Skip to content

Coast writer pens best-seller

Gibsons author Marion McKinnon Crook has a certified hit on her hands with her latest book, Always Pack a Candle, about her first year as a public health nurse in B.C.’s Cariboo-Chilcotin region in the early 1960s.
A.Candle

Gibsons author Marion McKinnon Crook has a certified hit on her hands with her latest book, Always Pack a Candle, about her first year as a public health nurse in B.C.’s Cariboo-Chilcotin region in the early 1960s. The book has spent the last 14 weeks on the B.C. bestsellers list, catching the attention of a growing number of readers soon after it was published last May.

Crook will launch the book locally on Saturday, Sept. 18 in a hybrid event held both in person and via Zoom at the Gibsons & District Public Library.

Crook has more than 30 books to her credit, both fiction and non-fiction, and this memoir is typical of her clear, well-paced style. While the narrative does move along, it’s balanced with the emotional and character notes you’d expect from someone recounting their job of healing, helping, and learning when to leave well-enough alone in a vast rural area of B.C.’s Interior some 60 years ago.

“Those were such exciting and refreshing times,” Crook said in an interview. “Even though there were times that were tragic, and sometimes difficult and scary, they were still fascinating. I really enjoyed it.”

Writing about it all, she added, “brought back those times and the flavour of those days and the adventure that you felt and how everybody seemed so young and ambitious and busy.”

We also learn a lot about relations with Indigenous peoples, who then had to endure treatment as second-class citizens, or less. They also were subject to separate, federally run health and education systems, which as we now know, were at best second-rate, and often much worse.

“I was so naïve. I had no idea that people thought about other races that way,” Crook recalled. “It’s just abhorrent.”

Meanwhile, Crook doesn’t skimp on the broader reality of being a young 20-something woman, catching the eye of more than one romantic interest while having to work around the house rules of a strait-laced landlady. The uptight early ’60s, we are reminded, had yet to be subsumed by the freer love to come later in the decade.

And why title the book, Always Pack a Candle? It was advice Crook got soon after arriving in the wintry region. Was it to help sterilize medical instruments, or to use in a power outage or in hydro-less rural homesteads? Not primarily. But a candle could help keep you alive, we learn.

Saturday’s 2 p.m. launch event is limited to an in-person audience of just eight people, but many more can join virtually. You can find the Zoom link on the events calendar on the Gibsons Library’s website.