Book creation team

It’s one thing to have the content – stories, articles, photos. It’s another thing to take the content and create a masterpiece that weaves a spell-bounding tale that captures the legend of Walter Gage.

We’ve assembled a fabulous book creation team to do that: Shelley Fralic, Kate Bird, Patty Osborne, and Danny Peart. Their collective talents and experiences will guarantee the book will be enjoyed by all readers and critically acclaimed by historians.

Shelley Fralic, Author

Shelley’s 41-year career as a writer and as an editor helped define news in British Columbia. She was the 2016 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award for journalism from the Jack Webster Foundation.

First an assistant features editor, she soon became a deputy editor, deputy managing editor and eventually executive editor at The Sun, in which she oversaw the administration of the newsroom. But a writer at heart, Fralic chafed to tell stories, and when given the opportunity, turned to being a columnist.

As a columnist Shelley possessed a willingness to speak plainly that allowed her to define both her writing and a management style in a business where ethics and public service are bookends to a craft often misunderstood by the public. Fralic says she gets her strong streak of opinion from her mother. But she is also a relative of Nellie McClung, the famous Canadian feminist, author and politician who with four others challenged Canadian law around whether women were “qualified persons” to sit in the Senate.

She is the experienced author of several books, including the recent B.C. bestseller, Making Headlines: 100 Years of The Vancouver Sun.

Kate Bird, Photo editor

Shelley and Kate are a dynamic duo.  They worked on three books together over the years: Wildfire: British Columbia Burns, Making Headlines: 100 Years of the Vancouver Sun, and Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos From A Decade That Changed the City.

As a News and Graphics Research Librarian at The Vancouver Sun and The Province, Kate helped manage a large photographic archive of negatives, prints and over 1.5 million digital images. She conducted technology training for reporters at the Montreal Gazette and the Calgary Herald newspapers, as well as a database searching workshop for staff at Global News BC.

She is currently working a new book: City On Edge: A Rebellious Century of Vancouver Protests, Riots, and Strikes, which will be published in September 2017.

Danny Peart, Editor

As a member of the Friends of Walter Gage, Danny has provided his guidance as a writer and publisher of several books. He is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and has studied writing with Gloria Sawai, Zsuzsi Gartner, Edna Alford, Seán Virgo, Carolyn Smart, Don McKay and Ernest Hemingway.

The editor’s role in a self-published book is to review the drafts and ensure what will be printed and distributed is as good as it can be. It ranges from granular spell-checking to testing for the spell-bounding “big picture” tale we desire.