One area resident can now check “becoming a published author” off her bucket list.
Ponsonby writer C.L. (Caryl-Leigh) MacKenzie recently published her first book, Bumbleberry Pie: A Chronicle of Incidental Mishaps, an anthology of amusing situations her family of six children has gotten into over the past 34 years.
“The stories came to be because I’ve got this very interesting family,” she said. “So there’s an endless supply of material and weird things seem to [be attracted to us.]”
It wasn’t until she was talking with a friend that MacKenzie, 54, realized she might have a marketable topic.
“I was telling somebody something that happened and she looked at me and said, ‘You know you need to write this down because this is just too crazy,’ and I’m like, ‘Well why?’ and she said, ‘because these kinds of things don’t happen to everybody you know,’” MacKenzie explained.
“So I thought … I can’t die without sharing some of this, reminding my kids of how much fun we had throughout our life so that’s … why I started writing them.”
One of the stories, a family favourite MacKenzie said, is a tale involving a plane ride, a crying baby and a number of marbles that just wouldn’t stay in the bag.
It wasn’t until her husband, standardbred horse trainer Raz MacKenzie, snuck a look at some of her stories and happened across the Acacia Publishing memoir/biography contest in September that MacKenzie found the courage to show her work to someone in the publishing industry.
“He found this contest and convinced me that I had nothing to lose,” she said. “I thought maybe I’ll get some feedback or some advice if I become a finalist … maybe I’ll get at least somebody to read it and tell me, ‘well this is what you should do or maybe try this.’”
As it turns out, MacKenzie won the contest and the prize was a publishing deal with Acacia Publishing Inc., an Arizona-based company.
Up until last year MacKenzie said she was letting her fear of possible failure prevent her from pursuing her dream.
“I’ve been writing for years but I guess I never finished anything because that was my excuse not to have to submit anything and get rejected,” she said.
But even with the help of the publishing house she said the road to the finished product wasn’t easy. She found that as the process was coming to an end, she was finding it difficult to stop editing Bumbleberry Pie.
“[It came] to a point where I said to Raz, ‘Just take this away from me,’” she said. “‘I’m not reading it again because now I’m changing everything.’”
One of the major changes editors made involved punctuation.
“I tend to write the way I talk, so we eliminated something like 190 exclamation marks,” she said with a laugh.
Unfortunately the editing and publishing process came to a halt in February when MacKenzie’s editor and Acacia Publishing Inc. founder Karen Gray died suddenly. MacKenzie said she went through a week of uncertainty after the News until she received a call from the executors telling her the publishing house was closing and her book wouldn’t be completed.
“I had another week or ten days of that was the biggest shock,” she said. “I thought, ‘We’re so excited about all this and everybody had been working so hard on this and everything and now what the heck am I going to do?’”
Just as she and Raz were working on another plan to publish her book, she got another call from the executor.
“She said that they had talked and they decided that they were going to honour the terms of the contest, they were going to finish publishing the book, that it would be the last project that Acacia did and one of the other editors was going to take over the process,” MacKenzie said.
And so her book was published – but the struggle was far from over.
“The only caveat was that they were no longer going to be able to participate in the marketing distribution,” she explained.
Now the couple is in possession of the books that were printed as part of the contest, but without a publisher behind her, MacKenzie said she’s struggling to place it in bookstores and on Amazon.
For now, she said she’ll keep most of her sales local, with copies already in Roxanne’s Reflections Book and Card Shop in Fergus. She said she would be approaching other local booksellers as well.
However, even though staying within her community means shoppers may look at the book because of her name, MacKenzie said it makes her uncomfortable.
“When Raz said, ‘No we’re going to start in our own community,’ I’m like, ‘No, I’d rather strangers read it, please. I don’t want everybody that I know to read it,’” she said. “So it’s kind of the double-edged sword.”
Despite all the twists and turns, MacKenzie was happy with the outcome.
“It was like getting to live my life over again and it really was very therapeutic because it made me realize how thankful I am,” she said.
“My hope, my dream is that (Bumbleberry Pie) is successful enough that it allows me to write and put other things out so that it can be a career for me. And that’s what I get up in the morning and do.”
