The late show

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Winnipegger Joan Thomas waited until she was nearly 60 to launch her successful career as an award-winning novelist

WINNIPEG writer Joan Thomas incites envy in every boomer who wants the last third of his or her life to be the best.

At 60, the former teacher, curriculum writer and arts administrator has carved out a new career as a novelist whose work is marked by sophisticated prose and emo­tional nuance. She gave up her last day job two years ago, six months before she sold her second novel, Curiosity, to McClelland & Stewart in Toronto.

A love story about an early 19th-century female paleontologist, it will be officially released April 1 with an 8 p.m. signing at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg.

Its first review, a pre-publication notice in the trade journal Quill & Quire, calls it "without question the best novel this reader has come across in the past year."

Curiosity follows a mere 18 months on the heels of Thomas's debut, Reading by Lightning, which won both the Commonwealth and Amazon.ca first-novel awards and made the long list for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Ironically, it was shut out of the money in last year's Manitoba Book Awards.

"I was really disappointed," she admits. "It's my com­munity. But in the broad scheme of things, how could I have been luckier?"

As she awaits the announcement of the IMPAC short list, due in mid-April, and the glare of publicity she is sure to face with Curiosity, Thomas looks healthy and as slender as a teenager.

Her husband of 25 years, Bill Dunn, is enjoying his second year of retirement from his career as a legal-aid lawyer. Their 23-year-old daughter Caitlin is launched and out of the house.

And what a house! Sinfully tidy, filled with art, CDs and books, it's a gorgeous Scotia Street character home with a picturesque view of the Red River.

Thomas has the time to cross-country ski out her back door and to take long walks to contemplate her third novel ("I'm gestating it now," she admits), not to mention the freedom to travel wherever her research takes her. Better yet, Bill is happy to tag along.

"My theory is that Joan has been writing these books for a very long time," says Susanne Alexander, her Reading by Lightning publisher at Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton.

"She just had to put them on paper."

Her neighbour and friend Sam Baardman agrees that Thomas is not one to rush into anything.

"A lot of what happens with Joan is internal," says Baardman, a well-known singer-songwriter and arts administrator.

"She sees herself as being a writer. They're not people who barge through the world without thinking things through."

Thomas was born in Portage la Prairie and grew up in Carberry, the middle daughter of a farm-implements dealer and a bookkeeper (who are both still there and going strong).

When she came to Winnipeg to study English at university, she says, she had no thoughts of becoming a writer. She taught high school and entered the writ­ing racket as a reviewer in her 30s, first with the Free Press and then with the Globe & Mail.

About 10 years ago she got the urge to write fiction, largely because she had become tired of the limitations of reviewing.

"I found fiction liberating," she says, "all that room to explore characters and situations."

She started Reading by Lightning in 2001. It focuses on a headstrong farm girl on the Prairies in the '30s who struggles to find a sense of herself.

Besides its national awards, Lightning was selected as the one novel every Manitoban should read in the Winnipeg Foundation's second annual On the Same Page literacy promotion.

"Joan told me she was invited to so many book clubs she gained 10 pounds," Alexander jokes. "They all served lunch."

It was in England, while researching Lightning -- one of its minor characters is an amateur paleontologist -- that she stumbled onto the subject for her second novel. She found a reference to an actual woman, Mary Anning, who had made several key fossil finds in Lyme Regis on the south coast in the early 19th century.

This was 40 years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Anning's work had made people begin to question the biblical account of the Earth's age.

But because she was a woman, and from a working­class background, her discoveries were all appropri­ated by upper-class men.

"The material was so rich," Thomas says. "I knew hers was a story that would resonate today on many levels."

In fact, Anning's time seems to have come. The late British novelist John Fowles got the ball rolling in 1999 when he hosted an international symposium in her honour.

"He said she was his secret inspiration for the char­acter of Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant's Woman," Thomas notes.

In the last year there have been two other books about Anning, one a biography and the other a novel, Remarkable Creatures, by London-based Tracy Cheva­lier, known for her 1999 hit Girl With a Pearl Earring.

In a joint review of both on Sunday, the Toronto Star

said, "Chevalier's name-brand recognition will no doubt give her the leg up on Thomas, but Thomas has written by far the superior novel."

"I was worried when I first heard about it," Thomas admits. "But it's aimed at a different market. It's interesting how two writers can have such different treatments of the same subject matter."

Thomas had started Curiosity well before she found a publisher for Lightning. The latter, after being shopped around, landed at Goose Lane, where the Toronto editor she had found to work with her on it, Bethany Gibson, was hired as senior editor.

Goose Lane published it in the fall of 2008. By this time Thomas had finished a draft of Curiosity, and her agent, Anne McDermid, sold it to M&S, who asked for revisions.

She spent the first six months of 2009 working on those revisions, going back to England for more re­search and squeezing in a trip to New Zealand as part of her Commonwealth Prize.

She's about to begin her next round of travel to promote Curiosity. She's reading at Toronto's Harbour­front in April and has already received bookings for writers festivals in the fall.

Meanwhile, there's that third novel she'd like to start. All she'll say is that it won't be historical. The setting will be contemporary.

Seems Bill will have to make dinner for a while, since he's got all that free time. She has no thoughts of retiring.

"I'm with Freud," she says. "We need love and work."

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca