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Marion McKinnon Crook is a nurse, an educator and the author of more than fifteen books under three different pen names: Marion Crook, Emma Dakin and Marion McKinnon. In 2021, she published Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage $22.95) under her full name, Marion Crook McKinnon about her adventures as a young nurse who provided much-needed health care to rural communities in the 1960s.
Crook followed up with Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living (Heritage, 2024) with nursing and lifestyle stories in the Cariboo from the 1970s.
From Victorian drawing rooms to gold-rush saloons in BC, Crook has long been drawn to lives shaped by courage, curiosity and reinvention. In Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Florence Wilson(Heritage House, 2026), Crook turns her research and narrative flair to the true story of Florence Wilson, a poet-turned-entrepreneur who left London, England to become the cultural heartbeat of Barkerville as a saloon owner and founder of the Theatre Royale. She brings Wilson’s transatlantic journey to life, revealing a frontier heroine whose influence on BC’s cultural history deserves renewed attention.
For information on all her books, visit: https://marioncrookauthor.com/
In addition to her nursing degree, McKinnon Crook holds a master's in liberal studies and a PhD in education. Now a full-time writer, she lives on BC's Sunshine Coast.
Photo credit: Duke Morse
BOOKS
Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage, 2021) $22.95 9781772033625
Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living (Heritage House, 2024) $26.95 9781772034691
Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Florence Wilson (Heritage House, 2026) $26.95 9781772035643
[BCBW 2026]
REVIEW
Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin
by Marion McKinnon Crook (Heritage $22.95)
Review by Sage Birchwater
In her memoir Always Pack a Candle, Marion McKinnon Crook lays out a year in her life as a fledgling public health nurse during the 1960s.
Her delightful story is tactfully told, conveying the essence of the region, the people and the times, while at the same time protecting the identities of those who lived there.
What’s not clear is the book’s genre. Is it historical fiction or is it a memoir as Crook proclaims? The names of all the characters are made up, and some characters are completely fictionalized, but the author states that the conversations and events really did occur.
I’ve been a writer of local history in the Cariboo Chilcotin for several decades and have been a resident of the region since 1973, a decade after Crook describes her arrival in the community, disembarking from a Greyhound bus in Williams Lake on a hot dusty August day in 1963. So I relished the opportunity to suss out the “usual suspects” in her narrative. After all, the social landscape of the Cariboo Chilcotin has a preponderance of larger-than-life personalities.
To no avail, I was confounded. Crook cleverly conceals who was who.
This was Crook’s prerogative and intention, and for good reason it turns out. It gave her the freedom to focus on difficult social issues and the shifting mores of the times like birth control, sexism and racism. It also gave her the opportunity to hit hard on tragic incidents of incest, sexual abuse, professional misconduct and impropriety without getting snagged on incriminations and finger pointing.
Crook’s portrayal of the geography and backwoods way of life traveling rugged roads, icy in winter and muddy in the spring throughout the region, rings true. Hence the survival technique described in the book’s title, “always pack a candle” is relevant. Place names are familiar like Horsefly, Likely, Big Lake, Beaver Valley, Black Creek, Miocene, Canoe Creek, Lee’s Corner, Alexis Creek, Puntzi Mountain, Tatla Lake, Anahim Lake and Soda Creek, but for the most part the names and identities of people are kept well hidden.
In the time span of the book, August 1963 to summer of 1964, Williams Lake was in the midst of metamorphosing from a village into a town, then eventually into a city. Government offices and a new hospital were being constructed as the community was poised to take on the status of a regional centre. Hundreds of bush sawmills throughout the backcountry were also being consolidated into larger manufacturing plants in the bigger communities of Williams Lake, 100 Mile House and Quesnel.
Though the identities of her characters are fictionalized, Crook says the incidences and conversations in the book really took place. “I did live with the independent people of the Cariboo and experienced severe weather. I was not prepared and had to learn from experience,” she writes.
She also learned from others who readily shared their wisdom, insights and expertise.
“In the age of rock ‘n’ roll, Woodstock, free love and civil rights, I nursed in the wild regions of the Cariboo, where we were less interested in social movements and more interested in staying alive and surviving rough roads, oncoming logging trucks, and the challenges of country nursing.”
What I find difficult to comprehend is the strength and maturity Crook demonstrates as a young, first-year public health nurse. Her calling out incompetent doctors, misguided social workers and racist educators without getting crushed by the system is hard to fathom.
Chalk it up to the joys of artistic license perhaps. Or maybe she really was a brash outspoken young woman, wise beyond her years.
