Cea Sunrise Person, author of the bestselling memoir North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Counterculture Family, and How I Survived Both (HarperCollins Canada, 2015), will be guest author for the upcoming session of my online course Memories into Story I: Life Writing, offered by the University of Toronto, SCS, Creative Writing Program. The course begins May 4 and runs for 10 weeks.
You can find out more here: Memories into Story I. (Interested? Register soon as space is limited.)
“North of Normal serves to expose counterculture realities, illuminate family relationships that juxtapose love with torment, and illustrate the power of forgiveness,” the Toronto Star says of the memoir that some have compared to Jeannette Walls’s bestseller The Glass Castle. I had the pleasure of copy editing North of Normal, and I’m so pleased that my students will benefit from Cea’s background and thoughts on turning life experiences into creative nonfiction.
As an editor, I’ve worked with and come to know many wonderful writers, Cea among them. Literary guests are a popular feature of my courses Memories into Story I (introduction) and Memories into Story II (advanced workshop). Students have the opportunity to read several short memoirs or excerpts from longer works selected by the author. They then submit questions — based on the course curriculum — about the works read, and about writing and publishing in general — and later receive a pdf of the full collaborative interview.
Previous guests from both Canada and the United States include Will Ferguson, Peter Behrens, Beth Powning, Catherine Gildiner, Adair Lara, Gabrielle Hamilton, Lee Martin, and others. (I publish an edited version of these interviews later on my website; you can use the Search function on the homepage to find the ones that have appeared so far.)
About Cea
Born into an eccentric hippie family, CEA SUNRISE PERSON spent the first decade of her life living in and out of tipis in the Canadian wilderness. From the age of thirteen, she worked successfully as a model in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Munich, Hamburg, Zurich, and Milan. She now lives in Vancouver with her husband and three young children. She is the author of the bestselling memoir North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Counterculture Family, and How I Survived Both and is at work on a second memoir. (www.ceaperson.com)
About North of Normal
In the late 1960s, Cea’s charismatic grandfather Papa Dick uproots his family from suburban California and moves them to the Canadian wilderness. Along with her teenage mother Michelle, Cea spends the first decade of her life living in and out of canvas tipis with neither electricity nor running water, at the mercy of fierce storms, food shortages, and adults more interested in their own desires than parenting a child.
Knowing no other world, Cea is happy enough playing nude in the meadows and snowshoeing behind the grandfather she idolizes. But for Michelle, one crucial element is missing: a man. When she strikes out to look for love, spinning from one boyfriend to the next, Cea is forced along for the ride—and into a harsh awakening. Finally, in her early teens, Cea realizes she will have to make a choice as drastic as the one her grandparents had made to get the kind of life she craves.
Shocking, heartbreaking, yet often funny, North of Normal is the singular story of a woman’s desire to find her normal — no matter what it takes. Cea’s journey of self-discovery and acceptance, which comes full circle when she has children of her own, is profoundly moving, celebrating the strength we all carry within us to shape our own destiny.