Barbara and Christopher Roden invite you to join them, and Tim, to explore their activities and interests.
Here are links to their publishing activities:
Ash-Tree Press
and
Calabash Press

and to the two literary societies with which they are involved:
The Ghost Story Society
and
The Arthur Conan Doyle Society

Ghost stories? So now you know why we call it a 'weird' world. That, and the way that Halloween takes over our home as a major annual celebration. The two of us were bad enough, but now Tim (aged 6) has the Halloween bug, too! So, from early October onwards, our home transforms into many shades of orange, and ghosts and ghoulies lurk everywhere. . . . for the past three years, Tim has even insisted on Halloween being the theme of his September birthday party. There! told you it was a weird world.

Our lives revolve around books: when we're not producing and publishing them, we're reading them; and if that wasn't enough Barbara, who's President of the Ashcroft Elementary School Parent Advisory Council, runs the Scholastic Book Programme for the school: so every month sees us knee-deep in catalogues, orders, and boxes of books: all of which has helped to put over $3000-worth of books into the School and its library over the past year (so we don't complain about it!). Tim's reading progress means that even more bookshelves are required—regularly.

Barbara, Christopher, and Tim live in Ashcroft, British Columbia. It's a small community which straddles the Thompson River, some 200 miles north-east of Vancouver and 55 west of Kamloops.

Ashcroft
People often ask us about Ashcroft, and, more particularly, why we are here. The 'why' is simply because we want to be here: we live in a delightful area, where wildlife abounds; it's quiet with few distractions, and that means we're able to get on with the work we want to do.

Ashcroft is named after a nearby roadhouse and ranch, founded during the 1860s Cariboo Gold Rush. The town proper was created in the fall of 1883 when American cowboys John Christopher Barnes, William Brink, and Oliver Evans, anticipating the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built the Thompson River Hotel—more saloon than hotel—near the surveyed track line. By the time the railway arrived in 1884, they had surveyed a townsite around the hotel and were selling land lots. A year later, Ashcroft had a second hotel, four general stores, three blacksmiths, a Chinatown, and a school—wouldn't it be fun if we had a Chinatown today?

For a time, Ashcroft was a transportation hub of the Interior. In spring 1886, soon after a bridge was built over the river to connect the town to the Cariboo Road, the famed BX Stagecoach line moved its headquarters to Ashcroft. Mule trains, freight wagons, and stagecoaches brought a colourful assortment of characters to town: bank robbers, train robbers, horse thieves, cattle rustlers, ordinary honest adventurers, and con men more reminiscent of towns in the early American West.

By the Eve of the First World War, Ashcroft suddenly found itself 'off the map', bypassed by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, superseded by Cache Creek as the transportation and service centre. The BX shut down and the great fire of 1916 destroyed three-quarters of the town. We had a reminder of what that fire must have been like more recently: in 2001 one of our major Heritage buildings, the Harvey Bailey Building, the same area that burned in 1916, went up in flames following an electrical fault in one of the units. Now, for the first time since Tom Kirkpatrick set up his store and Post Office in 1885–6, there is a depressing vacant lot.

The community later revived itself as an agricultural centre, and saw another renewal with the opening of a copper mine in Highland Valley. A large-scale rock quarry project has also recently moved ahead. Ashcroft has a population of around 2,000, and still has much of the frontier ambience of a cowboy town, which, given the large number of local ranches, it comes by honestly. In summer, Ashcroft is one of the hottest spots in BC, with sagebrush, cactus, and rattlesnakes! (Mind, we get Bald Eagles and Ospreys to compensate for the latter.) Winters, at least since we have lived here, have been reasonably mild—although snow is generally around on the local mountains from late October onwards—but it has dipped as low as -25C on occasion.

Ashcroft is a nice, quiet place to live, even if the summer of 2003 did see the village transformed into Ishawooa, Wyoming, as it was taken over by Hollywood for the making of An Unfinished Life, directed by Oscar-nominated (for Chocolat) Lasse Hallstrom, and starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, Josh Lucas, and Jennifer Lopez (before she called off her wedding with Ben). Laurie Webster's realty office was turned into the Ishawooa Post Office, and it was funny to see US Post Boxes on our street corners—funnier still to see a few US tourists trying to use them. We were told that Ashcroft actually looks more like Ishawooa than Ishawooa itself does. Here is our local RCMP Detachment, in red serge, posing in front of our 'US Post Office' (actually, I think they got all dressed up because they thought J-Lo was going to pose with them!):

Part of the film-making process involved the painting of a huge mural over one side of a building. Here's the maquette used by local artist Jo Petty, who worked on the mural, and who later passed on the maquette to Tim.

And this is what the finished product looks like:

So it's not always quiet: there was the day the CP came to town in a big way, when locomotive 2816, resplendent in freshly painted livery, drew a huge crowd. And 2816's been back since, too! Also a regular feature is the CP Christmas Train, which always halts in Ashcroft for a session of Christmas songs and music, led, for the past few years, by Tom Jackson.

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(That's the three of us, posed on the front buffer of the giant!)

