How Heather Marshall brings readers into places of the past

Heather Marshall

It's hard for people to really get their imagination there and smell what the character is smelling and hear what they're hearing. So in a place like a prison that is very unfamiliar for most people, I needed to make it as familiar as possible so that they could imagine what Emily is experiencing there. And that's, I love that part of the work.

Michael Tamblyn

I'm Michael Tamblyn. This is Kobo in Conversation. My guest is Heather Marshall. She is a writer of historical fiction, including her 2022 debut best-selling novel, Looking for Jane, and 2024's The Secret History of Audrey James. Heather Marshall's new book is Liberty Street. It's the story of a young journalist's quest to expose the cruelty and corruption of the Mercer Women's Prison from the inside. the women she meets there, and a police detective trying to uncover a secret 30 years later. Heather Marshall, welcome to Kobo.

Heather Marshall

Thank you for having me, Michael.

Michael Tamblyn

This book has some amazing characters and a compelling story, and we're going to get deep into it. But it feels like to talk about this book, we have to talk about the idea of being incorrigible and specifically being an incorrigible woman.

Heather Marshall

Yes, so there was some legislation on the books in Ontario from, I think, I think the first legislation was called the Female Refuges Act. And I believe it was 1893, sometime in the early 1890s. In the early part of the 20th century, they included this clause that became to be known as the incorrigible law. And it allowed for anyone parents, anyone, absolutely anyone, not just police officers, anyone to bring a woman before a judge, anyone under the age of 35, for being incorrigible, for incorrigibility, which basically translated to defying the social norms of the day. This could include teenagers being in a relationship with someone their parents disapproved of, coming in late for curfew, women who were unhoused or who had addictions, women who were mentally ill, it just ran the gamut. The subjectivity of what could be considered incorrigibility was so ludicrously broad. And this applied to all women in Ontario under the age of 35 until the act was finally repealed, not until the late '60s.

Michael Tamblyn

And how could you get this label applied to you?

Heather Marshall

By your parents who were upset with you, by maybe a police officer who saw you on the street. In my book, without getting ahead of myself, there are women who were suffering from, you know, postpartum depression and mental illness who were sent to places like this because of that by their loved ones. So it's really, it was the most shocking thing in all the research that I did, and it was obviously really the driving force for writing this novel. I always like to say with the stories I pick and the research that I unearth, I'm like a feminist student of history. So when I come across these things where I am like the prime candidate for someone who would probably know about that, and if it's a surprise to me. I think, so this clearly wasn't in the books that I read. I've stumbled across this. If I didn't know about this, what are the odds that, I'll call more sort of the average reader who maybe isn't a feminist student of history, what are the odds that they would know about this? And I just love to kind of bring some oxygen to those things, shine a light on it to kind of give it its historical do and connect it to themes that are still relevant today.

Michael Tamblyn

And so this is also a revelation to your protagonist, Emily Radcliffe. Can you introduce us to her?

Heather Marshall

Yes, Emily is a very green, a little bit naive at first. journalist who is working at Chatelaine Magazine. And it was the women's magazine in Canada, still is around. I think they recently celebrated their 90th anniversary. And she is hungry for a good story. She's very junior at the magazine, wants to kind of strike out in A life that is not what's expected of her. She wants a career, isn't sure if she wants marriage and children. It's not off the table, but doesn't want it yet and is feeling a lot of pressure to, you know, move that way very quickly.

Michael Tamblyn

And what time period are we in?

Heather Marshall

Oh, this is the early 1960s when we begin with Emily.

Michael Tamblyn

And so Emily receives a message, and that prompts her to come up with a plan. Tell us about the plan that Emily has and what she's trying to do.

Heather Marshall

Yes, I am a bit of a sucker for letters. And as a writer of historical fiction, I love kind of bringing letters and notes into my writing. I haven't done it consciously, but I've realized that there's now a pattern. So Emily gets this note delivered to her at Chatelaine, and it's from an anonymous whistleblower at the prison saying, you know, These are terrible conditions. Here's what's happening to us. I won't say too much for the spoilers, but atrocious conditions. We need help. The police are unwilling to. They don't care about what's happening at the prison. Emily decides she needs to be the one to care and wants to break this story.

Michael Tamblyn

Is she based on an actual journalist?

