Former Medicine Hat resident Johnson set to showcase novel ‘Chipped’ at mall

“They spend 25 years together until she’s killed in an accident. And he’s lost, he doesn’t know what to do without his human. He figures he’ll just turn back into a lump of stone, but that’s when he finds himself in the hands of her beloved niece.”

The former Medicine Hat resident writes under the name K.A. Johnson and now lives on Vancouver Island. Johnson and her husband operate a scuba diving lodge.

She moved to Medicine Hat with her parents in the early 1980’s, attending Crescent Heights High School before moving to Calgary for post-secondary school.

“Winter is pretty much my writing time. Summer is the time it all percolates in my head,” Johnson said.

She is in the city to do a meet and greet and book signing at Indigo Books on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.

Chipped is the second novel written by Johnson, one she thought up while writing her first novel, Trusting Bamboo Bridges, which she calls a memoir gone mad.

“I spent eight, almost nine years with Doctors Without Borders in the field, and people kept saying, you should write, you should write your story, it’s so exciting, things you’ve done and places you’ve been, ” Johnson said.

“I started writing this memoir, and it’s much more exciting when you have a flight of fancy, and had I wished I had done this, well, a character could do that,” she added.

“It took off on its own into fiction, but it is still very closely related to things I’ve actually done and seen.”

Johnson has toured the book around Vancouver Island, but with the book being available to buy at Indigo in Medicine Hat, she decided to do a signing in the city.

“I thought, why not? I’ll introduce myself to my mom and dad’s neighbourhood. They’ve been really good about promoting me. I thought [that] I should probably see if I can say hello to people firsthand here,” Johnson said.

She joked about asking her brother, Gordie Johnson of the rock band Big Sugar, for help.

“I’ve been trying desperately to get him to hook me up with all the people with lots of influence out there,” Johnson said.

“But yeah, he couldn’t be more proud.”

Johnson said that her journey to become an author started with keeping a journal while travelling.

“I spent 12 years overseas, roaming the world, including climbing Kilimanjaro, which is very much a feature of Chipped,” Johnson said.

“It was just nice to be able to put things down in a more story way, as opposed to just notes and bits and pieces out of my head from my time in travels,” she added.

“It’s funny because once you start writing, and once you start a story, if you kind of know where it’s going, the characters start to come alive in your head. They’re real people to me.”

Johnson carries the little stone hippo Chip with her. She says he doesn’t talk like in the story, but does travel everywhere with her now, including up Mount Kilimanjaro.

She says her novel takes on a life of its own.

“It is kind of nice to bring them out to the world and to have people who are reading my books say they touched them in some sort of way,” Johnson said.

“The last email I got about Chipped, somebody said, they felt like they were climbing with me. They were out of breath the whole time. Which I thought was quite amazing.”

For more about the author, or to find one of her books, you can visit her website at katherinejohnson.ca.

by Jesse Gill

Former Medicine Hat resident Johnson set to showcase novel ‘Chipped’ at mall

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