Joanne Walker Hatherly

Every summer, I drive past a forest-banked straight stretch of the Trans Canada Highway and remember my fifteenth year when my boss's husband dropped me at that spot and assured me that a Greyhound bus would stop if I waved it down.

Those were the days before cell phones, Wifi and Twitter, so the only people who knew my whereabouts were the snarly adults who had dumped me there. Everyone else, including my parents, believed I was snug at a posh lakefront cottage where I was employed as a nanny.

I have no memory of how long I stood at the side of the highway, but I do remember the smell of the blacktop baking in the summer sun, the scrape of gravel under my sandals as I paced the shoulder, the soil-like smell of my Army Surplus canvas knapsack, and the sound of the air thick with blackflies and mosquitos.

Cars pulled over, drivers asked if I wanted rides or if there was someone they could call. I wasn't wise enough to turn down the rides, but I did only because I was still enough of a child to do as I was told, and I had been told to wait.

That bus did come eventually, but what if it had not? What if I had taken one of those rides?

This sort of thinking fuels my fiction-writing. Most of the time, things work out, but sometimes, they don't.

After a brief stint as a freelance journalist for the National Post, I joined the Victoria Times Colonist, a CanWest/Global (later PostMedia) daily newspaper in British Columbia's capital city where I wrote humour, news and features for almost 10 years. My work was published coast-to-coast in Canada, England and in two Canada-like places (North Dakota, Alaska).

A matrilineal cousin to Canada's acclaimed author Gabrielle Roy (The Tin Flute), I've lived in three Canadian provinces, the United States, Spain, Australia and Switzerland.

Formerly signed to a UK literary agency, I am looking for new representation. At this moment, my work is being read by four leading literary agencies, two in the U.S., one in Canada and one in the UK.

Learn more about me at https://joannehatherly.wordpress.com/