After focusing on her mother with her first book, Saskatoon-based author Marilyn Frey turned her writer’s eye on herself.
The result was Reflections in a Farmhouse Window, a new memoir that captures stories from Frey’s time living in Meadow Lake, Cudworth, Rosthern, and Middle Lake.
“I’ve always enjoyed being a writer,” Frey said during an interview with the Herald. “Once I retired from my day job in 2019, I started taking all kinds of courses and workshops and started reading a lot and really studying the art of writing. I wanted to capture my stories because I had so many of them bouncing around in my brain, all these different memories, and I wanted to put some kind of order to it”
Frey’s first book was a biography about her mother written for family members. Reflections in a Farmhouse Window was also originally intended to be a “family only” project, but that quickly changed. Soon, she had more than 100 stories written, and colleagues from various writer’s groups encouraged her to get them published.
“Actually I had to go back and re-write a lot of them, because it’s different when you’re writing for your family as opposed to writing for strangers who might be reading your books,” Frey said. “It mostly started as I was writing for my own family.”
Sixty of those stories made the final cut for Reflections in a Farmhouse Window. Frey the complexities of prairie life make a strong foundation for great stories.
“It’s always been home for me,” she said. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I had an opportunity to move to Toronto with my job and no, I just wanted to raise my family here.”
Frey said anyone who grew up in the same time period she did will recognize a lot of the experiences she writes about. Ideally, she hopes it will inspire readers to record their own family stories for future generations.
“I’m probably hoping that they can reconnect with it, that it will spur their own memories of similar things, and maybe it will get them talking and sharing their stories with their families,” she said. “I’m so afraid that these stories are going to be lost. People don’t gather around the kitchen table and share stories and visit like they did decades ago, so it’s a way to capture that and hopefully keep those memories and those stories alive.”
With two books written, Frey has already set her sights on a third, but this time in a new genre. After dipping into biography and memoir writing, she’s decided to write her first novel.
“I’m going to try it and see how it goes,” she said. “I’ve got the first draft complete, and I’m now doing the many, many revisions to try and hone it a bit.”
Frey will be reading from her memoir at the Prince Albert Public Library on Tuesday, Oct. 15, starting at 7 p.m.
