After our son Anderson was born in May 2022, Mirriam encouraged James to return to complete his second year of the MFA program (“insisted” would not be an unfair characterization). Almost three years after taking a break from the program, James now had a much cleaner book proposal and narrative to pitch based on their unlikely and fateful adventures together. But it quickly became apparent that this was a story that could only be told properly from two perspectives.

In order to capture Mirriam’s voice, James interviewed her on long drives or late into the evening using his Iphone as a recording devoice. James then transcribed and edited the transcripts for Mirriam’s additional review and line-by-line revisions to her sections until she signed off on the wording. Although some of the writing built on James’s early drafts from the first year in the program, the bulk of the work took place between June 2023 and April 2024, when the draft of the full manuscript was finalized.

When James returned to complete the second year of his MFA after a three-year absence, the first assignment of the term (due January 7, 2023) asked students to identify three possible imprints/publishers that would be suitable for their project, providing a rationale for fit for each. James wrote:

“Given my lack of a literary platform (online or otherwise) and the personal nature of this non-fiction project, I expect the most likely publisher would be a smaller Atlantic Canadian press that publishes a wide range of non-fiction, including memoir. Pottersfield Press is located at Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, which is only about a 15 minute drive from my home in Cole Harbour. (Harder to get more “local” than that!) Pottersfield was founded in 1979 and runs a well-known Prize for Creative Nonfiction I will consider entering next Spring assuming the completion of my manuscript.”

Writing and revising right up until their deadline, we submitted the final manuscript for The Illogical Adventure to Pottersfield Press on April 30, 2024. Two months later, we were overjoyed to receive news that we had won the contest and our book would be published in the Spring of 2025. We are hugely indebted to Lesley Choyce and the team at Pottersfield for providing unpublished authors like ourselves with a potential outlet for work through this annual contest, and for their belief in our story.

As is often said, a memoir is not an autobiography. We are not attempting to tell the complete story of our lives in The Illogical Adventure. Otherwise it would be much longer and (we assume) far more tedious for readers. One of the biggest challenges memoir writers face is in choosing what to leave out. Ideally, everything in a memoir should help drive the narrative forward and support its main themes. For us, that meant a specific and streamlined focus on our relationship – including what led us both to be in Cape Town on April 29, 2018 for our fateful first meeting, as well as aspects of our character, background, and events that help explain why we kept pursuing each other despite the distance and cultural differences.

The other main challenge in writing a memoir lies with the nature of memory itself. While we were able to rely on journals, photos, videos, receipts, emails, WhatsApp messages, and many conversations with each other as well as family and friends, the story remains a reconstruction of the past to the best of our ability. In attempting to put our story into words, we were reminded many times how difficult memories can be to pin down.

The covid pandemic swept the world at a critical moment in our relationship and in both our lives. Had we been forced to wait to travel into 2021 or 2022 to see each other, it is unlikely that we’d be together and married with children today. Everything was in such a state of flux in the summer of 2020 that it was difficult to determine what to do. We felt only an urgency to reunite by any means necessary.

While we were careful to follow all the quarantine and mask protocols, there’s no doubt we were fortunate to find flight and entry requirements that allowed us to meet and stay safe. We know how difficult that time was for so many, particularly in retrospect. We hope readers will agree that, for us, the risks were necessary and worth taking.

Nothing is impossible! Trust your heart when it is trying to tell you the right person has come along and the timing is right to take a chance on longer-term and deeper commitments, even if you can’t see beyond all the obstacles in your way. Be thankful for the miracle of finding someone to spend your life with, whether it’s a childhood sweetheart or someone halfway around the world you haven’t met yet. Love is worth it.