Lorna J. Shaw

Learn a little bit more about the woman herself

Lorna Shaw was born in New Liskeard in 1934, a small town on the shores of Lake Temiskaming in Northern Ontario, the setting for the novel The Last Summer. She was the youngest of six children to parents Violet and George Harrison, who were pioneers to the area. Her love of books came at the age of seven when an elder sister introduced her to and assisted her in reading Anne of Green Gables. She was educated at the local public schools and became a committed Christian when she was fourteen and became involved with the furtherance of the Kingdom of God by sharing the gospel at school and in the community.

In 1952 at the age of 18, Lorna left New Liskeard to go to Toronto to train as a nurse at the Hospital for Sick Children which she loved. As part of the curriculum for the course, Lorna was sent to the St.Thomas Ontario hospital for three months of psychiatric nursing. While in St.Thomas, on a blind date, Lorna met the love of her life, Dennie Shaw, a well known business man in the area. She returned to Toronto to finish her training and graduated as a nurse with high honours in 1955 and was awarded the prize for General Proficiency. Lorna was chosen to be the valedictorian of her nursing class and began her career of public speaking to large audiences at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. Later she received accreditation as a Registered Nurse in the province of Ontario.

Still carrying on a long distance courtship by mail with Dennie Shaw, Lorna moved to London Ontario in 1956 to work as a head nurse in the medical pediatric unit of Victoria Hospital. She and Dennie were married in 1958 to live south of the city and begin raising a family of three sons and two daughters, Where Lorna carried on her involvement with church work and community involvement.

A tour to Israel in 1983 inspired her to write her first novel, In Fullness of Time, a chronological life of Jesus Christ as seen from the perspective of His mother, Mary of Nazareth. Lorna and her husband self published the book with kind reviews and acceptance by the CNIB for their talking books program. Of course Mary's story had to end with her death on the last page of the 787 page novel. Lorna felt her loss so acutely as though she had lost her best friend and couldn't write about her anymore so she began a six act screenplay of the novel, but never chose to find a producer to bring the play to life. To fill in the gap of her writing hours, Lorna looked for another imaginary character and found her deep in the recesses of her mind. She began to write The Last Summer the story of Margaret Darwin, a contemporary self sufficient woman who struggles through many situations as perhaps the average woman, but only with a little more fun and adventure.

While on vacation with Dennie in Key West Florida in 2004, Lorna suffered a major stroke, leaving her partially incapacitated, but with her imagination still intact she went on to write a sequel to The Last Summer, named A Kenyan Winterlude. Given Lorna's penchant for writing long novels she continued on with Margaret's story in An Etruscan Spring. Margaret's story does not end there but finally at the end of the twentieth book in the New Lancastrian series, Margaret's life must come to an inevitable end. Lorna Shaw cannot guarantee that she will not write another long novel but it is certain that she will write an autobiography, having received all the medical notes from her stroke. “Stroke of Blessing” is already forming in this imaginative mind.

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In the Beginning

October 24th, 2014

I got my start to writing, by a trip to Israel back in 1983 on a tour with a group from the TV program One Hundred Huntley Street. We were in a southern suburb of Jerusalem to visit the Church of the Magnificat, the traditional site of the home of John the Baptist. You will remember that Mary of Nazareth visited her cousin, Elizabeth (John's mother) when she first became pregnant with Jesus. The tour group roamed about the old church and the rose garden under the watchful eye of the curator priest from Quebec City. This man had the longest and dirtiest toenails I have ever seen on a human being which is why I remember it so vividly.

A month later, I sat in my favourite chair at home in Sparta, reflecting on the sights of the Holy Land while reading the gospels, and remembered after seeing the Church of the Magnificent, the tour had continued on, within a quarter hour to the olive wood tourist traps in Bethlehem! I lay my head back and closed my eyes, thinking that if I were Mary, great with child, and had tramped over a hundred miles from Nazareth, up hill and down dale through the heat and dust and flies, and I had come this far on my way to Bethlehem, I would never pass my cousin's open door without stopping in to say 'hello' and to see her new baby, born in my absence, and rest my weary feet. So… I thought, There's a story here about the relationship of these two families and many of the other people mentioned in the New Testament. So… I said to myself (I thought) Someone should write a book about all these people. I can only say, I heard a voice, perhaps in my mind, say, "Then you do it!"

