Today we catch up with Rachel Stone, author of The Blue Iris who writes stories of hope and redemption, often set against vibrant Canadian backdrops.

A former labour relations specialist, Rachel left the corporate world behind when a health issue from years earlier came back to haunt her. Desperate for distraction, she enrolled in creative writing courses in the hopes of finally giving her writing dream a dedicated shot.

When a short writing assignment formed the seedling of The Blue Iris, Rachel found herself transfixed by the process of developing the novel's vibrant cast of characters, who offered a timely escape from her real-world health worries.

The Blue Iris quickly took up residence in her heart, fulfilling Rachel in a way she'd never experienced as she re-examined her whole approach to life and made writing it a priority. Subsequent medical tests proved shocking: not only had pursuing her passion filled her soul with sparkles -- it also appeared to be healing her body. Rachel vowed to see the book through no matter how many rewrites, edits and queries it took (spoiler: it took a LOT!), then go on writing like her health depended on it.

Rachel holds degrees in psychology and industrial relations, and once worked seven summers at a flower market. She’s an active member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and proud co-founder of a local volunteer initiative supporting new and newly-immigrated families in need. Born and raised in Toronto, Rachel lives near the city with her family and on weekends you’ll find her along the south shore of Georgian Bay, belting nineties pop rock from her paddleboard.

You can learn more about Rachel at her website: www.rachelstoneauthor.com. The Blue Iris is available to preorder now.

A little about today's host-

Author and musical composer Kathleen Basi is mother to three boys and one chromosomally-gifted daughter. Her debut novel, A SONG FOR THE ROAD, follows a musician on an unconventional road trip. Bestselling author Kerry Anne King writes, “In a novel filled with music, heartbreak, and surprising laughter, Basi takes us on a journey that encompasses both unimaginable loss and the powerful resilience of the human heart.”

Meaty, earnest, occasionally humorous, and ultimately uplifting, Kathleen’s fiction highlights the best within ourselves and each other. She writes monthly reflections on life, writing and beauty on her newsletter. Subscribe at https://kathleenbasi.substack.com/. 

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Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kathleen Basi. I'm an award-winning musical composer, a feature writer, essayist, and, of course, storyteller. Let me tell you a little bit about today's guest.

Rachel Stone writes stories of hope and redemption often set against vibrant Canadian backdrops. Her writing placed first in the 2022 OBOA Writing Contest and has appeared in numerous international literary and visual arts magazines, journals and blogs. Her debut novel, The Blue Iris, is upmarket book club fiction about a group of people with broken pasts who converge on a Toronto flower market where they unearth deeply rooted secrets and learn to own uncomfortable truths. The Prairie's Book Review describes it as riveting, soul searching, and full of heart. A spectacularly told story. But for Rachel, this description sounds more like her own journey in writing it. A journey that involved deep personal transformation and ultimately healed her body. Welcome, Rachel to Author Express.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks. So, first of all, tell me the most interesting thing about where you're from.

Okay, well, for me, Toronto is where I'm from. And the coolest thing about Toronto and I don't know, I think people have a general sense that it's multicultural. But more than 50% of Toronto's population, which is like, close to 3 million people, were born outside of Canada. So, for me, growing up, that certainly rang true. Like, I didn't have a chance to travel much when I was a kid. I didn't travel till I was in my twenties and I just felt like, growing up I always had the whole world in my city and my uncles would take me out every Saturday in the summer and we would explore a new neighborhood with a new type of cuisine and a new culture and we would spend the whole day. Yeah. So, I hadn't really been outside of Toronto, but I really felt like I was hitting up a new place every week, a new culture. And we never ran out of stuff to try, we never ran out of new types of foods to eat, and you know, just culture to experience. So, that's definitely my favorite thing about Toronto. And I think it's probably, for me, the most interesting thing about Toronto.

That is really interesting and that's fun, and it's such a gift to have that as a possibility for you growing up, because so many of us grow up in a little bubble in our own little worlds and takes until, you know, adulthood to start getting outside of it. So, that's really cool.

Yeah, and it was funny. Like, I really appreciated that even from a young age, not even looking back, it was like, at the time, it was like wow, this is so cool. We would hop on the subway or, you know, now I live 30 minutes outside of Toronto. At the time, I was probably 20 minutes outside of Toronto. But it's just a quick jaunt. It was always easy to do and just like I said, never ending. Which is really, really cool.

Yeah, that is really cool. I actually quite envy that. That's fun.

You have to come visit.

Yeah. I have not been to Canada except to like, sort of, skirt the edges of it on the way to somewhere else.

Yes.

I'll have to do that. Okay, so, what's something about you that other people find hard to believe?

