• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

This warm-hearted memoir tells the story of the dream of many North Americans: to throw up a dull job and journey into the wilderness to live off the land. Sunny Wright does exactly that when she decides at age twenty-eight to quit working at a "man-sized job for a female wage" in a Vancouver sawmill. With her young daughter Lisa and friend Betty, they sell off everything from their urban existence and outfit themselves with two trucks full of goods for the journey in to northern B.C in search of a place to live.

They have never even gone camping before, but they are determined to succeed, and they do. After much searching they find land near Vanderhoof and begin the hard but joy-filled labour of constructing their own house, their own barn and setting up as subsistence farmers. Eventually they will learn how to run a bootleg still for extra money and will become famous in the area for the dogs they raise and the winter trips they take by dogsled.

This is a book that readers can enjoy as they live alongside Sunny, Betty and Lisa in the bush, watching them learn to build log houses, make friends with the fiercely individualistic people of the back country, survive the desperately cold winters and enjoy the independence of rural life. The volume includes many black-and-white photos of their life in the bush.

Sunny Wright lived for ten years with her daughter and another woman friend near Vanderhoof in the British Columbia interior. To Touch a Dream is her first book about those exciting years. She is presently at work on a second book. She now makes her home in Sardis in the Fraser Valley.

Sunny Wright's profile page

To Touch a Dream: A Wilderness Adventure

This memoir tells the story of the yearning of many Canadians: to quit a dead-end job and move into the wilderness to live off the land. Sunny Wright did exactly that when she decided at age twenty-eight to quit working in a Vancouver sawmill. With her friend and daughter, she leaves her urban life outfitted for life in northern BC. They find 160 acres of bush land near Vanderhoof and begin constructing their own house and farm buildings. To make extra money they bootleg home brew, raise rabbits, breed sled dogs and run a trap line. The book follows Sunny, Betty and Lisa’s adventures as they struggle to survive alongside fiercely individualistic neighbours, fighting northern winters, but enjoying the independence of rural life. This Thoreau-like quest will make an ideal comparison for the studies of other utopian people and communities.