Q&A With Author Lorna Schultz Nicholson
She grew up playing sports. Now she writes about sports (and other things, too) for kids.
I met Lorna Schultz Nicholson in 2007 when we were pitted against each other on “A Total Write-Off,” a short-lived TV game show in Edmonton in which writers were paired up to construct a story based on audience prompts.
Lorna’s partner was the late Scottish-Canadian historical fiction writer Jack Whyte. Mine was local playwright Chris Craddock. I was pretty sure Lorna and Jack would win, partly because Jack delivered his team’s story in his enchanting Scottish brogue, and partly because Chris and I disliked each other intensely from the minute we were forced to work together, which made collaborating a challenge. Meanwhile, Lorna and Jack seemed to get along famously. Also, their story had something to do with tulips, which are one of my favorite flowers.
I was shocked when the audience clapped harder for the story that Chris and I spent more time squabbling over than actually writing. To this day, when Lorna and I are together and people ask how we met and she says, “We met on a game show. She beat me,” I get a little thrill. Losing to me still bugs her!
Yes, I am that petty. But mostly it thrills me because I know that if Lorna and I had met when we were in junior high gym class, she would have beaten me at everything and I still would have wanted to be her best friend. Lorna is the kind of girl I would have idolized as a kid—smart, friendly, kind, and the one thing I wanted to be but knew I never would: a gifted athlete. Growing up in St. Catharines, on Lake Ontario south of Toronto, she played every sport available to girls back then, excelling at rowing (her high school team won championships in Canada and the US), hockey, and volleyball.
Not surprisingly, many of Lorna’s more than 50 published books (which include picture books, middle grade and young adult novels, and nonfiction for kids and adults) are about sports, quite a few about hockey. Lorna’s husband, Bob Nicholson, was president of Hockey Canada for 16 years, which has given her an edge when it comes to writing biographies about hockey stars like Hayley Wickenheiser, Sidney Crosby, and Edmonton’s Connor McDavid—she knows those people and they trust her to get their stories straight.
But here’s what should be obvious to anyone who has read Lorna’s books or is familiar with her work habits: the true keys to her success are her skill and discipline. As she told me when we talked for this interview last week, “I was a sports person before I met Bob. I played hockey when I was a teenager—I played all through my teens on all-star teams. It wasn’t like I wrote about it because of my husband. I wrote about it because I knew about the sport—and more importantly my son was playing at the time, so I used his experiences and those of his friends.”
I did the same thing when I wrote my middle-grade novel, Addy’s Race, about a fifth grader who is trying to carve out an identity for herself other than that of the only kid in school with hearing aids. In the process, she discovers that she is a gifted runner. I basically cribbed from my daughter Elizabeth’s life, as well as stories I heard from kids and parents I interviewed when I co-wrote Your Child’s Hearing Loss: A Guide for Parents, in the early 2000s.
Borrowing from our kids’ lives for our stories is a habit Lorna and I share. But unlike me, Lorna didn’t decide at a young age that she wanted to be a writer. What happened is that when she moved from Ottawa to Calgary in the late 1980s and began raising a family shortly thereafter, she discovered that her part-time job, working for a local radio station, was not compatible with being the mother of three young kids. She’d always been an avid reader, and she’d been writing scripts for the radio job. When she noticed an ad for a writing class on a coffee shop bulletin board, she decided, “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to sign up for a writing class.’
DW: What did you write in that first class you took?
LSN: I wrote chapters for a really, really bad romance novel. Everybody else wrote a short story. But I was obsessed with writing—I would put on a pot of coffee at 9 at night when the kids went to bed and I would write till midnight. I needed practice. I treated it like I was practicing for a sport.
DW: Romance to hockey seems quite a leap. How’d that happen?
LSN: I got into a writing group a wonderful group of artistic women—we’re still together today. Jacquie Guest was one of the gals in that group. She was writing all these children’s books and she’d ask me a lot of questions because she was writing about sports and I would answer her questions—things like what’s an offside in soccer and what’s icing in hockey. I said, ‘I’m going to write one of those books” and she said, “You should, because I don’t want to write them anymore.”
DW: And the rest is history?
