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“What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you." — Anne Lamott |
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My short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Little Fiction, Literary Mama, Stealing Time, and Hip Mama, and in the anthologies Outcrops: Northeastern Ontario Short Stories, The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, and Body & Soul: Creative Nonfiction for Skeptics and Seekers. I'm the co-creator with Richard Sheridan Willis of the critically-acclaimed one-man show Strolling Player. I’m a member of the Toronto Women Writers Salon and I teach the creative writing half of a yoga-creative writing workshop called Creativity Rising.
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The Longer Story |
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I’ve tried to write or longed to write or resisted writing or feared writing or, finally, actually written for the greater part of 30 years. I’ve published numerous short stories and essays in literary journals and anthologies, written two learner novels, and now have a completed novel called Truth Landing. Along the way I've learned a great deal about the creative process, how to surrender to it, how to put myself in its path and allow myself to integrate with it in a way that's sustainable, nourishing, and supportive--of both myself and my creativity.
Words and stories, truth and fiction: there's never been any other work I wanted to do. My work explores, to put it broadly, what it is to be female. The complexity and depth of friendship and sisterhood, the emotional heritage passed on from mothers to daughters, the models inadvertently set of what is possible and expected, ambivalence around marriage and motherhood, religious tradition and the limits it sets, the conflicting pulls of art and domesticity, the struggle to break free of what we've been given to create what we yearn for. Alongside the rugged landscape of the Northern Ontario bush where I grew up and the New York City streets and Toronto neighbourhoods and West Virginia mountains where I've emerged into myself, these are currently my terrain.
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Sign up for a free copy of Where the Sanctity Lives, an essay originally published in Stealing Time Magazine, about my journey out of my head and into my body. (There's a purity ring, a home birth, sex, and wolves.) You'll also receive my spontaneous and rare newsletter.
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