BONNYVILLE – When Bonnyville author Carmen Kissel-Verrier sat down to write her debut novel, she never could have imagined winning an international award for her work.
But, that’s exactly what happened with the Butcher Shop Girl: A Memoir for Misfits and Mavericks. The book was among the winners of the 2021 International Book Awards in the performing arts category.
“I don’t think anybody really thinks about winning awards, especially a memoir,” Kissel-Verrier noted. “You just put your story out there, you feel maybe you worked really hard to provide value for the reader because that’s who you really care about the most is the readers. If they like it, awesome. That’s the best praise and award you could win.”
The American Book Fest hosts the awards to be ‘a promotional vehicle for authors and publishers to launch their careers, open global markets, and compete with talented authors and publishers throughout the world’ their website stated.
The Butcher Shop Girl isn’t like most books when it comes to the plot. While writing, Kissel-Verrier decided to start with the “most exciting, daring, dangerous scene at the front so that you hook the reader.”
“That includes an escape scene from a cartel family in Bolivia, which I found myself in a very seemingly lucrative contract that ended up going sour very quickly and I needed to be rescued from Bolivia by the American embassy,” she detailed. “That’s where we start and then chapter two, I take the reader all the way back to the beginning so that they can understand how the heck a farm girl from Bonnyville could end up in a situation like that.”
Kissel-Verrier believes her coming-of-age story is far from normal and allows readers to accept their own unique stories.
“Maybe they didn’t feel like they fit in because their upbringing wasn’t a typical (one), so I show them that it’s completely normal and you will make mistakes along the way. But you can deal with them, grow from them, move on from them, and you can go on to have a fantastic life that you designed,” she said, adding the book primarily speaks to misfits and mavericks.
“It’s a complete collection of my coming-of-age stories that were pretty loud, very entertaining trauma responses before I ever understood what a trauma response was.”
When asked why she decided to share her story, Kissel-Verrier said it was friends and family who encouraged her to share the time in her life from her teens to her early 20s as they saw true value in sharing that time.
It also helped that Kissel-Verrier has a love for writing and a background in it. She has a journalism studies degree, which she upgraded to include technical writing.
“That’s when I started to feel like ‘hey, I can still do this. I think I have enough courage to talk about these things.’ I know, as a writer, you can’t have a boring book, you just can’t. In order to do that, you need to be real and you need to be vulnerable. You need to write about the exact things that nobody wants to talk about but everybody wants to read. I thought that if I could do that, I could maybe produce a book.”
Kissel-Verrier hopes that her book winning an international award helps bring awareness to Bonnyville because she’s “eternally proud of this little corner of the globe and draws continual inspiration from the vibrant people who also call this place home.”
Robynne Henry, Bonnyville Nouvelle
