Word Guild Writing Award

Elaine A. Small accepts her Word Guild Writing Award

A  WINNER!

I’m happy to announce that my book, Priests in the Attic-a memoir,  is a Winner in the “Canadian Word Guild Writing Awards”–General Readership Category.

The presentation took place on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011, at World Vision, in Mississauga, Ontario. My heartfelt thanks go out to The Word Guild for recognition of my book and its particular message:

“Priests in the Attic was conceived and written on wings of reverie and prayer…”

“In essence, this  memoir is a story of  triumph over the ongoing conflict between spiritual  and worldly desires. In this way it is everyone’s story as we all fight the temptations of a crass, secular, world designed to lure us away from God’s purpose and his distinct plan for each one of us, while here on earth.”

Priests in the Attic – a memoir

Book Cove

The opening page of my memoir, Priests in the Attic, states: “There were seventeen priests at my father’s funeral.” Yes, that is where my story begins and in some ways that is where it ends—three hundred pages later. But all is not doom and gloom: in between the laughter and tears, highs and lows, there is a rollicking story that jostles its way through showbiz dreams, hard-won successes and devastating losses. Short-term hopelessness combined with short-term homelessness are all caught up in a restless, pseudo-yearning to be “normal at any cost,” to somehow stop “wanting it all” and settle for the status quo. But underneath all of the struggles, unrecognized for years, there beats the heart of a pilgrim, a spiritual being who is longing to be free of burning ambition and worldly desires—and therein lies the emotional reality and truth of my memoir.

In the early 1960’s, after four years of studying voice at the Toronto Royal Conservatory, I had a short-lived but successful five-year career as a supper club chanteuse, singing under my married name of Elaine Steele at the best hotels in both the US and Canada, including the Royal York and King Edward-Sheraton hotels in Toronto and the Ritz Carlton Café in Montreal. Those were heady, exciting days that eventually came to a screeching halt. Read on…