Things I want to know about you: Photographs
The publishing contract says I need 12 photographs. 12 photographs. It doesn’t seem like a lot. My agent says Do you have any photos from the commune? No? What about […]
Blue (pill) Christmas
That year my room-mate Francois was a med school drop out who was studying pharmacology, both academically and personally. He had drugs for waking up, falling asleep, calming down and perking up. Still it never occurred to me that he was depressed until a week before Christmas when he shut down the Champlain bridge by threatening to jump. The next day his dad came to pack up his things and within a few hours it seemed like every trace of my room-mate and his marvelous medicine supply were gone.
I don’t know why Francois was sad but I knew why I was. I was twenty-three and newly divorced, publicly humiliated both by my unfounded belief in happy endings and my unfaithful husband. My friends and family had sympathy in small amounts, equivalent I realized, to their initial enthusiasm when I’d gotten married three years before.
Writing credits
Books Red Star Tattoo My Life as a Girl Revolutionary (Penguin Random House Canada 2016) Winner of the 2017 Edna Staebler Creative Non-Fiction Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 Hilary Weston Creative […]
This Literary Magazine – “Witnesses”
“The lovers sit nearly naked on the bed in the hot summer night, drinking wine and telling stories. They are new and still telling stories, still taking inventory of each […]
Before the Revolution
My memoir “Before the Revolution” will be published by Knopf Random House Canada in spring 2016. I am represented by Trena White, associate agent with the Transatlantic Agency and principal […]
Quotable Blog – “Memory, fiction, and drug dealers I have known”
“Writing is how I process and honour experiences that too often are seen as secret or shameful. Like the man at the halfway house, I want to tell you where […]
2013 in review
I said when I started writing my memoir about my radical childhood that I would decide at the end of it if I wanted to be a writer or not. All I knew at the start was that I needed to write that book. But as I discovered I had to become a writer to write a book.
It has been a long and interesting journey as I’ve learned to write better stories, give a reading, take criticism. As I’ve both toughened up and opened up to all the things that writing brings into my life.
Quotable – “What is Sweet”
“The snow is coming down, thick and steady and the other kids seem to disappear in and out of landscape, their faces obscured by the mist of their breath and […]