Author Description

The first time Dieter Schmidt meets Mad Maggie is at a blockade on a logging road. He's there to threaten the local First Nations band with court action if they don't allow his client's heavy equipment access to Deadman's Island. Maggie emerges from the forest, but rather than chastise the lawyer for his part in trying to replace this unique ecosystem of magnificent old-growth trees with a housing development, she gives him an ultimatum. She will cure his yet-to-be-diagnosed terminal cancer if he saves the trees. Dieter dismisses Maggie's prediction as delusions of someone suffering from schizophrenia. But when he begins to cough up blood and is given six months to live, he has no alternative except to reconsider. Mad Maggie and the Wisdom of the Ancients is a love story between two disparate characters, a brilliant, ambitious corporate lawyer whose personal and career mantra is "the will to power", and a free, uninhibited spirit who practices natural healing on a secluded island in the wilderness. It's a story about protecting wild things and wild places as well as the devastating effects of mental illness and the stigma society inflicts on those affected. It's a story about compromise, tolerance and understanding and how these feelings spring from love and are nurtured by it. It's about mystery, secrets and power that abound in nature and within ourselves.