About Us
Caterina Edwards and Jean Crozier: two writers who sought the uniqueness of their own families, and found intense satisfaction in successfully writing their families’ stories. Both Caterina’s Finding Rosa and Jean’s No Corner Boys Here won grateful readers, critical praise, and literary awards.
We bring other noteworthy experiences to our writing workshops. Caterina’s books and essays have received international recognition. She has taught creative writing at numerous universities and colleges, and her work has been the focus of academic study. Jean has been a successful entrepreneur, researcher, and information manager, as well as being an experienced presenter.
Together, these instructors have created a series of dynamic, individually responsive workshops.
Jean Crozier
Before Jean Crozier turned to creative writing, she had a well-developed career as the Director of Libraries for Canada’s largest geotechnical and materials engineering firm. She supervised the establishment and operation of libraries in branch offices, and was responsible for corporate research on projects ranging from earthen dams to permafrost construction, and from early studies in acid rainfall to animal / train interaction in the national parks.
Jean owned and operated her own library and information management company for close to twenty years, conducting research in a broad range of scientific and engineering projects, developing special libraries for corporate and government clients, offering sales and support for information management software systems, and of course, the creation of clear, concise project reports.
Her next career overlapped that of her business activities. She was determined to create a narrative of her maternal family, but needed to transition from a writer of professional assessments and recommendations, to that of a creative writer and genealogist. Her quest took her to the classrooms of Canada’s best creative writing teachers, as well as the excellent courses offered by the local genealogical society.
No Corner Boys Here is Jean’s first book, a two-volume narrative of the Thurstons, her mother’s people, a family who emigrated from South Wales in 1927, just two years before the Great Depression began. The family consisted of parents Fred and Ellen, eight children (the youngest four months old) then another baby born in 1930. They left behind a 2-storey stone house with a stone barn and stone-paved yard, 135 lush acres that supported a successful dairy farm and business. Not one of the siblings knew why their parents had emigrated.
Neither did they know why their parents had chosen to settle on a quarter section of dry land outside Irma, Alberta, with its tiny two-bedroom house and barn (both of wood frame construction), or why they were so apprehensive of their farm inspectors, the Soldier Settlement Board. It became Jean’s job to research the family’s connection with the Welsh coal mines and the miners’ strike of the mid-1920s, British / Canadian immigration schemes, the role of the Soldier Settlement Board (the family had no military connection whatever), life on a Canadian farm during the Depression, Canada’s WWII draft program and the ‘NRMA’ soldiers, and a host of other subjects from teachers’ education to construction of Lancaster bombers, rural life before and after electrification, the farming transition from eight-horse teams to John Deere tractors. Jean discovered the truth of family memoir: that there is no such thing as a ‘simple memoir of a simple family’.
Jean self-published No Corner Boys Here. The 2-volume family memoir received a sought-after IPPY (independent publishers) book award and numerous literary accolades, and can be found in public and school libraries across Canada.
Researching and writing a Crozier family memoir is Jean’s current project. Beginning with her great-grandfather’s emigration from County Tyrone, Ireland about 1833 and his life as a hotelier in Erin, Ontario, through the lives of his sons and grandsons, Jean has amassed a wealth of information about Ireland and its history, Ontario history and settlement, the great western movement following completion of the railway in 1885, as well as the (often rollicking) hotel and liquor industries, harness racing, the Klondike gold rush, the destructiveness of the Great Depression, and the real story of ‘Stalag Luft III’. Along the way, Jean has found cousins she didn’t know she had, DNA-related Croziers in Ireland, Canada, and Australia, and new friends who have enthusiastically climbed on board to support her quest for information and relatives.
Jean’s essays and articles have been published in local and national magazines and anthologies. She finds co-developing and instructing the “Finding the Unique” series of writing workshops exciting, and fully enjoys sharing her research skills and writing techniques both in the workshops and in story-coaching individual clients.
Jean has a B.Sc. from the University of Alberta, and a Diploma in Library and Information Technology from MacEwen University; she was chosen by Alberta Business magazine as ‘One of Alberta’s 50 most Influential People’, and was a Regional Finalist in the Canadian Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. Jean is a Distinguished Alumna of MacEwen University, a Fellow in the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and was a Founding Member of the Alberta Women’s History Project.
Caterina Edwards
Caterina Edwards grew convinced of the importance of recording and writing family stories while working on her mother’s story for Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, A Daughter in Search of the Past. The book received stellar reviews and became the subject of several graduate theses and academic articles. It also won the Wilfred E. Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, the Bressani Prize and was shortlisted for the City of Edmonton Book Prize. The positive reaction of readers, including her extended family, encouraged Caterina to develop, with Jean Crozier, the Finding the Unique writing workshops.
In 2021, Finding Rosa was published in Italy under the name Riscoprendo mia madre. The memoir received much media attention, including radio interviews, leading articles in the cultural pages of newspapers, and an appearance on both a provincial news cast and a national arts programme. Crossroads of Civilization is a very prestigious international literary festival held annually in Venice, Italy. Twenty-six writers from all over the world are invited as guests, and Caterina was only the fifth Canadian writer to be so honoured. The publishing house, Les Flaneurs Edizioni, was so happy for Caterina’s noteworthy success that they created a Canada Imprint dedicated to publishing Italian editions of Canadian books. They have published six novels, so far.
The Sicilian Wife, Caterina’s latest book, is a mystery novel set in Alberta and Sicily. It was named a Best Book by The National Post and received excellent reviews in Canada, the United States, and Sicily. Her previous publications include a novel, The Lion’s Mouth; a book of novellas, Whiter Shade of Pale/Becoming Emma, a play, Homeground; and a collection of short stories, The Island of the Nightingales, which won the Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Short Fiction. She also won the 2014 Edna Staebler Personal Essay prize for Light and Space in the Piazza. Many of her other short stories and essays have been anthologized. Her play the Great Antonio, was broadcast twice on CBC radio and chosen to represent Canada at the New York Festival Radio Drama competition
Caterina taught creative writing for many years at nearly every post-secondary institution in Edmonton. She was on the board of the Writers Guild of Alberta for four years and wrote the Advanced Fiction Writing Course for Athabasca University, and she served as writer-in-residence at both the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan University Caterina had begun dealing with the difficulties of writing from one’s personal experience when she co-edited with Kay Stewart two books of life writing by women: Eating Apples: Knowing Women’s Lives and Wrestling With the Angel.
Caterina is a longtime Edmontonian. She felt particularly honoured in 2016 when she was inducted into the City of Edmonton Salute to Excellence Cultural Wall of Fame. She has lived in the same house for 43 years and with the same husband even longer. She and Jean Crozier have led the Finding the Unique Writing Workshops since 2011. “Jean and I are lucky. We make a good team. We bring out the best in each other and work to do the same for each of the participants.”
More about Caterina at her website: www.caterinaedwards.com