Quick Bio
My short stories and essays have appeared in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Little Fiction, Literary Mama, Stealing Time, and Hip Mama, and in the anthologies Outcrops: Northeastern Ontario Short Stories and The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. 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. I’m currently querying one completed novel, writing a new novel, and putting together a collection of personal essays.
The Longer Story
Photo credit: Heather Morrison
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 am now revising an actually-publishable novel while juggling two or three other book-length projects. 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.
As an editor I'm passionate about helping others' stories find their way into the world, too, whether in the developmental stages, the it's-here-on-the-page-but-I'm-not-sure-exactly-what-it-wants-to-be stages, or down to the level of word choice and sentence strength.
My husband, Richard, is an actor and director. Our daughters, Maia and Aphra, are 9 and 7. We live in Toronto.