Fictionalizing her story and compressing several years into one makes for a jam-packed, eventful narrative. When Crook drives 100 miles across the Chilcotin Plateau from Williams Lake to Puntzi Mountain Air Base to perform her community nursing duties, she is confronted by an American airman saluting her at the gate. She describes her humorous dilemma whether to salute back to a foreign official on Canadian soil, or just nod her acknowledgement. She chose the latter.
Crook conveys interesting historical information about the DEW (Distant Early Warning) system the United States established across Canada during the Korean War and Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Puntzi Mountain Air Base was built by the Americans in 1950 to serve as a radar station on the DEW Line and it remained an American air base until the fall of 1962, the year before Crook started nursing in the region. Then the Americans turned over command to the Canadian Air Force, and some US personnel remained at Puntzi Mountain to help with technical operations until Canada closed the base on December 31, 1966.
One anomaly of Crook not naming real people in her book occurs when she travels west into the Chilcotin in the dead of winter and was given hospitality at the Graham Ranch in Tatla Lake. She states that a woman she assumed was Mrs. Graham, fed her enough breakfast “to keep a logger moving all day.” Of course Margaret Graham, matriarch of the ranch for over 50 years, had died five years previously in 1958. Nevertheless, members of the Graham Family were still proprietors of the place when Crook stayed there.
Time and again throughout the book Crook breaks through the staid social conventions that shrouded the Cariboo Chilcotin at that time. She is particularly empathetic to the plight of Indigenous people and makes a valiant effort to address racism in its many forms. This makes the book relevant to the current climate of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Indigenous injustices.
Crook is consistent in her manner of respectful dialogue with Indigenous characters throughout her narrative. This is exemplified by her encounter with an elder Indigenous woman at a child health clinic in Anahim Lake. She describes the woman approaching her and asking if she’d mind giving her niece a ride into Williams Lake. This provided a segue into learning more about the young woman, Charmaine who was an art student in Vancouver with dreams of becoming a great artist.
The strength of Always Pack A Candle is the easy conversational style employed by Crook. More like a novel than a memoir perhaps, but a polished work, attractive to both history buffs and readers of fiction alike.
9781772033625
BCBW 2021-22
Author of nine books, Sage Birchwater of Williams Lake is one of B.C.’s most essential historians and journalists.
***
Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living by Marion McKinnon Crook (Heritage House $26.95)
Review by Sage Birchwater (BCBW 2024)
On the heels of her bestselling memoir, Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage House, 2021), Marion McKinnon Crook has crafted another engaging memoir of her life as a community health nurse in Williams Lake and the surrounding Cariboo area. Always on Call is a fine follow-up.
Crook’s first memoir depicted the beginning of her professional career as a novice in community nursing. At the age of 21, she arrived in Williams Lake by Greyhound with her newly minted Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Seattle University. Crook was immediately faced with navigating the steep learning curve of putting theory into practice and boots to the ground in a broad, unfamiliar landscape.
Spin forward a dozen years and Always on Call offers a new, mature nursing perspective. Like her previous memoir, it depicts a year in her life, from March 1975 to March 1976, with some artistic license thrown in for good measure.
The author is now 34 and married with three kids, ages 10, 8 and 3, and her husband is a lawyer. The family lives on rural acreage just outside of Williams Lake where they keep cattle, sheep, chickens and a 500-pound mama pig—their oldest child, Janice’s 4-H project. Their two youngest children, Glen and David are adopted and have Indigenous ancestry.
So the scene is set with Crook balancing her life as a mother, wife and public health nurse. Janice and David, the two oldest kids, both have 4-H projects and the usual ups and downs in school. Three-year-old David is shuttled back and forth to day care, then to preschool.
As in her previous memoir, Crook is careful not to disclose the identities of most people in her narrative. Her kids’ names are accurate but her husband’s is made up.
There is good reason for this discretion. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of her writing is the author’s capacity to speak to social issues: racism, sexual abuse, bullying, poverty, bigotry, sexism, medical malpractice, transgender questions and moral dilemmas—both in the office and in the community as a whole.
She does name a few individuals as signposts of the community and the times: Rancher Freddy Westwick, a larger-than-life sawmiller in Miocene; the colourful Pan Phillips from the Blackwater; and prominent educator June Streigler.
The reader gains insight into the inner workings of office politics and the stresses of a government agency like the Cariboo Health Unit, where a manager retires and the government drags its heels replacing her. The nurses chip in to rotate the supervisory work, until they say enough is enough.