Heather Marshall

Yeah, she's inspired by two journalists. One is an American named Nellie Bly. Absolutely incredible person. Her second claim to fame is becoming a pilot and flying around the world at a time when women were not doing that. Not even many men were doing that. And her other claim to fame is that she went undercover as a journalist to what they then called a lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York at the turn of the previous century. And she was there for 10 days and wanted to break the story of the deplorable conditions at that institution and became famous for that. It was a series of articles called Ten Days in a Madhouse. And I just loved her story. It was one of those where I thought I couldn't have created that myself if I'd tried. And her courage was just something I really wanted to celebrate. And I've been trying for years to find a way to fictionalize that. So when this idea for Liberty Street came to me, I knew immediately this is what my character was going to do. The other journalist is a Canadian named Lotta Dempsey. And she actually worked for Chatelaine for a period of time and wrote a lot of of the articles that appeared in the Toronto Star when news of what was happening at the Mercer Prison did break in the '60s. So my character, Emily, is kind of a composite of those two women that I wanted to celebrate.

Michael Tamblyn

And so Emily gets sent to, or kind of gets herself sent to, Mercer Women's Prison. Tell me about that place and what it says about being a woman in prison at that time.

Heather Marshall

First of all, I wanted Emily to be her character, to be very, as I said before, kind of green and naive and very idealistic. She really has lived a quite sheltered and privileged life and has no idea what she's getting into. This feels like an adventure. It feels like, you know, a way to kind of craft this life for herself, to get an advancement in her career. And once she gets in there, it's quite a shock to her what's happening. terrible conditions, these women that she meets. And this was one of my favorite parts of the book was creating this cast of characters of the women at the prison. I thought there was a lot of opportunity there to have women from all walks of life in some very relatable situations so that we could see how many, like how far the tentacles of this act reached and how easy it was for women to get sent there from all walks of life in all different situations. So Emily meets these women and discovers that really most of them should not be incarcerated. And that's the thrust of it. That's the thesis. Most of these women have not actually committed a crime. And that was one of the most shocking things about that piece of legislation, was that most of these women were not criminals. Some were, but most weren't. They were there for just completely subjective misbehaviour that someone else found in some way offensive or reprehensible. And so they could be incarcerated for up to two years for not having ever committed a crime. So that's what Emily discovers when she goes. I don't know how much we want to get into in terms of spoilers.

Michael Tamblyn

We can leave it there except to say locate Mercer Women's Prison for us.

Heather Marshall

Yes, it was in Liberty Village, so just south of King Street. Its address was actually 1155 King. and bordered Liberty Street and Fraser Ave. and Jefferson Ave. that block of Liberty Village, which is now the Allenay Lamport Stadium. And most people have no idea that this prison was there. There was a men's prison as well, not far from it in Liberty Village, which has also since been bulldozed. But that's been the thing that has been the most fun in a way, I use that word sort of loosely, but for people who live in Toronto going, I I had no idea. That's just always been a stadium. But, you know, in my parents' lifetime, like, my mom was a kid when that prison was still there. And people are shocked to learn this. I also was, which is, again, part of the reason I wrote the book.

Michael Tamblyn

And one of the things that drew both me and producer Nathan to this book in the first place is that Kobo's headquarters were located for a decade in the building on Liberty Street that was just across from Lamport Stadium.

Heather Marshall

No way.

Michael Tamblyn

Yeah, an old factory building. So it would have been like.

Heather Marshall

Yeah, they were mostly factories. Yeah.

Michael Tamblyn

And I don't know how to feel about that because that's, it's so strange to think that you had these two huge correctional institutions sort of, you know, dropped right in the middle of the city there. And as we can imagine, Emily getting into prison is one thing. Getting out of it is a whole different problem. But you put a lot of detail into the book of the physical environment of the place, including, I have to say, some very beautifully drawn floor plans at the start of the book. Why was it so important that we get a sense of the physical space that Emily is in as she's in the prison?

