Kathy Siddall has a simple question, and two covers to wrap it with.
"Who did you meet? Tell me the story."
The veteran Prince George media and marketing professional has had one of those ideas that just won't fade away - a brain pellet rattling around in her noggin. She has reached a point in her life when all the factors are pointing her towards this persistent creative spark.
The idea centres on building a book. Siddall is semi-retired from her other business interests, so the time and effort required to compile and edit stories into volumes is an exact fit for her circumstances.
The idea came to her on a trip with her family from Prince George to Victoria.
"We started off with this joke. How long would it be before we ran into somebody from Prince George?," she said. "Well it didn't take long: Hixon. So then it became how often would we run into people from Prince George."
Several times, as it turned out, and some of them were long-missed acquaintances, or friends of friends that reminded them to reconnect with the mutual connections.
She also encountered a distasteful man in a restaurant who befriended her for the meal from a table away, but said unkind things about his own wife. He became memorable to her, for the wrong reasons.
But meandering around the Inner Harbour gave her the opposite reaction.
"We were looking at the boats and the beautiful downtown, traffic was really heavy because the regatta was on, and this man - he looked like a homeless man, or close to it - we noticed was yelling at me - 'Hey beautiful' - and he made his way over to me and handed me a bouquet of flowers. It was so sweet. And then he turned around and started selling his remaining flowers to the tourists. Those flowers were what got him by, and he just gave them to me to be sweet. Well it was one of the most wonderful moments I'd ever felt."
It was then that the epiphany happened. Meeting people, be they strangers in a passing encounter or the love of your life, is a deeply held memory for most people. Each person's memory is loaded with several of these recollections.
Siddall believed, and a publisher agreed, that these stories were the kind that audiences love to tell and read about. She is now in the process of compiling those memories to fit under the title Who Did You Meet? - Tell Me A Story.
"People have all these encounters with important people that stick in their memories. That's what I want to know about," she said. "Maybe it is a big movie star you met. Maybe it is a teacher who turned you onto a great career path. Maybe you were adopted and got to meet your biological family later in life. Maybe it was a one-night stand that you can't let go of. The person you married, a hero you got to be in the same room with, a stranger who made a deep impression... You know who it is that sticks in your mind. Write that down and send it to me."
Siddall said each donated anecdote should be no more than 500 words, be free of legal implications, and it has to be a story Siddall can then be free and clear to tell the world within her publishing formats and prerogatives.
She will compile the best ones into book form. Ideally, she said, so many entries will arrive that she can hive them into categories. Perhaps there is a whole book waiting to be published just on sports figures, or on romantic encounters, or meetings with strangers. What stories she receives from the public will dictate the directions the book project will take - maybe one volume, perhaps a series.
These 500-word (or fewer) stories should be emailed to [email protected].