While Crook is acting administrator, a young woman shows up demanding to see a nurse. “I’ve got the clap,” she confides.
Crook sets out the procedure: provide some antibiotic medication for the infection, take a swab of the infected area, and get a list of sexual contacts from the woman. When she discloses the names of a dozen or more men, including some prominent citizens, it’s obvious she is a sex worker.
A young nursing student questions whether the woman shouldn’t be reported since she is probably “charging for her services and that’s illegal.”
Crook cools her off. “If we reported women who were charging for sex, they wouldn’t come to us for treatment. If they didn’t come for treatment, we’d be failing them and the community because the diseases would spread.”
Crook advises the young intern not to put her personal prejudices ahead of good nursing practice. “That means whatever your private opinion, treat the patient with respect.”
One of the strengths of the book that keeps the narrative lively is the juxtaposition of the author’s professional life at the health unit with her family life as a mother and wife and the always busy demands on the farm.
“Parenting is such an imprecise vocation,” Crook admits.
The issue of Crook and her husband adopting two Indigenous children comes up. Remember the Sixties Scoop?
When the author and her son, David, (now four years old) head over to nearby T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) to meet with a woman who has a boar to breed Crook’s daughter Janice’s sow, the woman asks if the child belonged to a local T’exelc family. Crook is caught off guard because she doesn’t know the origin of her son thanks to the enshrouded secrecy of the adoption process.
She says the T’exelc woman seemed both surprised and resentful.
Crook explains how the adoption took place: “When the social worker told us she had a baby for us, she added, ‘Oh, and he’s Native. Is that alright?’”
Crook says she and her husband looked at each other. “It didn’t matter to us. We didn’t think it would matter to others. Or that it might matter to his clan, his band, his tribal community, and one day that it might matter to David. We had been incredibly naïve.”
The author’s personal honesty in these reflections is refreshing.
Each chapter takes the reader on a unique journey of discovery. Home visits to rural communities where numbered addresses were nonexistent. “Half a mile past the end of the snake fence, then turn right and cross two cattleguards” were often the only directions.
Always On Call is both informative and entertaining, and an insightful look into how things were in the Cariboo and the healthcare system nearly 50 years ago.
“It was all one giant, complicated, satisfying, balancing act,” Crook concludes. “It was enough. I was content—for now.” 9781772034691
Author of nine books, Sage Birchwater of Williams Lake is one of BC’s essential historians and journalists.
Crook followed up with Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living (Heritage, 2024) with nursing and lifestyle stories in the Cariboo from the 1970s.
From Victorian drawing rooms to gold-rush saloons in BC, Crook has long been drawn to lives shaped by courage, curiosity and reinvention. In Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Florence Wilson(Heritage House, 2026), Crook turns her research and narrative flair to the true story of Florence Wilson, a poet-turned-entrepreneur who left London, England to become the cultural heartbeat of Barkerville as a saloon owner and founder of the Theatre Royale. She brings Wilson’s transatlantic journey to life, revealing a frontier heroine whose influence on BC’s cultural history deserves renewed attention.
For information on all her books, visit: https://marioncrookauthor.com/
In addition to her nursing degree, McKinnon Crook holds a master's in liberal studies and a PhD in education. Now a full-time writer, she lives on BC's Sunshine Coast.
Photo credit: Duke Morse
BOOKS
Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage, 2021) $22.95 9781772033625
Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living (Heritage House, 2024) $26.95 9781772034691
Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Florence Wilson (Heritage House, 2026) $26.95 9781772035643
[BCBW 2026]
REVIEW
Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin
by Marion McKinnon Crook (Heritage $22.95)
Review by Sage Birchwater
In her memoir Always Pack a Candle, Marion McKinnon Crook lays out a year in her life as a fledgling public health nurse during the 1960s.
Her delightful story is tactfully told, conveying the essence of the region, the people and the times, while at the same time protecting the identities of those who lived there.
What’s not clear is the book’s genre. Is it historical fiction or is it a memoir as Crook proclaims? The names of all the characters are made up, and some characters are completely fictionalized, but the author states that the conversations and events really did occur.
I’ve been a writer of local history in the Cariboo Chilcotin for several decades and have been a resident of the region since 1973, a decade after Crook describes her arrival in the community, disembarking from a Greyhound bus in Williams Lake on a hot dusty August day in 1963. So I relished the opportunity to suss out the “usual suspects” in her narrative. After all, the social landscape of the Cariboo Chilcotin has a preponderance of larger-than-life personalities.