The 2001 fire in the village centre was not the worst that we have seen recently. 2003 has been a nightmare year throughout BC, with large areas of forest being destroyed by wildfires, the like of which no one can ever remember seeing. The picture below was taken from the hills above Ashcroft in mid-August, on the night we returned from a short holiday to find our surrounding hills in flame:

About Us
Barbara hails from Vancouver, BC, where she studied journalism. Following a life-long interest in mystery stories, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, she helped to found a Sherlock Holmes society, The Stormy Petrels of British Columbia, in 1988. Barbara became a Master Bootmaker, the highest award of the Bootmakers of Toronto, Canada's national Sherlock Holmes society, in 1990. She moved to England in 1992, and shortly after became joint editor of ACD—The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society, at the same time becoming more involved in the activities of The Ghost Story Society. She became editor of The Ghost Story Society's Newsletter in 1993, taking over as joint organiser of the Society in early 1994. Since then, Barbara has been principal editor of the Ghost Story Society's thrice-yearly magazine All Hallows, and has written a number of articles for Sherlock Holmes—The Detective Magazine and the new Strand Magazine, besides being a regular columnist for Canadian Holmes, the journal of the Bootmakers of Toronto. She has edited and introduced five volumes of H. R. Wakefield's supernatural fiction for Ash-Tree Press, and provided an afterword for the sixth and final volume, Reunion At Dawn, which published seventeen previously unknown stories by the author. Barbara was also responsible for editing the Ash-Tree Press rarity, Lady Stanhope's Manuscript; and her 'The Adventure of the Suspect Servant', a short Sherlockian pastiche, was included in The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (1997), and subsequently translated into German as Das verdächtige Dienstmädchen——oooh! fancy schmancy!

Christopher is a native of Stourbridge in the West Midlands of England (like Jonathan Small of The Sign of Four, he is a Worcestershire man) and, in a moment of mental aberration, he decided to found The Arthur Conan Doyle Society, which came into being in May 1989. He edited two volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories for The Oxford Sherlock Holmes series, contributed a short biographical study of Arthur Conan Doyle to The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes (1992), and has been principal editor of ACD—The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society since its first issue in 1989. Christopher edited and introduced Sleep No More, L. T. C. Rolt's classic collection of supernatural fiction, for Ash-Tree Press; and the first publication of 'The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe', Arthur Conan Doyle's 'lost' ghost story, for The Arthur Conan Doyle Society. He became a Master Bootmaker of The Bootmakers of Toronto in January 2000; and was invested as 'Sir Henry Baskerville' in The Baker Street Irregulars of New York in January 2002 (thinking that whilst 'Sir Henry B' is appropriate given his Anglo-Canadian connection, The Hound of the Baskervilles remains his least favourite of all Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels!).

Together, Barbara and Christopher have edited M. R. James: Two Ghost Stories—A Centenary (Ghost Story Press, 1993); Forgotten Ghosts: The Supernatural Anthologies of Hugh Lamb (Ash-Tree Press); Midnight Never Comes (Ash-Tree Press); Shadows and Silence (Ash-Tree Press); A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James (Ash-Tree Press); Western Wanderings, The Future of Canadian Literature, The Blood-Stone Tragedy, and Conan Doyle of Wimpole Street (all for The Arthur Conan Doyle Society); and On the Shoulders of Giants: Jack Tracy and The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (for the Baker Street Irregulars' Baker Street Journal Xmas Annual, 2000). They are currently compiling and editing a new anthology of supernatural fiction for Ash-Tree Press. Much of their working day is taken up with the activities of Ash-Tree Press and Calabash Press, which they formed in Britain, moving the whole of their business operation to Ashcroft, British Columbia in January 1997.

Tim was born on 15 September 1997 and is destined to be 6ft 6ins and somewhere around 240lbs. He'd look pretty good on the blue-line for the Vancouver Canucks, but we think he feels that basketball might be a less brutal occupation (and it'll probably pay more, too!). Early interest in Paddington Bear and Postman Pat has waned somewhat, though he is still keen to build layouts for Thomas the Tank Engine. In fact, we think he is destined to be an engineer or an architect, since he's always building. He likes arts and crafts, too, and has us occasionally talking in French, rather than spelling out words, because his spelling and reading have become very good, very quickly. As noted at the beginning of this page, Tim revels in Halloween, and is fond of spooky stories (just as well, really, given the amount that we have around the house)—and he loves Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not yet quite ready for Harry Potter, he has a morbid interest in Lemony Snicket's Unfortunate stories of the extremely Unfortunate Events in the lives of the Highly Unfortunate Beaudalaire orphans; and is also working his way (with Mom's help) through Edward Eager's Magic Tales. He is a competent operator of the DVD player and the hi-fi system, enjoys The Alan Parsons Project, and seems to be developing a (good) taste for The Beatles, having watched A Hard Day's Night recently. Not surprisingly, he also readily identifies the names and images of both Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and seems to think more of The Hound of the Baskervilles than does his father.

Tim may not be reading Harry Potter,
but that didn't stop him being 'sorted'
when the new book was launched at
our local Chapter bookstore!

So, is there any time to relax around here? You betcha!

A favourite spot of ours is Nimpo Lake, five hours north and west, on the road to Bella Coola, the road to nowhere. Stewart's Lodge provides ideal surroundings for reading, fishing, or just doing nothing:

Some of us are even lucky enough to catch something!

© Barbara & Christopher Roden 2003

'Can I put this thing down now? It's slimy!'

Don Cherry? Who he?

Link to an Interview with Barbara & Christopher by Jim Hawkins of The Nashville Scholars, 2001
Follow this link to our Diary