Boulevard Magazine - November 2011 Issue

Weinman. And it does.

Stevens’ second book, Never Knowing, launched last July and is being gobbled up across the globe. Her third, Always Watching, due out sometime next year, has already sold in six countries before it’s even left her laptop.

Anyone who’s read Stevens’ work will recognize Vancouver Island in her settings, be it a nameless mountain, Nanaimo, Shawnigan Lake or Victoria. Born Rene Unichewski, Stevens decided to publish under a pseudonym that was easier to recognize (and say): Chevy was her dad’s nickname in school, and Steven is her brother’s name. Raised on a ranch in Shawnigan, Stevens holds fond memories of hanging at Mason’s Beach, playing on the Kinsol Trestle and swimming in the Koksilah River. “There’s a river in all three of my books,” says Stevens. “I feel a strong affinity for it.”

Although she enjoyed writing in high school, Stevens didn’t see herself writing novels. “I certainly daydreamed about it, but my intention was to go into Fine Arts,” she says. In her 20s (while grinding her way through said Fine Arts program, and then onward into a career in sales), she still thought idly about writing a book. But it wasn’t until 2005 that Stevens finally confided in her aunt: “I think I was meant to be a writer.”

Over the following months, Stevens began dreaming in prose, seeing words “landing on the page in sentences,” and knew it was time to make the leap.

After a break-up, Stevens took her dog (the now-deceased Annie, who’d been her companion for years) to Mudge Island.

There, tea in hand, rain hammering on the aluminum roof and a fire crackling, she got to work. “I remember thinking, ‘This … this is how I want my life to look,’ ” she says. But upon her return to the real world, life and work intervened.

She struggled along for half a year, balancing writing with working in real estate before finally selling her Nanaimo house and moving home to Shawnigan. “I look back on it and go, ‘freaky crazy!’ But I was only 32 at the time, I didn’t have kids, I wasn’t married, I wasn’t happy in my current job. It was, ‘if you’re going to do it, now’s the only time.’ ” Those years in real estate gave Stevens the experience and ideas that launched her first book into the stratosphere. “I got the idea for Still Missing at an open house and started playing with it,” she says. “I’m always a ‘what if’ kind of person, which is usually geared toward all the horrible things that could possibly happen.” While at the open house, Stevens wondered: what would happen if I didn’t come home? “I played with that idea and sat down and started writing.”

If Lindsay Buziak comes to mind, you’re not alone. While the story runs along similar lines, Still Missing was already in draft form when the young Victoria real estate agent was murdered in 2008. “I see more of a connection with my story 27