Heather Marshall

I think, first of all, most people have never been in a prison. So one of the things about any kind of fiction is that if you're describing a place that a lot of people probably haven't been, you do need to add in a lot of detail that is in some way familiar to them so that they can imagine that place. That's true even if you're writing fantasy. There have to be some points of reference that people today can understand so they can feel themselves in that space. Secondly is, again, with historical fiction, there are little details that you have to throw in or change or tweak slightly so that it doesn't feel like a modern-day prison. So even what the women were wearing, the types of food they were eating, the way they were speaking, the types of, even like I've got, You know, there's soap flakes used to clean a floor. There's some coal tar soap that the prisoners had to bathe with. Those are things that we can't even imagine. Those products are not even around anymore. And the other thing that I think, and it's one of the things I actually love most about my research process, is figuring out what kinds of soap and personal care products were these people using? What did they smell like? What did the packaging look like? What did things feel like? What were the fabrics people were wearing? I love all of that granular research as a lover of history, but I find that some of... Like I'm always very flattered when people tell me, in your work, I felt like I was there. And I don't always feel that in other books. It's not always as immersive. And for me, I really do attribute that to a lot of those details that are very sensory, because our lives are lived in a very sensory way. Our memories are so directly connected to smell. We have tactile memories. You can pick up a stuffed toy from your childhood and just you immediately know the texture of that fabric. It's just so ingrained in our lives and in your daily life. You go about, you smell things, you see things, you hear certain things. And I think without those details, which you don't need to overdo it, but without those details, I think it's hard for people to really get their imagination there and smell what the character is smelling and hear what they're hearing. So in a place like a prison that is, yeah, as I say, very unfamiliar for most people, I needed to make it as familiar as possible so that they could imagine what Emily is experiencing there. And that's, I love that part of the work.

Michael Tamblyn

Emily in this prison, she's there in order to bear witness and express in words what's going on. You know, as you say, how prisoners are treated, what they're experiencing, why they're there. And we are with her through it. She has to experience it herself. And as a journalist, some of the things that Emily experiences, some of the things that are done to her, she doesn't have language for her. And if she did, she wouldn't want the words spoken.

Heather Marshall

I think, again, that she was very naive, but also that women just also, they weren't informed about some things. Like one thing that I had to deliberately remove, and I hope I don't make anyone too squeamish here, but the word speculum for a genital exam. She didn't have the language for that. was, she didn't know what that tool was, so I had to describe it in terms of how it sounds and how it felt. And especially when it comes to medicine, women were so removed from that process. You were not supposed to ask questions. Things were done to your body. You didn't have any agency in that. And that can feel very foreign, fortunately, for women reading the book, anyone reading the book today to go, well, what do you mean? You know, like, so, but to make it historically accurate, you have to watch for those things. What would a character, of her level of education, of her level of life experience, what would she have known, a woman living in this time period? Because something like that, when you get those inaccuracies, it can really pull a reader out of a story, especially historical fiction, and all of a sudden, the whole thing is unbelievable. In my author's note, I have a note about the word stigma. I wrote it, and then it occurred to me, would Emily know that word? And a lot of things have been around a lot longer than we would think. The word stigma was used in that capacity in 1963, so I've sort of slightly fudged it by a couple of years. But things like that can, yeah, really pull a reader out if you're not careful.

Michael Tamblyn

June Jones is a character who's an inmate alongside Emily, and she has a very different story than Emily does. Can you tell us a bit about this character and what we get to see by having her in the story?

Heather Marshall

June Jones is one of my favorite characters in the book. She's my favorite secondary character. And I didn't originally have her in mind when I first kind of conceptualized the book, and she became so important to me and so important to the story. I'll be honest, I don't know that we've seen the last of her, because I just can't get her out of my head. but she is a brothel madam who ends up at the Mercer Prison for running a house of ill repute, as they used to call it. And in my research process, usually at the beginning of a book, I do kind of a deep dive, as much as I can easily lay my hands on, to see, is there enough meat on these bones to write the story that I think is there? And if the answer is yes, then I go and do more research about the things that I think I'm gonna need to know. Part of my research process was quite hard won with some Freedom of Information requests trying to access the Mercer documents at the Ontario Archives. And I was able to access some of them redacted. but I found a reference in a prisoner register to a brothel madam who had been in and out of the Mercer on, as far as I could see, at least three occasions for running a house of ill repute. And that just really sparked something in me. And I love that part of the research process where something I didn't even plan, I just get a sudden inspiration by something I've read or a historic figure that I now know about. And I go, oh, that needs to be a character or that needs to be a subplot. So that's how June came to be. But I also wanted to sort of... She juxtaposes Emily with sort of her level of confidence. There's almost this masculine sort of confidence. Again, a woman of her time was, she calls herself a businesswoman, you know, and she is striking out in a way that was not expected or encouraged. And I wanted to play a little bit with some questions surrounding prostitution. So, her motive, June's motivation for running her brothel the way she does is she, she says, you know, that women are going to have to prostitute to survive. If they have to do that, they should be able to do that without being afraid of being injured or killed. And that is why I do what I do. Um, because her family history is such that people she cared about did not have those options. So I wanted to kind of explore that a little bit and I like to kind of dig into grey areas and some kind of like social questions or discomforts with readers to kind of just get them thinking and it's things that book clubs can maybe touch on a bit. So that was. kind of June's purpose in the story. And she counterbalances Emily in a really great way and helps Emily with her story arc. She is not nearly as naive and green by the end, in part thanks to June's influence.

