The sweet scent of gorse in bloom and the sound of foghorns in the distance bring Crofton writer Liz Forbes right back to her childhood in Oak Bay.
They’re fond memories, if unusual, and she shared them with the world in her book Growing up Weird, a Memoir of an Oak Bay Childhood. She brings those stories, and a few unpublished ones, to share with residents as part of the Marion Cumming Lecture Series hosted by the Oak Bay Heritage Foundation.
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“It excites me that at 84 I’m being asked to go do a talk. I love it and we’re never ever too old to be able to do whatever we want to do,” Forbes said in a phone interview.
Forbes came to writing in retirement, with several history columns in mid-Island publications and excerpts in books.
“I started writing fiction and that didn’t work for me,” she said. “I used to entertain people with stories about my family, enough to make them laugh, and so I started writing those stories.”
About a decade in, she decided to pull the tales together as a book and the Oak Bay memoir landed on Ivy’s Bookshop shelves in 2017.
She wrote a second called River Tales: Stories from My Cowichan Years and is already working on capturing next chapter of her life.
A member of a longtime writing group she created in her hometown, Forbes’ words have appeared in four editions of Chicken Soup for the Soul and a Touchwood series in the book Somebody’s Child. “I had given up a child for adoption when I was 18 so I wrote about that,” she said.
Her reading, and added unpublished stories she’ll tell during the talk, focus on day-to-day life, different homes and shenanigans as a student at Monterey school.
“I’m really looking forward to it. I think the exciting part is that I love memoir, I read memoir, I love knowing how other people’s lives are. It’s even better if they’re not famous because you can relate more,” she said.
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While hard to pinpoint a favourite read recently, she plans to pick up the first by Oak Bay author Faye Pattapiece who penned and published hers at the age of 92.
“I love reading Anny Scoones. She was really an inspiration to me … She goes all over the place and I can follow it. I love it,” Forbes said of the prolific Victoria writer.
Along with sharing a perspective of history in Oak Bay, Forbes hopes to instill a passion for memoir and inspire others to write their own stories.
“Getting old is really a privilege and you can be exactly who you are. And people want to hear your stories – I think that’s amazing.”
The Oak Bay Heritage Foundation event is April 26 at 7 p.m. in Windsor Park Pavilion. The event is free, with donations accepted. Visit oakbayheritagefoundation.ca for details.