NEWS PHOTO JAMES TUBB
Local author Samantha Johnson poses with her dog Mike and a copy of her latest book, 'Our lives according to Erwin,' available now on Amazon.
jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb
Losing someone or something important in one’s life is a difficult hurdle everyone must navigate in their lives. In Samantha Johnson’s latest novel, Our lives according to Erwin, there’s no shying away from that loss or how to handle it.
The story of change and growth is Johnson’s third independently published work following her previous stories of The Law of Conformity and 13 Ways to Die.
Our lives according to Erwin is described by the local author as a novel about change and growth and ways we grow and move forward after a loss.
“It’s a story about the losses in our lives and some of the ways we can move forward out of grief, and you can have grieve from the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship, in this story there is death. There’s sudden death and there’s death we know is coming,” Johnson said. “It’s about those themes and it’s also about acceptance of what is coming and how connection can help us be stronger, more resilient and move forward.”
The story, which follows three characters, Liza, Isabella and Merle, came to Johnson while she was walking on the path that crosses Hill Road. She saw a flash of a truck coming around the corner and a jogger and had what she thought was the story formed before she was home. That version didn’t end up working and it was a little bit later when the title came to her while at work.
“I was at work at Plains (Canada), I was talking to my two supervisors and they were talking about a previous employee called Erwin, who apparently was quite the guy,” Johnson said. “But hearing his name, when I was standing there I said to them, ‘I could write a whole novel around a guy named Erwin.'”
The story process took six years in total as she didn’t work on it for five years until sparked in late 2020 by a friend reading one of her other published works. She had written some of the early chapters before moving to Medicine Hat but made alterations when she picked it back up due to changes in her life with the passing of her husband Mark and because her writing improved as a reporter with the News.
She says she changed throughout the process, part of the reasons she went the self publishing route.
“The one thing I like about the self publishing through Amazon is they print the books to order,” Johnson said. “I read once in a Brene Brown book about how many books don’t get sold, they never even make it to the shelves and just get recycled again. For me, it became more about getting the story written down and getting it out into the world and not so much about being a published or traditionally published author, or even a famous author. It’s just more about completing the circle of writing.”
The story and her other published work can be found by searching her name or the title of the book on Amazon.
