Sewing & Writing: My Passions that Collide

When I started this blog all those years ago, I thought I would muse about my opinions on all manner of subjects related to women and style—especially women of “a certain age.” Fast forward six or so years, and I have found myself writing more and more about style as it relates to sewing. I’ve even taught myself how to tailor a blazer and make a Chanel-inspired Little French Jacket. About three years ago, as we were in the thick of the COVID pandemic, I started writing a novel that featured sewing and women’s transformation at its heart.

I’d been writing for decades—mostly nonfiction with brief forays into historical fiction—but this was different. When The Year I Made 12 Dresses was published, I didn’t know it would be number one in a six-book series. That was then.

Today, I am launching a new book. If you read Good Housekeeping: My Unexpected Adventures in Domesticity, you’ll already know Erica Flanagan. But she’s onto a whole new adventure.

Here’s the background:

For almost four decades, I’ve been married to a Newfoundlander who left the island when he was seventeen years old to go to university and never moved back, returning over the years only to visit his parents. Then, last year, something magical happened.

My husband and I took a ten-day trip back to Newfoundland to do a cross-island tour, something he had never experienced. Being a city boy from St. John’s on the east coast of the island, he had never travelled the Viking Trail or hiked in Gros Morne National Park on the Great Northern Peninsula. He had never been to see the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows or sailed a land-locked fjord.

So, we landed in Deer Lake and met our guide with a fancy SUV, just as Erica, Eliza, and the rest of the characters populating my newest book did.

That trip and my mother’s one-hundredth birthday last year inspired this story.

“On the island of Newfoundland at the edge of North America, if you’re not an islander, you’re a “come-from-away.” And if you were born here and left never to return, according to Nora Houlihan, who is about to turn one hundred, you’re the worst kind of CFA.

In celebration of her centenary, Nora has decreed that all her immediate family members—most of whom have deserted her and left her beloved Newfoundland—return to the island for her big day. But before they attend the party, she’s arranged for them to have a cross-island road trip in the hopes they will see what they’re missing and mend their wayward ways.

Her granddaughters Erica Flanagan and Eliza Cohen, feuding cousins, are both perplexed by the dictum but reluctantly agree to join their parents, Nora’s two children, and the rest of the cousins on the trip. Erica, a journalist who hails from  Toronto and Eliza, a hardened New York cookbook author who left not only the country but converted from Catholicism to Judaism, are both less than impressed by the thoughts of hiking in Gros Morne, staying at roadside motels and eating codfish.

With the mysterious Gordie O’Brien as their tour guide, the Houlihan clan grudgingly embarks on the adventure of a lifetime, prying open their minds and, most of all, their hearts to breathtaking landscapes, friendly people and mouthwatering food. By the time they arrive in the city of St. John’s, they are ready to celebrate the one hundred years of the obstinate, tactless, enduringly obnoxious Nora. Or are they?

Before she lets them celebrate, Nora insists on a family meeting. Before she dies, Nora is intent on rattling a few family skeletons. By the time they emerge, the Houlihans will realize that they might have thought they knew their own family, but really, does anyone truly know their family?

They say you can’t choose your family, but if you could, would you choose the one you have?“

Hope you enjoy it.

Link for lots more info: https://patriciajparsons.com/we-came-from-away-that-summer-on-the-rock/

Buy it on Amazon: https://a.co/d/06fjbGEB