Katherine’s big news is the publication in two countries of her second novel, Her Turn. HarperCollins is publishing it in the U.S. and Knopf in Canada, both on July 6, 2021. It is very different from Sofie & Cecilia — Her Turn is a contemporary story set in Washington, D.C. about a newspaper editor whose life is up-ended when her ex-husband’s second wife submits an article to her. Wife #2 doesn’t know she is sending it to Wife #1. A small circle of hell is let loose. Stay tuned.
A piece about Little Women, timed to the 2020 Oscars, appeared in February in The Globe and Mail. Once the pandemic was part of our lives, The Globe also published a piece Katherine wrote about the history of hand washing. (For that, she drew on research she did for The Dirt on Clean.)
The pandemic saw Katherine tutoring her London, UK, grandchildren remotely, and she wrote up her experience of teaching a grandson to write poetry in the October issue of the Literary Review of Canada. The editor of the Review commented that when the grandson is grown up, he will be happy to tell people at cocktail parties that he was a published poet at the age of 9!
The September issue of Reader’s Digest has an article by Katherine with some tips for mourners (drawn from her book, The Mourner’s Dance). December saw two articles: a feature on the novelist Helen Humphreys in the Literary Review of Canada, and a piece in Reader’s Digest about why Katherine’s family has to eat a very special food every Christmas Eve.
She had two Zoom appearances. One is a benefit arranged around Sofie & Cecilia to raise money for a charity in aid of African grandmothers who are bringing up their grandchildren orphaned by AIDS. And the second is a talk about The Dirt on Clean and its relevance to the pandemic, for a branch of the Canadian Federation of University Women.