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BARBARA J. SHAVE
Looking like three gumdrops in a candy store, author Barbara Shave (left) with her cover artists: Laila Campbell (middle); Lee Claremont (right). Through her first two lives, Barbara Shave was a compulsive, middle-of-the-night madness writer. She wrote only when the inner urge struck — usually in the middle of the night. Barb took the craft more seriously after her husband’s death, when she began her third life in Kelowna, British Columbia. While writing was at first her catharsis, it became her new reason to be. This author's first life centered around her Illinois family and schooling. After university training that included a year in Vienna, Austria, she began her teaching career. However, she was soon sidetracked by marriage to a handsome, athletic school administrator from Canada. After the birth of their first child, the family moved to Medicine Hat, Alberta — the setting for Barb’s second life. During those 29 years in Medicine Hat, Barb was a public school music teacher who sometimes directed massed choirs of 1000 or more children. She also served as a Red Cross disaster responder, a market gardener, a barbershop singer and handball ringer, an actress in amateur musical theater, and a tough mom for two children. She and her husband built a holiday cottage in the deep woods of Northern Idaho without benefit of power tools, kayaked among killer whales in Johnstone Strait off the British Columbia coast, canoed fast rivers, and skied the mountain snows that fed those rivers. In 1996 she and her husband retired and moved to a remote mountain village in British Columbia where they intended to pursue their wilderness retirement dreams. They were barely settled when her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that stage of her life ended with his death. In 2001 Barb moved to Kelowna in central BC to search for a third life. She had the time and need to write and was soon in demand as a magazine feature columnist under a “Gray Matters” header. Many of these articles are included in the mostly humorous stories and perspectives which comprise her two books. Her lively stories focus upon those unanticipated twists of fate and fancy which ultimately govern all lives which Barb calls “Raven Tricks.” Both books are easy, entertaining reads, like an afternoon outing with a feisty old friend who finds wisdom or humour in ordinary situations. Click here to read sample magazine articles Click here learn Barb's view on self-publishing
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