Norma Macmillan had a wide-ranging career in the arts, including the production of her plays, Crowded Affair and Free as a Bird, in the 1950s and 1960s by BC's groundbreaking Totem Theatre and New Jersey's famed Grist Mill Playhouse. But she is best known as the actress who was the voice of television's Gumby and Casper the Friendly Ghost. The Maquinna Line began when the family lived at Sunset Boulevard's legendary Chateau Marmont. Norma continued to work on the book after she and her husband, Thor Arngrim, returned to Vancouver, but it languished in the back of a closet after she died in 2001, at the age of 79. Thor and veteran Vancouver writer Charles Campbell revived it, and it is a tribute to an old-fashioned storytelling tradition that respects history but isn't afraid to enliven it.

 

Alison Arngrim wrote the forward to The Maquinna Line. She is the author of Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Being Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated. Her role as Nellie Oleson on the popular televisions program Little House on the Prairie continues to bring her notice today. Alison is daughter to Norma Macmillan and Thor Arngrim.

 

The Maquinna Line's editor/ghost writer and contributor of the Afterword, Charles Campbell wanted to write fiction but got sidetracked by journalism. He edited The Georgia Straight for a decade, worked at The Vancouver Sun as entertainment editor and an editorial board member for five years and is a contributing editor to The Tyee website. He studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia, was a Southam Fellow at Toronto's Massey College, and has taught in the writing and publishing programs at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University.