Is there a literary dynasty brewing in Kitchener, Ontario? Three local authors, all working in the young adult fantasy genre, share a family connection: Patricia Bow, her son James, and James’s wife, Erin Noteboom Bow. Patricia and James have already published multiple titles with Dundurn Press – Patricia’s latest, The Prism Blade, is set for release this month – while Erin is currently shopping her debut via New York agency Pippin Properties.

The Bows owe much of their current success to another YA author, Marsha Skrypuch, who maintains the online writers’ forum Kidcritters. Both Patricia and James have workshopped their fiction with the Kidcritter community, and Skrypuch introduced Barry Jowett, her editor at Dundurn, to James and, later, Patricia. “Marsha had actually sent me a sample of [James’s] writing herself,” says Jowett, “and I liked it and asked to see more.”

That first sample became James’s debut, The Unwritten Girl, published by Dundurn’s Boardwalk imprint in 2006. Fathom Five, a sequel featuring the same characters, but set in a different fantasy world, followed a year later, and Dundurn will publish James’s third book, The Young City, within the next year or so.

Patricia’s journey to Dundurn was a bit more circuitous. After a failed attempt to write romance fiction – “I’m afraid I just don’t have a romantic nature, I suppose,” she says – she spotted a call for submissions from German publisher Cora Verlag, looking for YA thrillers. The outfit released her first supernatural tale in 1990 in German, followed by eight more, but none of those titles has ever been published in English. That lent a bittersweet flavour to Patricia’s first literary achievement. “It was indeed somewhat frustrating,” she says. “You just don’t feel as though you’re participating in it. It was gratifying in a way, because I saw the actual books, but it did leave me feeling somewhat as though I was outside of my own experience.”

Her first English-language novel, The Spiral Maze, appeared with Thistledown Press in 1997. Bow has since published the Silver Birch award-winning novel The Bone Flute with Orca Book Publishers and a non-fiction title through Firefly. She moved to Dundurn, her son’s publisher, last year, launching a new fantasy series about the dragon-inhabited land of Mythrin. Jowett, though, says the family connection was irrelevant. “It wasn’t James recommending his mom or his mom recommending him,” he says. “They just both happen to write the kind of books that I like.”

Those books, based on the mutual influences shared by mother and son, bear some similarities. Both authors pen fantasy in which the real world is connected to another via portals. Both also write about characters who are outsiders who stumble into a mystical new world, taking their friends along for the ride.

Still, there are differences; James describes his writing as more cinematic. “I tend to view my stories through the eye of a camera,” he says. “Whereas I think my mother is more traditional, and gets into the characters’ heads’ and develops things more organically as an actual writer, as opposed to a director.”

Patricia read the kind of books that she loved – C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, Tolkien, Patricia Wrightson – to James until he was almost 12 years old, fostering his own attraction to the fantasy genre. It was novels based on the cult TV show Dr. Who that catapulted James’s own writing career years later, when he began penning fan fiction, eventually publishing his own fanzine while attending the University of Waterloo and meeting Erin, who admired his writing, in the process.

No literary slouch herself, Erin has published two poetry collections with Wolsak & Wynn, and has also won a CBC Literary Award for poetry. Watching her husband toil away at his novels “looked like a lot of fun when you’re watching it from the outside,” she says. “It turns out to be a lot of fun and a lot of work.” She’s also written children’s material; in fact, the search for a champion for one particular children’s story led her to her New York agent. “It’s a retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s 500 rhymed quatrains for kids, and getting that sort of thing published on your own is pretty much impossible,” she says.

None of the Bows are ready to quit their day jobs; Patricia works in the communications office at the University of Waterloo, where Erin also works as a writer for the Faculty of Engineering. James is a freelance journalist and stay-at-home dad (he and Erin have a two-year-old daughter). Still, all are busily working away on new concepts and sequels to their existing oeuvres, and lending support and understanding to each other along the way. “Writers tend to be kind of insular and obsessive, and I imagine we’re a little bit hard to live with,” says Erin. “It’s great to have someone who shares your same insular obsessions; it makes it much more social.”