To no avail, I was confounded. Crook cleverly conceals who was who.
This was Crook’s prerogative and intention, and for good reason it turns out. It gave her the freedom to focus on difficult social issues and the shifting mores of the times like birth control, sexism and racism. It also gave her the opportunity to hit hard on tragic incidents of incest, sexual abuse, professional misconduct and impropriety without getting snagged on incriminations and finger pointing.
Crook’s portrayal of the geography and backwoods way of life traveling rugged roads, icy in winter and muddy in the spring throughout the region, rings true. Hence the survival technique described in the book’s title, “always pack a candle” is relevant. Place names are familiar like Horsefly, Likely, Big Lake, Beaver Valley, Black Creek, Miocene, Canoe Creek, Lee’s Corner, Alexis Creek, Puntzi Mountain, Tatla Lake, Anahim Lake and Soda Creek, but for the most part the names and identities of people are kept well hidden.
In the time span of the book, August 1963 to summer of 1964, Williams Lake was in the midst of metamorphosing from a village into a town, then eventually into a city. Government offices and a new hospital were being constructed as the community was poised to take on the status of a regional centre. Hundreds of bush sawmills throughout the backcountry were also being consolidated into larger manufacturing plants in the bigger communities of Williams Lake, 100 Mile House and Quesnel.
Though the identities of her characters are fictionalized, Crook says the incidences and conversations in the book really took place. “I did live with the independent people of the Cariboo and experienced severe weather. I was not prepared and had to learn from experience,” she writes.
She also learned from others who readily shared their wisdom, insights and expertise.
“In the age of rock ‘n’ roll, Woodstock, free love and civil rights, I nursed in the wild regions of the Cariboo, where we were less interested in social movements and more interested in staying alive and surviving rough roads, oncoming logging trucks, and the challenges of country nursing.”
What I find difficult to comprehend is the strength and maturity Crook demonstrates as a young, first-year public health nurse. Her calling out incompetent doctors, misguided social workers and racist educators without getting crushed by the system is hard to fathom.
Chalk it up to the joys of artistic license perhaps. Or maybe she really was a brash outspoken young woman, wise beyond her years.
Fictionalizing her story and compressing several years into one makes for a jam-packed, eventful narrative. When Crook drives 100 miles across the Chilcotin Plateau from Williams Lake to Puntzi Mountain Air Base to perform her community nursing duties, she is confronted by an American airman saluting her at the gate. She describes her humorous dilemma whether to salute back to a foreign official on Canadian soil, or just nod her acknowledgement. She chose the latter.
Crook conveys interesting historical information about the DEW (Distant Early Warning) system the United States established across Canada during the Korean War and Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Puntzi Mountain Air Base was built by the Americans in 1950 to serve as a radar station on the DEW Line and it remained an American air base until the fall of 1962, the year before Crook started nursing in the region. Then the Americans turned over command to the Canadian Air Force, and some US personnel remained at Puntzi Mountain to help with technical operations until Canada closed the base on December 31, 1966.
One anomaly of Crook not naming real people in her book occurs when she travels west into the Chilcotin in the dead of winter and was given hospitality at the Graham Ranch in Tatla Lake. She states that a woman she assumed was Mrs. Graham, fed her enough breakfast “to keep a logger moving all day.” Of course Margaret Graham, matriarch of the ranch for over 50 years, had died five years previously in 1958. Nevertheless, members of the Graham Family were still proprietors of the place when Crook stayed there.
Time and again throughout the book Crook breaks through the staid social conventions that shrouded the Cariboo Chilcotin at that time. She is particularly empathetic to the plight of Indigenous people and makes a valiant effort to address racism in its many forms. This makes the book relevant to the current climate of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Indigenous injustices.
Crook is consistent in her manner of respectful dialogue with Indigenous characters throughout her narrative. This is exemplified by her encounter with an elder Indigenous woman at a child health clinic in Anahim Lake. She describes the woman approaching her and asking if she’d mind giving her niece a ride into Williams Lake. This provided a segue into learning more about the young woman, Charmaine who was an art student in Vancouver with dreams of becoming a great artist.
The strength of Always Pack A Candle is the easy conversational style employed by Crook. More like a novel than a memoir perhaps, but a polished work, attractive to both history buffs and readers of fiction alike.
9781772033625
BCBW 2021-22
Author of nine books, Sage Birchwater of Williams Lake is one of B.C.’s most essential historians and journalists.
