Biography

I’m a writer and a reader. A mother and a grandmother. A friend. A walker, a coffee-drinker. A vegetable gardener, a sock darner. 

An Ontario farm girl.

One of five siblings, I grew up on one and then another family farm: I spent my first nine years on a dairy farm in York County, near Woodbridge, and the second nine years on a cow-calf beef farm in Wellington County near Arthur. 

A reader. 

I was always a reader. The books I read were chosen randomly, if you could say that they were chosen at all.  And of course I was not unique in being a reader who longed to be a writer but in that vague way, not knowing how, not working at it or towards it, not thinking it at all possible.

A city dweller.

As an adult, Ottawa was my home for five years but I have lived in Toronto since 1983.  I went to school then I had a career, first in the labour movement and then in the Ontario Public Service. I had two sons, now adults. 

A writer.

With some life changes in the early 2010s, I wondered (as people do) about the decisions made over a lifetime, the cumulative impact of right turns and wrong turns, what was gained, what was lost, what might have been different.  I wondered if it was too late to learn how to write and decided to explore the possibility, to enrol at schools of continuing studies, to work at it.

Beginning in 2018, my stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in paperplates, FreeFall, Hamilton Arts & Letters Magazine, The New Quarterly and Grain. In 2022, I had success with flash fiction in two on-line U.S. publications, including a first prize from Streetlight Magazine. More recently, I won third prize in the McNally Robinson Contest; the story was published in Prairie Fire in 2023.

These are stories set in offices, elevators and department stores, bars and restaurants, living rooms and kitchens, streetcars and automobiles.  

They are stories about relationships (mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends). 

They are stories that, despite their simplicity, linger.