Author Diana Stevan of Campbell River will be reading from her latest novel, Sunflowers Under Fire, at the Courtenay Public Library on Friday, May 17 at 2 p.m.
Prior to the reading, she’ll be giving a short PowerPoint presentation on how she used family history to write her novel based on her grandmother’s life in western Russia (present-day Ukraine) duringthe First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the civil wars and the Polish occupation.
Raised in Winnipeg, Stevan shared a bedroom with her baba until she was 15, but her grandmother never talked about life in the old country.
“She helped raise me but I never knew the horrors she faced before she came to Canada in 1929,” Stevan said. “She probably kept things inside, much like soldiers do when they come back from war. To talk about the past would’ve reawakened the trauma of what they’d gone through.”
After her baba died, Stevan’s mother, a natural-born storyteller, would talk about life in Volhynia, an oblast (province) of Ukraine and the impact of all the wars on the family. Stevan recorded them and later, encouraged by her own granddaughter, decided to write the story.
Stevan’s grandmother, Lukia Mazurets, was an uneducated Ukrainian farmwife and mother of eight, but her love of family, wits, and faith got her through one of the most tumultuous times in Russian history. It’s an inspirational story, one that shows the lengths an ordinary woman will go through to keep her family together.
And with the ongoing news about Russia and Ukraine, Sunflowers Under Fire shows how the seeds of this ongoing conflict were planted generations ago. It started well before the Tsars took power and continues to today.
Stevan hopes her story will also underline the difficult choices all immigrants make when they leave the land of their birth. “No one leaves a country that serves them well. They leave when there’s little hope for themselves and/or their loved ones.”
This is Stevan’s third novel. Her first novel, A Cry From The Deep, is a romantic mystery/ adventure set in Manhattan and Ireland; her second is The Rubber Fence, women’s fiction set on a psychiatric ward in a Winnipeg hospital. She’s also written a coming-of-age novelette, The Blue Nightgown, also set in Winnipeg. With their two daughters grown, Stevan lives with her husband Robert in Campbell River and West Vancouver. When she isn’t writing, she loves to travel, read, garden, and visit her family.