Michael Tamblyn

There is a second thread to this story, which is a detective in the 1990s working on a case that seems linked to this prison, which by the 1990s, as you say, no longer exists. Why weave that thread into the story and what are, give us a little bit of a portrait of Rachel McKenzie?

Heather Marshall

Rachel is a bit different than any other character I've written before. And she came out of a couple of places. I always love a dual timeline. And I love sort of showing a bit of an evolution of where we started and where we've come to, and in many ways, how far we still have to go. So I've got this 1960s character, Emily, who is striking out on her own in a male-dominated field. And I wanted to sort of show, where are we at sometime down the road? And for mathematical reasons, it was the '90s. It couldn't be too close to the present day. But I thought, OK. And I have a reference to in the 1960s, one of the prisoners says, oh wow, a woman police officer, what an idea, that sounds wild. And then like 30 years later, we have a woman detective. And so just showing how in one generation, that much change and the impact that it had. I show how Rachel is still experiencing sexism on the job, how things are different for her in terms of mental health stigma on the job than they are for her male counterparts. So I like to play with those themes quite a bit. And Rachel's, the origins of Rachel's whole storyline, not even her character so much, is When my, I like to kind of tell this story because people are always curious about the sparks for ideas, but when my son was a baby, I had to drive around all the time to get him to sleep. He was in this phase of a few months where I had to drive him around to get him to sleep.

Michael Tamblyn

I also know that phase, yes.

Heather Marshall

We live semi-rural, and so I ended up pulled over in this tiny town that is mostly a cemetery. And I had to pop a soother back into his mouth that had come out, and he was wailing, pop the soother back in, and I kind of stopped, and I saw there was this cemetery, and I was parked along a residential street that faced the cemetery. And I just had this random thought, it was a very old cemetery, and I thought, how interesting, what an interesting place to live with your house facing a cemetery all the time. And then I had this funny little idea of what might you see? And that you would have to be a certain type of person to be comfortable with basically your front lawn being a cemetery, because they do give some people the creeps. I personally find them quite peaceful. But so I had this thought of what would that be like, which inspired the prologue. And the prologues are often what I write first in a book. They come to me first, and then they kind of spark a story. So that was sort of the origin of Rachel's entire timeline. And then I thought, okay, so who is this person? There's a body in a graveyard that is unidentified, that isn't supposed to be there. So what is that character doing? And Rachel's timeline, again, without spoiling too much, allowed me to dig in even further to the mental health theme. Um, and also questions of... Oh, not even questions of, it's more, um... I became a bit fixated through Emily's character and all these answers she's trying to find. I became fixated on this question of, you know, and a reality for many people in their lives at some point, that sometimes there just isn't an answer. That sometimes we just have to live with an unknowable thing, whether that's a relationship, um, you know, why something happened to you at some point in your life where there just is no explanation. Because I think... especially in a tech age with access to information at our fingertips, we are all so used to always having the answers. And there's, it really stirs something in us, anger, frustration, grief, when we don't have an answer. And so that, I just really wanted to explore that feeling and that question. And I did that vis-a-vis mental health and Rachel's relationship with her very complex mother.

Michael Tamblyn

And Rachel is very much a parallel character to Emily. So these are two storylines that we're alternating back and forth on through the book. And parallel in one is a journalist, very much of the investigative style. The other is a detective, very much of I will follow this trail wherever it leads. And so it's It's fascinating to see these two sort of in contrast as we go through the story. As you say, mental health shows up in Rachel's timeline. Rachel's mother, Mary, seems to suffer from some undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. And we see her through Rachel's eyes. And it makes Mary a hard character to root for. What did you want the reader to see in her and see in that relationship?