LSN: It almost was history. I had an idea to write a book about a boy who plays hockey and has diabetes—I went through this in high school with a good friend of mine on the rowing team who had diabetes and nobody knew, including her. When we found out, it explained a lot of the problems she was having. I remembered how scared we all were for her and I thought that would make for a good story, and maybe it could help somebody else who was going through that. I sent one chapter and an outline to Hadley Dyer, a really great editor at Lorimer Books in Toronto. Jacquie phoned me a few weeks later. She said, “Lorna, what is wrong with your phone? Hadley Dyer is trying to call you.” At the time, people didn’t do a lot of email. I went and listened to our answering machine, and the recording wasn’t “Hi, this is the Nicholsons,” it was my kids play-fighting. It was spring break and they were bored, so that’s what they did—recorded their fight. I was so embarrassed! She’d called that number and that’s what she got. I thought, “My kids have ruined my big moment.”
DW: But they hadn’t?
LSN: Lorimer wanted the book. They wanted to see it and I hadn’t written it yet. I literally sat down and wrote it in 14 days. I was diligent. My kids were still on spring break and they kept interrupting me. I wrote in my son’s “play ice area” and every once in a while he’d tell me I had to move because the Zamboni had to clean the ice. It was wild. But I finished it. My friend from my writing group edited it and then I sent it to Hadley and the rest is history as far as children’s literature was concerned.
DW: You’ve had so many books published since that first one in 2004—you probably need to build an addition to house them all. The book I’m most interested in talking about right now is When You Least Expect It, your young adult coming-of-age novel about a teenage rower. I remember finding the story really moving because of how you dealt with so many different aspects of grief. And when you told me where the idea came from, I was blown away. I wonder if you can talk about that a bit here.
LSN: When I was 29 years old I was coaching the novice men at [the University of Victoria]. It was January 15, 1988, a Friday afternoon, and I wanted the boys to get an extra row in, and they were all keen. I was in a motorboat and I had two crews of eight rowing across the lake and I could see the swells coming. I said to both eights, “We’re going in. We’re not going to stay out in this weather.” There was a sudden squall, one of those really weird squalls that came up really quickly. One of the boats capsized. Two boys died—one in the hospital, from hypothermia, and one drowned. There was an inquest months later, and it led to all kinds of safety measures being introduced, but I was so traumatized by it all. I just buried it.
DW: So did you write When You Least Expect It as a way to process that experience?
LSN: It didn’t start out that way. I was talking to an editor about sports, and when she found out I was a rower she was curious—she lives in an area where rowing is a very big sport, and she said, “It’d be really good to have a rowing book.” I don’t think I planned to make my book about that, but that’s what came to me. I think the biggest thing with the writing was I wanted to honor [the rowers’] parents. At the time it happened, I was 29 and didn’t have children. Now I really understand what it would be like to lose an 18-year-old to something like that. What those parents went through was awful.
DW: When You Least Expect It was well-received by your peers—it won the R. Ross Annett Award for children’s literature from the Writers Guild of Alberta and was nominated for the Snow Willow Award in Saskatchewan and the High Plains Award, which honors children’s literature in the prairie states in the US and provinces in Canada. What kind of reaction did you get from readers?
LSN: A lot of the comments were about the grief, but people really responded to the rowing and the perseverance that it takes to be in such a sport. I wanted to get a parent in there—that’s why I created the character of Alan, the coach—but I also wrote it to give the world a glimpse of the sport of rowing. It’s a very beautiful sport and a hard sport, and it doesn’t get enough attention.
DW: What are you working on now, besides honing your grandmothering skills, now that you’ve acquired two grandsons in less than a year and a half, and you have a third grandchild on the way in the next few weeks?
LSN: I have a middle grade hockey novel, Stopping the Shots, coming out now, along with a biography about Sidney Crosby. Auston Matthews’ biography is coming out next year. I’d like to do one about a female who plays in the Professional Women’s Hockey League—hopefully that will come to fruition. I’ve got a book about Rick Hansen coming out in 2026—I’m writing that with him. And I sold two books this summer, a middle grade and one that I think is really adorable: The Night Before Shinny, told in rhyme, like The Night Before Christmas, but about animals that sneak off in the middle of the night to play hockey. Gordie Howe comes down and he’s like Santa.
DW: What’s inspiring you these days?
LSN: I just met with my friend Joy Fielding, who is a New York Times bestselling author. She’s turning 80 next year, and she has a new book coming out then. I said, “Do you have any other ideas?” and she said, “Yes! I have lots of ideas. I have three percolating and I don’t know which one I’m going to be doing next.” She’s going to be 80 and is under contract for another book. I met with her and thought, “I want to be like you when I grow up.”
How could I not love this discussion with two of my favourite people? So interesting to hear the backstories of some of Lorna's work, and of your friendship. Lots of new Lorna-stories coming out, too!