A former Bearspaw resident has made the jump from an accomplished (and published) poet to budding novelist with her first feature length novel. She’ll be presenting her work at the Cochrane Public Library this Saturday, Nov. 14, from 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Nancy Mackenzie’s Nerve Line tells the story of a young Irish art student Cathleen who, upon breaking up with her less-than savory fiancé, travels to stay with her grandmother on her ranch near Cochrane and attend the Banff Centre for a self-directed painting residency. Her stay is all the more urgent when Gran, as she’s known, brings over a scrappy thoroughbred – specifically, the one Cathleen’s now ex-fiancé covets.
As Cathleen settles into her new prairie home, she ends up falling for Tommy, one of Gran’s hired hands. But as she finds out, love, art and horse-breaking are never simple things.
Interestingly, Mackenzie said that the story represents a sort of inverse of her own life.
“Some of that gets woven into the story but it flips it the other way.”
Growing up in Bearspaw, her family raised thoroughbreds and people from Ireland had come over to purchase one their foals.
And much like Kathleen, Mackenzie followed the path of the artist, only as a wordsmith.
After graduating university in Calgary with a degree in English, she went to the former Kootenay School of Writing in Nelson, B.C., to further study writing and editing. Mackenzie went on to become a professional book editor and writer with a three-decade long career, eventually founding her own company, Bronze Horse Communications.
An author of three children’s books, four books of poetry and two chapbooks, she decided to expand her work with a broader reach.
“I just felt like I wasn’t getting enough of an audience. I wanted to tell more of a story than I was just with poetry. So I gave it a shot.”
It took Mackenzie seven years to pen the novel. But it didn’t start life in novel form; Nerve Line was originally written as a screenplay. While there are quite possibly hundreds of thousands of long forgotten and half-baked manuscripts that go unnoticed and abandoned, Mackenzie’s work got noticed – from none other than Robert Redford’s company, Wildwood Enterprises. And they ended up looking at it, twice.
“They looked at it and said ‘we really like the world you’ve created but Mr. Redford is looking for a movie he can star in right now.’”
They called a few months later asking for the screenplay again, but yet again, decided against producing it into a film. It did, however, get noticed by other powers that be in Hollywood and was shortlisted on a Paramount Pictures feature film scriptwriting competition, Mackenzie said.
She offered it up for sale but found the budget was estimated too long for an American production and too high for Canadian one. With that, she decided to simply write the thing as it appears today. As for a sequel, one is already outlined, she said.
Catch Nancy Mackenzie’s reading and discussion of Nerve Line at the Cochrane Public Library this Saturday, Nov. 14. Admission is free.