Heather Marshall

Honestly, some sympathy. You know, Mary, I think at her core, is a sad and sympathetic character who is a product of her circumstances and through falling through the many cracks that don't catch people when they have a mental illness. She needed treatment for a long time, didn't get it with some quite catastrophic consequences. She is by no means an innocent character. But I really wanted to show the complexity of that. A big question for Rachel is sort of what is her mother choosing to be like versus what can she not help being like? What is the mental illness? What is, as Rachel put it, crappy personality? And it can be very, very hard to unpick those from each other in relationships with people that have any kind of mental health issue. So there is, again, sort of no answer. I'm not providing an answer to that. I just wanted to explore that and kind of give voice to that kind of relationship that a lot of people may have with a loved one that can be very complex and very difficult to live with, to resolve, to love.

Michael Tamblyn

I'd like to talk a little bit about journalism and specifically women's journalism as it features in this book. Talk to me a little bit about Chatelaine editor Doris Anderson, who I understand is a character based on a real person.

Heather Marshall

She is. I first came across Doris Anderson back in my undergrad. I had a fantastic prof who actually sent me two texts to read that ended up coming back, still on my shelf, as research for Liberty Street, which was just such a strange, I don't know what you'd call it. It's just the meandering paths of our lives and the things that you think have absolutely no consequence at the time. It's just homework. And it's going to be my best-selling third novel 20 years down the line. It's always fascinating to look back on those moments. Anyways, that was where I first learned about Doris Anderson. And I just thought she was just such a ****** and was a woman so ahead of her time. As I say in the book, she was the head of a magazine, which was unheard of. There were no woman-led law firms, radio stations, newspapers. Like, Charlene was the only one, other than maybe brothels, really, like where there was a woman in charge. It was almost unheard of in that era. She was the editor-in-chief through the '50s and '60s and into the '70s. at which point she quit when she didn't get a promotion that was given to a man and said, Okay, that's it. Thank you. I'm going into politics. But she started sort of weaving into the magazine, in a very clandestine way, these feminist articles or articles that were just of importance to women and were political or controversial. And things like birth control. When The Pill first came out in '61, there were several articles. I did a whole paper on that in school going through microfiche of Chatelaine before it was digitized-- I'm showing my age-- and a woman and child abuse, anything to do with politics, really, divorce laws, equal pay. And she was sliding them into this ladies' magazine that had glossy covers about recipes and home decorating. And I just thought it was-- I loved how sneaky it was, and the fact that they sort of never got caught, so women could have access to this information at a time And they often didn't have access to it anywhere. The letters to the editor section at the back of the magazine became this place of discourse for women. And Doris Anderson would respond to them, sometimes arguing with them. But they didn't often have an outlet for that. So she was providing something that women weren't able to get anywhere else. She had, you know, almost exclusively women as employees. She was, by all accounts, a great boss. I got to talk to a couple of incredible Canadian journalists, Michelle Landsberg and the Honorable Adrienne Clarkson, who actually took my calls. I was on the floor, couldn't believe that I was speaking with them, and they really helped fill in some of her character and what it was like to work for her. So, by all accounts, was an incredibly progressive and supportive boss. And I just thought I needed to celebrate this woman. I just sort of love her as a, you know, slightly imperfect historical figure. But she went on to basically secure Section 28 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guaranteed men and women equal rights under the law when they were coming up with what was going to be in the charter, what should be included, what should the language be. She said, We need to have this in there. It is completely fundamental. And most women today don't know her name. So I just, it felt very important to me to fictionalize her and celebrate her.

Michael Tamblyn

Rachel McKenzie, the detective, starts to dig into the story of Mercer Women's Prison, and she gets invaluable assistance from the director of the Ontario Archives. And that just makes me ask, can you talk a bit about your own research for Liberty Street, because it sounds like you're saying it wasn't easy to get at some of this information about what was going on inside that prison.