Okay, well, this one usually shakes up the cocktail party. Not that I go to cocktail parties very often, but I have been inside 22 different jails.

Whoa.

And most people do not see that coming. For work. Not admitted to, but for work. So, yes, part of my previous life before writing full time was a corporate job and the client group was the correctional group. So, I would visit various jails regularly, like multiple times a week all around Ontario.

Doing what, if I might ask?

Oh, yes. No. So, like, corporate support, labor relations, basically working with the people who ran the jails and their unions. And sometimes it was training, sometimes it was a presentation. Usually there was, well, it's so funny when I started, you know, the promise was, oh, you're just going to go to the administrative side of the jail. They're very separate, right? Like, there's a separate entrance and it's just like an office. There's a water cooler and everything. Anyway, that didn't always happen. My very first day, actually, we walked in and we found out that the lovely office that was very officey, very much like the Bay Street office I left, was too small to hold everyone. So, we actually did have to go into the full jail proper to the very basement with no windows, that was ten minutes to get there. And if you'd have paid me a million dollars, I couldn't have found my way out. That was like, 9:15 on a Monday of my first, first day.

That is funny.

Anyway, so that was interesting. So, most people never believe me when I tell them that, unless you had worked with me before.

Yeah, that is really interesting. And you have so many experiences that are just outside of what our boring old ordinary is. That's very cool.

It doesn't feel that way, but thank you. Most days it's pretty boring, I promise.

So, let's move into talking about your novel. Tell us the name of it again.

The Blue Iris.

The Blue Iris. And I loved what you said in your introduction about the Toronto flower market. So, I want to break that open. But let's start by asking, what do you hope that readers take away from your novel?

Oh, boy, that's such a big question for me because I want them to take away so much. I think I am abnormally attached to this novel. It has so much in my heart. But I really hope that they can walk away from it feeling uplifted. Hopefully they believe a little bit more in redemption if they didn't believe in that before. And I really want them to connect to the characters. Like, I would love it if they would just either see themselves in or really deeply resonate with at least one of the characters. It's a big ensemble, so hopefully there's something in there that they'll find that they like. And overall, I think just, you know, speaking more to the characters journeys, I kind of hope that readers can walk away with finding the courage to own their own truths if they didn't have that before. Because that's really big thing for every one of these characters is learning to own their hard truths. And sort of secondary to that is just having faith that their future is going to find them. Like, it may not be clear right when you set out, especially my main protagonist, she's just finished graduate school. She's got all kinds of education behind her and ambition. She wants to be this big time something, but she doesn't know what it looks like, and that's really stressing her out. I call it the what's next, anxiety, right?

Oh, yeah. And that's a very real thing. I remember that transition time. It's tough?

Yeah, me too. And I don't think it's even going in approaching 30. Like, I still felt it well into my thirties. I still feel it sometimes now. So, I just hope that the message of the book resonates with someone on that level, because I think everybody can relate to it in some way. And just this concept that what's meant for you isn't going to pass you and your future is going to find you. Even if you can't see exactly what it looks like at the outset, you're on the path that you are supposed to be on.

That's very lovely. So, tell us about the book. It is set in a flower market in Toronto?

Yes, it is.

Tell us about that.

It's inspired by a real flower market, which is no longer there. But I worked there for seven summers, and so I felt very well equipped to write about a flower market, and I thought it was just a really rich setting for a novel. I was really excited to get into the whole sensory landscape and the concept of these beautiful flowers. But at the same time, there’s like, if you work at a flower market, there's a whole other side to the flower market. Like, there's a lot of men urinating against things they shouldn't be supposed to be, and there's a lot of forklifts, there's a lot of gross stuff, and there's a lot of, you know what I mean? It's very raw. Like, you know, you're there at 4:30 in the morning, and it's very chaotic, and yeah, there's diesel trucks everywhere, and it's a whole other thing compared to what you sometimes think of as, all this lovely flowery place and, you know. So, I try to sort of,

so, what you're telling us is that there's the beforehand and then there's the during and they're very different.

Yes. 4:30 in the morning is very different than when you stroll by at 01:00 on a Sunday afternoon. So, for me it was interesting because I could really play up a little bit of that duality. But yes, the setting is really special to me. It's based on, obviously, like I said, inspired by a real place and a real neighborhood. And that actually was the neighborhood that I first lived in when I was really young.

I love that idea. I mean, I've seen flower markets only on TV. I grew up in rural America, so it's not in my experience. And I just, I see those on in Notting hill, there was a flower market, I think, that he walks through and I just thought, oh, how beautiful. I love flowers and you know. So, that's really interesting to hear. That makes me want to go pick up the book.