***
Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living by Marion McKinnon Crook (Heritage House $26.95)
Review by Sage Birchwater (BCBW 2024)
On the heels of her bestselling memoir, Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage House, 2021), Marion McKinnon Crook has crafted another engaging memoir of her life as a community health nurse in Williams Lake and the surrounding Cariboo area. Always on Call is a fine follow-up.
Crook’s first memoir depicted the beginning of her professional career as a novice in community nursing. At the age of 21, she arrived in Williams Lake by Greyhound with her newly minted Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Seattle University. Crook was immediately faced with navigating the steep learning curve of putting theory into practice and boots to the ground in a broad, unfamiliar landscape.
Spin forward a dozen years and Always on Call offers a new, mature nursing perspective. Like her previous memoir, it depicts a year in her life, from March 1975 to March 1976, with some artistic license thrown in for good measure.
The author is now 34 and married with three kids, ages 10, 8 and 3, and her husband is a lawyer. The family lives on rural acreage just outside of Williams Lake where they keep cattle, sheep, chickens and a 500-pound mama pig—their oldest child, Janice’s 4-H project. Their two youngest children, Glen and David are adopted and have Indigenous ancestry.
So the scene is set with Crook balancing her life as a mother, wife and public health nurse. Janice and David, the two oldest kids, both have 4-H projects and the usual ups and downs in school. Three-year-old David is shuttled back and forth to day care, then to preschool.
As in her previous memoir, Crook is careful not to disclose the identities of most people in her narrative. Her kids’ names are accurate but her husband’s is made up.
There is good reason for this discretion. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of her writing is the author’s capacity to speak to social issues: racism, sexual abuse, bullying, poverty, bigotry, sexism, medical malpractice, transgender questions and moral dilemmas—both in the office and in the community as a whole.
She does name a few individuals as signposts of the community and the times: Rancher Freddy Westwick, a larger-than-life sawmiller in Miocene; the colourful Pan Phillips from the Blackwater; and prominent educator June Streigler.
The reader gains insight into the inner workings of office politics and the stresses of a government agency like the Cariboo Health Unit, where a manager retires and the government drags its heels replacing her. The nurses chip in to rotate the supervisory work, until they say enough is enough.
While Crook is acting administrator, a young woman shows up demanding to see a nurse. “I’ve got the clap,” she confides.
Crook sets out the procedure: provide some antibiotic medication for the infection, take a swab of the infected area, and get a list of sexual contacts from the woman. When she discloses the names of a dozen or more men, including some prominent citizens, it’s obvious she is a sex worker.
A young nursing student questions whether the woman shouldn’t be reported since she is probably “charging for her services and that’s illegal.”
Crook cools her off. “If we reported women who were charging for sex, they wouldn’t come to us for treatment. If they didn’t come for treatment, we’d be failing them and the community because the diseases would spread.”
Crook advises the young intern not to put her personal prejudices ahead of good nursing practice. “That means whatever your private opinion, treat the patient with respect.”
One of the strengths of the book that keeps the narrative lively is the juxtaposition of the author’s professional life at the health unit with her family life as a mother and wife and the always busy demands on the farm.
“Parenting is such an imprecise vocation,” Crook admits.
The issue of Crook and her husband adopting two Indigenous children comes up. Remember the Sixties Scoop?
When the author and her son, David, (now four years old) head over to nearby T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) to meet with a woman who has a boar to breed Crook’s daughter Janice’s sow, the woman asks if the child belonged to a local T’exelc family. Crook is caught off guard because she doesn’t know the origin of her son thanks to the enshrouded secrecy of the adoption process.
She says the T’exelc woman seemed both surprised and resentful.
Crook explains how the adoption took place: “When the social worker told us she had a baby for us, she added, ‘Oh, and he’s Native. Is that alright?’”
Crook says she and her husband looked at each other. “It didn’t matter to us. We didn’t think it would matter to others. Or that it might matter to his clan, his band, his tribal community, and one day that it might matter to David. We had been incredibly naïve.”
The author’s personal honesty in these reflections is refreshing.
Each chapter takes the reader on a unique journey of discovery. Home visits to rural communities where numbered addresses were nonexistent. “Half a mile past the end of the snake fence, then turn right and cross two cattleguards” were often the only directions.
Always On Call is both informative and entertaining, and an insightful look into how things were in the Cariboo and the healthcare system nearly 50 years ago.
“It was all one giant, complicated, satisfying, balancing act,” Crook concludes. “It was enough. I was content—for now.” 9781772034691
Author of nine books, Sage Birchwater of Williams Lake is one of BC’s essential historians and journalists.
