British Columbiana: A Memoir

A job as a heritage interpreter at a remote gold rush site propels an insecure and anxious twenty-four-year-old to find what she truly desires from life.

Unsure of her next steps after graduation, twenty-something Josie Teed accepts a position at Barkerville, a remote heritage site in British Columbia showcasing the nineteenth-century gold rush. She lives in the adjacent village of Wells, population 250. There is no cell reception and the grocery store is an hour away by car. Once a thriving gold mining community in the 1930s, Wells has become a haven for white Gen-X artists and flower children, struggling actors-turned-heritage-interpreters, and transient miners.

Eager for respite from her competitive and lonely city life, Josie dives headlong into the slow and steady pace of the town. Faced with the prospect of remaining long-term, she must decide if she will fight to carve a place for herself in Wells’s idiosyncratic community. What follows is the story of a young woman trying to find her purpose in the twenty-first century while living in a village seemingly frozen in the past.