Debut novel learning experience for Erixon

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This article was published 04/07/2023 (835 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While school is out for the summer, retired Westman teacher Lisa Erixon is hoping to get back into the classroom in the fall to help students develop their writing skills using their pets as inspiration.

After all, Erixon went through this exact same creative process last year, resulting in the November release of her debut novel, “No Ordinary Cats,” through FriesenPress.

Talking to the Sun on Monday, the Lyleton resident said that the reception to her book over the last eight months has been very positive — so much so that she’s thinking about writing a followup story.

Even though the specifics haven’t been ironed out yet, Erixon believes this prequel would follow the same basic structure as “No Ordinary Cats,” which tells the stories of felines living on a farm through their own point of view.

“The story was inspired by the life of one of my beloved cats, Chairman Meow,” she said. “After he had died, in order to make sense of what had happened, I wanted to write about it. And after I had done that, then I realized that all of the other cats who owned me over the span of the last 30 years … had interesting lives, and their stories all deserved a voice, too.”

Despite this being Erixon’s first novel, her love of reading and writing can be traced back to her youth, with the titular character of Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 children’s novel “Harriet the Spy” being a major influence.

“I started to carry around a little notebook and write down things about my friends and my teachers,” she said, describing her mimicry of Harriet.

“That phase only lasted perhaps a few months. But it was long enough for me to determine that I really enjoyed looking at things through a different lens and looking at the minute details.”

This discovery eventually led Erixon to pursue a career in education, where she taught English in small rural communities like Pierson, Roblin and Chaplin, Sask., for more than three decades.

Once she retired from the job in 2016, Erixon finally found the time to pursue some serious writing projects of her own, starting out small by submitting stories to publications like Our Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last April, Erixon got a lot of extra free time after her rural home in Lyleton got hit with a series of blizzards, which forced her to stay indoors and finally confront the big cat novel that had been rolling around in her mind for years.

“The stories, in a lot of cases, wrote themselves,” she said.

“A lot of it came very easily because I knew these cats so well. I was invested in their lives and I remembered all sorts of things about them.”

Of course, the writing process featured its fair share of challenges, especially since Erixon had never tackled a project of his magnitude before.

Even with a group of beta readers to help polish up her manuscript, Erixon found it hard to shake the perfectionist quality that she had developed throughout her lengthy career as a teacher.

“So the hardest single thing for me to do was to hit ‘submit’ on that final document upload because I knew at that point I could no longer make changes,” she said.

However, Erixon is very pleased with the final product and has been taking copies of “No Ordinary Cats” to Westman classrooms since its publication, using the book as a launching pad for reading and writing exercises.

As a retired teacher, Erixon knows the importance of picking the right subject to properly engage students, with animals being an easy choice due to their universally beloved status.

But she also hopes that this book serves as inspiration to those who are wary about spearheading their own writing project and need that extra push to get started.

“Don’t be afraid to use your own unique voice. Don’t think you have to write in a certain style or a certain genre,” she said.

“And when you sit down at the keyboard, whatever way your ideas go just run with them.”

“No Ordinary Cats” is available for purchase through platforms such as FriesenPress, Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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