction Author. I was alone when I heard the words CELTIC KNOT. Twenty minutes later, my husband was alarmed to walk in and find me, distracted and hyperventilating, my hands shaking ever so slightly.