The Outer Coast is grounded in primary-source research from Canada and the United States. As much as possible, events, decisions, conversations, and movements are reconstructed from contemporary records rather than later retellings and secondary sources.
The project combines archival research with fieldwork along Vancouver Island's west coast, allowing historical documents to be understood within the landscapes in which they unfolded.
Research has included work with:
These collections include government correspondence, official inquiries, telegraph records, lighthouse communications, coroner's records, and administrative files relating to the wreck of the SS Valencia.
Newspaper accounts from both Canada and the United States have been compared to official testimony, allowing differences in public reporting, eyewitness evidence to be examined and a deeper understanding of how Edwardian society made sense of the tragedy.
Much of novel has been reconstructed from sworn testimony given by survivors, crew members, lighthouse keepers, government officials, and local residents in the weeks following the disaster.
Private correspondence and family records continue to add perspectives that are absent from official archives. Many of the families, like the Logans and Daykins, still live and work in the area.
Historical documents describe places. Walking those same shorelines and forests provides another form of understanding. Field visits along Vancouver Island's west coast have informed the geography, distances, weather, and physical experience described throughout the novel.
History is rarely preserved in a single archive. It survives in government records, family photographs, forgotten correspondence, newspaper columns, oral history, and the landscapes themselves. My goal is not simply to retell the story of the SS Valencia, but to reconstruct it as faithfully and compassionately as the surviving evidence allows.