Fort Erie author publishes children’s book she shelved for 20 years

Debi Selib started writing after her husband died two years ago, and one of the books that came out of it was a children’s story she had set aside more than two decades earlier.

‘Honker The Canadian Goose,’ a 72-page picture book set along Black Creek and the Niagara River, was published this year on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.

“It all came really through grieving. And then I turned it into something good,” the Fort Erie author told Fort Erie Radio. “I mean, grieving is never easy, right?”

Selib’s husband suffered brain bleeds about two and a half years ago and then developed dementia that did to him in one year what she said usually takes 10 years.

She cared for him until he died, and it was the nights alone afterward that brought her back to writing.

Her first book was ‘In Sickness and in Hell,’ a self-help book about caregiving, and more books and songs came after it before she returned to ‘Honker The Canadian Goose.’

The story came to her around 2002, while on the back of a motorcycle heading up the Niagara Parkway, where she saw a family of Canada geese near Black Creek.

“All of a sudden this story started to come into my mind while we were driving up the parkway,” Selib said.

She wrote it down and printed a few copies with her own photographs for her grandchildren, then the book stayed in the family until she began writing again.

It follows a gosling named Honker, the last of his family to hatch and the only one born with a tuft of feathers on his head. He walks with a wobble the other goslings do not have, and he goes “HONK” while the other goslings “peep.”

Selib said she wrote that part of the book for children who get singled out, because she was singled out herself.

“I was a chubby little kid and people bullied me because of it,” she said.

The rest of the book teaches children about the Niagara region. Honker meets a beaver and a blue heron, finds a trillium and befriends a Mountie, and the flock flies over Niagara Falls on its way south for the winter.

A section at the back called “Did You Know” gives young readers facts about Canada geese and each of the other animals in the story.

Generative AI was used to produce the book’s illustrations. Selib said drawing all 72 pages by hand would have taken her years, so she gave the software her own photographs, asked it to turn them into watercolour paintings and then reviewed each image.

Selib said she cares more about getting the book read aloud to children than about selling copies. She has asked a bookstore owner in Ridgeway about holding a reading and is waiting to hear back, and she is hoping schools and libraries will invite her in as well.

“I wouldn’t have hung on to it for over 20 years if it it weren’t for that thing inside of me telling me it’s time to get it out there,” she said.

She also plans to read the book at the Willows retirement residence, where she works as chaplain. Residents who have lived in the area all their lives will recognize the places in it, she said, including residents with dementia.

Selib is already writing the sequel, called ‘Honker Takes a Detour,’ in which Honker leads the flock off course on the way south.

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