Heather Marshall

Yeah, I just briefly touched on that earlier, but I thought I need to, this can't all just come out of my head 'cause that's not how I write my stories. I do a lot of extensive research, which helps populate it and I think helps it feel so much more real because so much of it doesn't come out of my head. I'm kind of stitching it together, but these are real women's experiences that I'm pulling from the history books and of course fictionalizing, but I think that's why it has a ring of authenticity and that's really important to me. So I thought, I need to know what it was like inside the Mercer prison. The Toronto Star articles were fantastic. They gave a lot of details on the grand jury report that was issued just prior to its closure, where they said, here are the deplorable conditions. Those were readily available to me. But I wanted to get a sense of, okay, so who were these women? I know that they could be sent there for incorrigibility. So what were their walks of life? So I wanted to get into prisoner registers. I knew that that there were medical records, prisoner punishment records, a number of different records. So I did Freedom of Information requests, but because so many of the women there were minors, they were protected not just under FIPA, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, but also retroactively under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. So I was told by the most helpful archivist in the FOI office, he said, you're going to need an order from a youth court judge to get these records. It's not going to happen. So I thought, OK. But he was so helpful. He said, I'm going to try to get you everything I can within these parameters. So a lot of them were redacted to remove any reference to the prisoners so I could see just things like what were they wearing. what were some of the day-to-day routines, things that didn't identify any of the prisoners. And then older records from prior to 1920, because they're sealed for 100 years. That was where I found June Jones. And I could kind of extrapolate. I was like, there's a 40-year period in here, but I can draw a lot of conclusions about what the Mercer would have been like from 1920 to 1960. So it was certainly not easy, but it was, oh my gosh, so much fun.

Michael Tamblyn

Are you one of those people who loves the research phase?

Heather Marshall

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'm sort of sad once I get moved out of it. I'm like, oh, now I have to write the book. Yeah.

Michael Tamblyn

You mentioned the Toronto Star and the eventual closure of Mercer's Women's Prison. Can you talk a bit about that expose and how it came about and what it led to?

Heather Marshall

I think it was kind of just a critical mass, and there may even have been some, very early women's lib happening in the early 60s. People may have been thinking a little bit differently about, is this legislation really above board at this point? Do we need to be reconsidering that? Why are these women in prison? I would like to hope, but the women had rioted several times, and the police had come to the prison, seen the conditions, and left. That had been in the newspaper over several years. There were references to the horrible conditions at the Mercer. They had official inspections every year, but they were scheduled. So the warden and the prison doctor could put on a pretty good show when those were scheduled. But I think there was, as I say, just enough of a critical mass, enough of these riots happening, word kind of getting out that they struck a grand jury to investigate, then had some inspections that were not scheduled, which yielded very different results. And eventually they went, you know what, this place, it's a total fire trap, first of all. And there had been a fire there in the basement at one point. it needs to go, so we need to shut it down. So there was nothing kind of magical about the timing. It would just, fortunately, the women were able to finally get some attention onto it. And then once that hit the papers, it all shut down quite quickly and was razed to the ground within a year of its closure. And now Lamport Stadium was built in its place.

Michael Tamblyn

As someone who loves research, I understand your husband is a librarian. Yes. That seems like a very useful thing for a writer of historical fiction to have around.

Heather Marshall

It is. Sometimes, like, I'm pretty good at the research, but sometimes, especially the more digital stuff, he has more recent training in that I'm also, you know, I would be dusty in the archives with my gloves, and he's a little bit more into the digital stuff. But one question I had for him, I was trying to figure out when Liberty Street was named. And he has a lot of experience in sort of like municipal government and stuff like that. He was like, I can figure this out for you. And it was like within minutes, he had an answer. Because my question was, was it prior to 1961? And yes, it was. So it is definitely helpful. We're bookish people.

Michael Tamblyn

You write in your author's note that this story was with you for several years, even predating the publication of your first book. Why did it need to sit so long in your mind before you could write it?

Heather Marshall

Part of that is contractual obligation. So I already have.

Michael Tamblyn

Totally understand.

Heather Marshall

Two books that were slated to come out before it. So sometimes the idea takes a while to percolate, but sometimes it's publishers. I'm not allowed to publish it yet.

Michael Tamblyn

They just want stuff.

Heather Marshall

And I mean, it does take a while. Like the research took a while and I had to wait for the FOI requests to come back. There was a bit of a process and that can take some time certainly to make sure that I'm getting it right because that's always important to me to do as much research as I can, keeping in mind that it is fiction. It's not a PhD thesis, but I want to do all that research. And so that really does take time. It's one of the reasons my books have been two years apart. since 2022, because I don't want to rush that. It's too important to the story and to the readers.

Michael Tamblyn

Heather, thank you so much for joining us.

Heather Marshall

Thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely.

Michael Tamblyn

I've been speaking with Heather Marshall, author of Liberty Street. Find all of Heather's books at kobo.com slash conversation and check the show notes for a link. Follow us in your podcast player to catch every episode. And if you enjoyed this one, don't keep that feeling locked up. Tell someone who loves a great story. Co-Po in Conversation is produced by Nathan Maharaj and hosted by me, Michael Tamblyn. Thank you for listening.