When Hurricane Dorian hit Atlantic Canada in September of 2019, Tara Pyfrom was in the Bahamas where the hurricane was regarded as the worst natural disaster in the island nation’s history.
Pyfrom and her family moved to New Brunswick – sight unseen – after the storm, where her therapy writing inspired her new book. “The Ocean in Our Blood” is about the traumatic experience of fleeing her home during a category five hurricane and starting a new life. It’s filled with harrowing moments from the family’s escape.
“The house was actually filling up with water like a fishbowl,” Pyfrom said. “We were terrified that we would end up with our heads pressed against the ceiling and no breathing room.”
Pyfrom and her wife went out in a category five hurricane to escape drowning in their home.
“We were only outside for about 30 minutes, but it was the worst 30 minutes of my entire life,” Pyfrom said. “I went under a couple of times. My wife had to pull me up by the back of my shirt.”
She said she still gets shaky when she thinks about the experience.
“It’s a pretty intense portion of the book.”
Moving to New Brunswick after was “pure chaos,” Pyfrom said.
“We had a young daughter that we were trying to parent and help her deal with her own trauma,” she said. “A lot of days where everything felt hopeless.”
Pyfrom’s therapist found out she was an amateur writer and insisted she write about the experience and confront it as a way of desensitizing herself to the memory. Pyfrom said it worked really well, and she found the heart of a book in those pages.
“That kind of gave me real focus and something to look forward to and something to work towards,” she said.
“I had a story to tell about surviving trauma.”
Pyfrom said most people have never been through a category five hurricane, but everybody deals with something, and she hopes her book motivates some of them to confront their trauma.
“If I can survive this, you can survive your thing,” she said.
“The Ocean in Our Blood” is available on Pyfrom’s website and the Write Cup bookstore and café in Saint John, N.B. It will be available on Amazon in July.
For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
