Local writer wins Atlantic award

The Pleasant Valley resident was informed she was among the winners in the annual competition for Nightingales Don’t Cry, the manuscript she had submitted.

Interviewed about it last week, she recalled sending the story but afterwards not giving it much thought.

“I mailed it in and basically kind of forgot about it, well almost,” she said. “And then they called me to let me know that I had actually won and I was shocked.”

Hers placed first in a field of about 40 submissions in the category of writing for children and young adult/juvenile fiction.

The main character in Tate’s winning entry is a teenaged girl who has had severe colitis and who is trying to cope with life’s challenges while dealing with her medical condition.

“She has an ileostomy…she’s still adjusting to this and she moves into this (new) community, new school, and she doesn’t want anyone to know,” Tate said. “Kids can talk about a lot of illnesses fairly frankly, but when you get into bowel diseases, there’s sort of a barrier.”

Tate found writing the story therapeutic, given the health issues her own family had faced.

Describing the original manuscript as “massive,” she notes that a mentorship arrangement with author Don Aker of Middleton helped her trim the story down.

“He steered me through the book,” she said. “We revised it, I believe, three times…He just gave me a lot of wonderful advice, almost all of it by email.”

Asked about the story’s theme, she said the book explores “the idea that you can have something about yourself that really inhibits you from forming – from daring to form – relationships.

She notes that dating, for example, can be a difficult thing to do for young people at the best of times, let alone when they have to deal with a health-related issue like the one facing her novel’s main character.

Retired from a full-time teaching career, Tate’s experience as a writer includes poetry and drama. She always had wanted to write for young adults, she said.

The top finishers in the Atlantic Writing Competition will gather in Dartmouth in late September for the annual Gala Celebration of Writers and Writing.

The annual Word on the Street literary festival takes place the following day in Halifax.