grandfather’s garden

Crash landing – into a children’s picture book!

Two years ago, I attended a workshop with two of the literary greats of children’s literature in Canada – Humber School of Writing’s Cynthia Good and Rick Wilkes of Annick Press. This cute little book was partly the result!

excitement rising for release of Unpacked

Things I’m feeling are: terror, excitement, cautious enthusiasm, and more terror. In today’s marketplace, being a writer means being an entrepreneur. There’s the blogs, there are interview to organize, photos to paw through, and web pages to update. This is the total opposite of sitting in my office, in candlelight, finishing the intimacies of my memoir.

Lobster Fisher For a Day

It’s still dark when Captain Lori Clark picks me up in her white half-ton truck — just after 4:30 am. The first time I met Lori, it was behind a gorgeous blush and eyeliner job and a glass of white wine. Today, she’s in her rubbers, and she tells me I’d better be in mine, too.

to new beginnings

In the afternoons we heard vivid and poignant lectures by Puerto Rican writers,activists, self-published, well travelled teachers and candles in their small but important circles there, fighting for justice, for identity, for freedom.

My Writing Process Blog Tour

The story is mixed in shades of darkness and stormy seas of confusion and grief, following a path of color and culture as the main character, Mo, finds the freedom to liberate the heavies in a sort of reality check taking stock of what she really has left in this world.

deeper into the words

am tuning in to the rhythm of my own creative process. I am learning character from Hemingway and style from Didion, delving into wildness with cheryl strayed and sitting peacefully on the fences of British churchyards with Bill Bryson. I am asking myself the traveller’s questions of Pico Iyer and am suddenly indebted to Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty for their courage and bravery to get up every morning and write.

Surf Baby

According to the Stanford School of Medicine, every single cell in our skeleton is replaced every seven years. Does that mean that that I was a different person this time, on that beach in Tofino? A unique person with hopes and dreams, looking back on the shadow self of years behind me?

[insert deity here]

When I returned home from walking the dog last night, the dusk had turned to dark.

Books are alive and well in Charlottetown

I gather books until my arms are full, and make my way down to the cash. Leila is hard to round up, now into a Ramona and Beezus collection on a shelf almost too tall for her. She hates to leave this magical place, where worlds open and close each time she twirls around.

a chance to refine the craft, chapter one

As Prince Edward Island welcomed its first rays of warm summer, ripe red strawberries, and car loads of families and travelers waiting for a glimpse of our famous Anne of Green Gables, I trotted off expectantly to Montpelier Vermont, and to my first Master’s writing residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts.