Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,102
Bruna in the Netherlands
Ornella Robbiati at Frassinelli/Sperling & Kupfer in Italy
Zoë Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge, and White
Anne McDermid, Martha Magor Webb, and Monica Pacheco
The New Quarterly
I read extensively on the Kindertransport and on the lives of the Czech Jews around the time of the Munich agreement. While my sources in their entirety are too numerous to mention here, I would like to acknowledge the following: The Jews of Bohemia & Moravia: A Historical Reader, edited by Wilma Iggers; Letters from Prague 1939–1941, edited by Raya Czerner Shapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg; Hanna’s Diary 1938–1941 by Hanna Spencer; Pearls of Childhood by Vera Gissing; and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer.
Tommy Berman, one of the original Kindertransport children, shared with me his memoirs, as well as the letters written from his birth parents in Czechoslovakia to his adoptive parents in Scotland. While the story here is not his, he provided the inspiration.
Many thanks, as always, to Thomas, Margot, and Emily Pick. I would also, and most especially, like to thank my partner Degan Davis, whose help on every level was invaluable, and my wonderful editor Lynn Henry, who I had the pleasure of working with for the third time. I couldn’t be more grateful.
P. S.
Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
Meet Alison Pick
ALISON PICK was born in Toronto in 1975, the first child of Thomas and Margot Pick. She grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, and spent her summers as a child in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She attended Westmount Public School, the K-W Bilingual School, and Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School, and spent one miserable year at boarding school, an experience she was not eager to repeat. She earned a BA (Hons) in psychology from the University of Guelph, where she took a creative writing course as an elective in her final year. Soon after, she was devoting all her spare time to crafting similes and metaphors.
In the fall of 2000, Alison participated in the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium under the leadership of Tim Lilburn, where she met her future life partner, Degan Davis. The two spent the first years of the century house-sitting across Canada while Alison wrote her first poetry collection, Question & Answer. The title section of the book won the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising unpublished writer under thirty-five in Canada and the 2005 National Magazine Award for Poetry. The publication of Question & Answer also marked the beginning of an editorial relationship with Lynn Henry, which went on to include both of Alison’s first two novels, The Sweet Edge (Raincoast Books, 2005) and Far to Go (House of Anansi Press, 2010).
Alison first embarked on her fiction-writing career as a participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio, where she was paired with novelist and short story writer Anne Fleming. After penning a number of short stories (the thought of which now makes the author cringe), the idea for a novel presented itself and Alison ran with it. Based partially on a fifty-day Arctic canoe trip she took in 1997, The Sweet Edge was published to rave reviews across the country, became a Globe and Mail Top 100 book, and was optioned for film.
Alison was accepted into the MPhil program at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2004. The degree offered a creative option, and in lieu of academic papers Alison submitted poems written in response to the program’s extensive reading requirements. These poems eventually became her 2008 poetry collection, The Dream World, Alison’s favourite of her own books. The title poem was included in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and another series from the book won the CBC Literary Award for Poetry.
In the winter of 2007, Alison began research for the novel that would become Far to Go. Originally titled Thursday’s Child (from “Thursday’s child has far to go”), it explores a similar historical circumstance to the one Alison’s own grandparents experienced when leaving Czechoslovakia. Far to Go sold in five countries before publication.
Alison’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in every major literary journal in Canada, and in magazines and newspapers including the Globe and Mail, the National Post, The Walrus magazine, enRoute magazine, and Toronto Life. She is on the faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Wired Writing Studio, and currently lives in Toronto, where she is at work on a memoir.
About the book
Questions and Answers with Alison Pick
Originally published on Torontoist.com in a somewhat