The garden that grew her – a new book from local Ontario author Leslie Bradford
Starting from an online post written innocently early one morning as a satire-laced story about a single mother, a Northern Ontario writer has found her literary muse not only in the details of her transformed life but also in the wit and wisdom of some 143,000 readers who made her particular discussion thread the most widely followed topic on a well-known website dealing with individualism and spirituality. Readers instantly declared Bradford a cross between Erma Bombeck and Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.
In “The Garden That Grew Her,” Leslie Bradford offers two stories. The first, her personal account of how to find peace amidst the chaos of an ordinary housewife’s career/kid juggling existence. “The cure for domesticide,” she explains.
“Then, there is a book within the book – a collection of the rowdy wit and wisdom of my fellow barefoot Gardeners. Ordinary people, like me, who are escaping domesticide and extinguishing the erroneous “Happily Ever After” myth.
In fact, so inspired was long-time writing teacher, Marilee Pallant – a/k/a the Garden Ya Ya and among the earliest followers of Bradford’s initial thread – that she has contributed a series of poems and lyrics that grace the end of each of Bradford’s 11 chapters in the book.
The impetus for that fateful post came after Bradford, a divorced mother of two daughters who worked in the automobile dealership industry as a finance manager, went online to share her experience after viewing a web cast and reading the bestselling book by a renowned teacher of spirituality. Dismayed at the volume of polarizing and ego-driven comments on the board, Bradford quickly composed her online story, the humorous seeds of the virtual garden metaphor.
In just one week, there were 1,750 hits. Eight days later, there were 14,000. In four months, after an unfortunate interruption that necessitated rejuvenating the thread, there were more than 143,000 followers, five times the number who had tracked Bradford’s initial story.
Bradford also picked up an award for Best Screenplay at the Moondance International Film Festival. “It was my first writing endeavor. I wrote the entire screenplay on Post-it-Notes while waiting around for customers on the used car lot. Bradford sold cars before being promoted to position as finance manager. “After tucking my girls into bed, I’d transfer the notes into script form using an old broken laptop.” The screenplay was also a finalist for the prestigious Praxis Fellowship at Simon Fraser University in BC and led to her write an animated film for children suffering from cancer. Nevaeh Can’t wait received a Kids First Coalition for Children’s Media official recommendation and is currently in production with Imaginethis Media Studios, a Chatham, Ontario company.
The daughter of a convicted criminal, Bradford dropped out of high school in grade ten, frustrated from a life-long struggle with undiagnosed learning disabilities. “It’s never too late to make a U-turn and jump back onto the path of your true desire. I’ve longed to write since I was eight years-old. It just took forty-four years of learning curve to get there.”
Bradford’s website and book trailer can be found at the thegardenthatgrewher.com
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