Meet Cathy Marie Buchanan

The second of five children, Cathy Marie Buchanan was born and bred in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Her father was a teacher, and her mother, a former teacher, was a homemaker.


She grew up in an area not all that different-looking than most 1960s suburban neighborhoods—though there were continual reminders that she was not living in just any town. The family made the trek to the falls whenever they had visitors—riding the Maid of the Mist, walking through Queen Victoria Park, gazing out over the Niagara Gorge—and regularly swam at Dufferin Islands, picnicked at Queenston Heights, and climbed in and out of the Niagara Glen, all favorite spots along the river. As a local she was, of course, privy to the never-ending stream of quirky Niagara Falls lore, stories like that of a high school boyfriend’s brother surviving the plunge over the falls in a barrel wearing only cowboy boots and a hat.


A defining feature of Buchanan’s childhood was the two-month camping excursion the family made each summer in their VW camper van. By her early teens, she had seen most every province in Canada and most every state in the U.S., and had swum in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. Her family made the first of these journeys—driving from Niagara Falls to the tip of Mexico and then on into Belize—in 1976, well before Mexico was set up for tourism, and with her two-year-old sister in tow. She believes that her parents’ tendency to throw caution to the wind helped shape her into an adult who would one day exchange the trappings of the corporate world for the writing life.

Often asked if she grew up wanting to be a writer, she answers with a definitive no and will tell you she spent her teenage years disgracing herself in high school English, often getting upwards of 20 percent deducted for spelling mistakes on exams. When it came time to head off to university, one of the criteria she used for selecting courses was not having to write—that is, spell—a single thing. She graduated with a BSc (Honours Biochemistry) and then an MBA, both from the University of Western Ontario, and spent the bulk of her non-writing work life at IBM, at first in finance and then in technical sales.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, her creative leanings were evident throughout her teenage years, in both her serious pursuit of classical ballet and her burgeoning abilities as a seamstress. Years later she would painstakingly bead her own wedding gown, an experience that informed the musings of her character Bess as she tackles the same on behalf of Miss O’Leary. After enrolling in a string of continuing education courses, always something with an artistic bent, she finally hit upon creative writing. She kept up the regime of full-time work by day and a writing class or bit of crammed-in scribbling in the evening for four years, all the while longing for more time to write than the tiny gap that existed between scrubbing her three young children clean and falling into bed herself would allow. After having a handful of stories published in Canada’s finest literary fiction magazines, she left her corporate position to take a serious stab at writing.

Before putting pen to paper, Buchanan spent four months researching The Day the Falls Stood Still, a task she describes as “purely pleasurable.” As she finished writing the first draft, her much-loved father died. It was then that her own grief-ridden struggle with what she believed found expression in the character of Bess. She completed the first draft in a year and a half and spent the next two rewriting the novel.

Within a week of sending out The Day the Falls Stood Still to publishers, Buchanan received the wonderful news that HarperCollins would publish it in Canada, Hyperion in the U.S., Random House in the U.K., and Sperling & Kupfer in Italy. More good news came shortly before the book hit the shelves. The Day the Falls Stood Still would be showcased in the U.S. as a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection, a designation awarded to only four or five books each year. It debuted on The New York Times bestseller list and has been named an Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association, a Best Book of 2009 by Barnes & Noble, and a Canada Reads Top 40 Essential Canadian Novel of the Decade.

Buchanan lives in Toronto with her husband and three sons.

She is at work on a second novel.