That is cool. And that's really interesting to me because I thought up here in the Great White North, you know, you would be more likely. So, that's really interesting. I never thought of that. I guess Canadians, we just get really excited when summer comes. Like, we just go all out. Maybe that's why. Because we actually have quite a few flower markets around.

Well, I know that they exist out there. It's just I've never gotten to be with one.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Well, let's transition a little bit to talking about your writing itself. Do you remember when you first decided you were going to write a novel? I guess I would ask first. Is this the first one you've written?

Yes, first one I've written, rewritten. Rewritten. Sometimes I think it's my fifth novel because of how many times I rewrote it, but it is my first. Yes. And I remember that moment very clearly, deciding I was going to write a novel. It was sort of part of a bigger journey. And obviously you alluded to that in the intro. But essentially, I had received some troubling health news. There was an issue that had cropped up again after eleven years. I thought I was done with it forever. We'll just go ahead and say it. It was a benign tumor in my orbit, like behind my eyeball. So that had resurfaced and there was a lot going on in my brain. We didn't know what the next steps were going to be. So, I really, really wanted to distract myself. And I enrolled in creative writing classes because I'd always really wanted to give that a shot. But I was very deliberate on day one of the introductions of that class. I'm going to do everything but fiction. Like, I can't write fiction. That's not what I'm doing. So that was really interesting. And then it actually came out of then we get to fiction assignment, and it's this writing prompt, and I find myself with this scene, and I'm like, wow, hang on. And there's just a lot of synapses start going, and there's a lot of magic happening that I have never experienced before. And, you know, things just start really snowballing in my head. And I remembered the advice of my instructor, who said, it's like driving at night. You don't have to see the whole way. You just have to see as far as your headlights and just keep going. So that was sort of in the back of my head. So, I kind of kept working with it. But I really, at that point was like, I don't know if this is going to be a novel. I mean, maybe a short story, maybe it's just going to sit in my drawer. I don't know. But I worked at it and worked at it because it just felt so incredible to write. Then I'd been at that for a few months, and I actually had my follow up scans, and they came back really positive. The tumor was not only stable, but it actually appeared smaller.

That's fantastic.

That was a really big moment for me. And it was so funny how it happens. Like, I was pulling into church, actually. We were going to Easter Saturday Mass. So, God bless my doctor for calling me on a Saturday with the news. But he knew I was on the edge of my seat, and I just decided right there, like I just said, I’m finishing this novel, I don't care. I don't care how many times I have to write it. I don't care how many times I have to query it. I'm getting this novel out into the world no matter what, and I'm going to figure it out. And it was a very clear, distinct moment that I just said, we're going. We're doing this. We don't know if it makes any sense, but I just felt like it had given me so much at that point that I had to see it through.

Oh, what a great story. So, your characters in your book kind of parallel that healing, I understand.

Yeah. On different levels. Yeah, they all have their scars, for sure, in all different forms. And yeah, it was just a lot about owning their truth and finding their truth and trusting their journey. All that stuff that I said. I mean, my what's next, anxiety was huge for years. So, yeah. There are definitely some parallels there.

Yeah, that's very good. This all sounds very interesting. So, let's start wrapping things up. Let's ask, what's the best place for people to find you online?

Probably my website. So, that's rachestoneauthor.com. And that's going to have my regular updates. You can sign up for my newsletter, which I promise to send only four times a year. And I've tried to update my blog pretty regularly, so if you like to just read a little bit about that, that's always available there.

Great. Okay, so in closing, let's ask this. What book or story is inspiring you the most right now?

For me, it's not a new one, but it's always been the story of Terry Fox. So, I don't know how familiar you are with him. He's our Canadian hero, ran across the country with one leg and one prosthetic to raise money for cancer.

Oh, wow.

Only made it as far as Ontario, but it's really huge here. Terry Fox, they organize runs to carry on his marathon of hope. So, his story is fascinated Canadians forever. He died the year that I was born. But for me, as a writer, it's almost resonating to me in a new way because, you know, you read about his journals, where he first started, and he was at the very beginning of this journey, and he was by himself. Like the cameras were not there yet. The police escorts were not there yet. The crowds were not there yet. He was all by himself with this really insane dream of running thousands of miles across the country on one leg. So that now, in the stage that I'm at now is really sort of a daily thing that I keep in mind because it's just so inspiring to me that sometimes it's just you and this crazy dream and you just got to keep going.

You just got to keep going. I love that. That's the word that we all need to hear at some point. Hopefully whoever needs to hear it today is hearing it.

Yes, that would be great.

Well, thank you so much for being on Author Express with us, and we look forward to speaking with you again.

Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful.

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