Before I started my first book, I distinctly remember rising from my chair and thinking I don't know how to write a book. And the thought came to me that I would have to read a lot to learn what the life of a Jewish woman, was like during the first century two thousand years ago. I walked into the den to pick up the encyclopedia to read about Herod the Great. I closed the tome thinking, I had an awful lot to learn but where to start? The public library in St. Thomas and the church library seemed good places to begin. But I ended up spending long afternoons at the University of Western Ontario's library, making copious notes. I read for two months, three or four hours each day. Then when the first week of September rolled around and my youngest child at home went to high school and the rest of the family went back to work or college. That's when I began writing In Fullness of Time. It took me one week to write the first paragraph. After that, I began writing like a mad woman and couldn't stop. The words were coming so quickly into my mind that my fingers on the pen could barely keep up to the ideas. I wrote steadily for two months, and one evening, decided to review what I had written up to the place where Mary leaves home with Joseph for Bethlehem because of the census. I found I couldn't stop reading the manuscript either because I could barely wait to turn the pages to find what happened next. After that, I felt I had something there worth spending much more time on.

October 25th, 2014

During the process of writing my first book, I found it was necessary to keep a chart with the years running across the top and the list of characters down the side so they would all age at the same rate and I added what was happening politically, too. I persevered for several more years when my son informed me that I would have to type the manuscript. I didn't know one end of the keyboard from the other. So he provided me with a word processor which had a delete button for my many errors.

At that time. I tried to edit the book myself and knocked on several doors in Toronto with little interest. I gave the manuscript to Ted Plantos, the Writer in Residence at the local library, and with several helpful suggestions, he assured me the book had merit. I questioned him severely, hoping he didn't want to hurt my feelings by saying “Toss it out!” I tried again to find a publisher. The secular press said that it was too religious, and the religious presses said that it was too secular and would never fly. So, in desperation, I turned to my husband who had just retired with a comfortable nest egg and we decided to go into the publishing business with Spartan Press. We went to Toronto to sign the papers for a company charter. I asked Paula Pike of Wordsmith in Toronto to design the interior of the book which she and her staff did so, satisfactorily and Best Publishing to print the book which they did so nicely. A local artisan designed the dust jacket. And In Fullness of Time was on the book shelves as I went from town to town, speaking to church groups here and there, but word of mouth got around with newspaper reviews, radio interviews and speaking engagements to small groups of women and a time of sharing to a congregation on Mother's Day morning at an Anglican church in Scarborough, completely unaware that I was expected to give the sermon!

The CNIB asked for a copy to record the book in its entirety for their Talking Books program. I visited the home of a blind woman in St Thomas who invited me to listen to the book with her. I sat in her living room with tears in my eyes listening to a professional reader speaking those words I had written so long ago .But, as they say, 'Life goes on.' Since Mary had died, I couldn't write her story anymore and I was utterly bereft without her. So I retold her story in a six act play. Knowing it would cost a fortune to produce such a film, far more than we had at our disposal, Dennie wrote our experience off as a learning liability.

And I, who couldn't stop writing again, began to write a novel about Margaret Darwin, a contemporary woman whose husband was an Alzheimer's victim, and she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer following his death. She feels alienated from her grown family who were less than supportive during their father's illness . She decides to spare them the inconvenience of the dying process and moves away from Toronto to a small town in northern Ontario where she meets a bevy o f interesting characters. She also discovers her supposed church- going faith is insufficient to sustain her during her situation and seeks to find the answer to her troubled soul . Although this synopsis may seem like a real downer, I assure you that I loved writing Margaret's story and couldn't kill her off on the last page as I tend to do with heroines. Instead, she had a misdiagnosis. So, I continued on to write 'A Kenyan Winterlude.'. Unable to stop, I finished 'An Etruscan Spring' with Margaret still going strong. And so, my dear reader, you will have to wait until my next blog appears on my website to learn what happens next.