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Marie Gage was born and raised in London, Ontario. She and her family moved to the Haliburton Highlands in 1996 when they purchased a self-catering resort which they ran for 14 years. She is now retired, living on a lake.
Marie Gage, creates stories for adults and children from her lived experiences. Her fictional stories emanate from insights gained through interaction with real people as well as her genealogical research.
Her latest offering, Promise of the Bluebell Woods, was inspired by the story of a War Bride and laboratory technician in a WWII field hospital who just happen to be her husband’s parents. To learn why Gage believes it important to capture the lives of ordinary people please read her blog post “Somewhere in Me”. It’s more than just a love story: It’s a war story that follows the Number 10 Canadian General Hospital’s path through the war and it’s the story of an ordinary English family during WWII and their extraordinary eldest daughter who made her mark on the war effort.
Her debut novel, A Ring of Promises, was born from her intensive research into the lives of her paternal grandparents. The research uncovered a story that was so compelling she simply had to find a way to capture it. The facts that were known were sparse and did not enable the writing of a memoir. Instead, fact and fiction are woven into a heart-wrenching tale that follows the path of the century-old romance upon which it is based.
The children’s book series was created with the assistance of her sister, Audrey Ramsay, as the illustrator. Audrey is a retired CSR clerk who has always experimented with various types of media such as watercolour, acrylic, pen and ink, washable oils and pencil crayon. She is predominantly self-taught but has taken many art classes to learn the basic techniques.
The first picture book’s illustrations were drawn on paper using watercolour pencils in an effort to create colourful pictures that would be attractive to young readers. For the second and third books she learned to create the drawings using digital technology.