Welcome
I’m a writer, reader, putterer, and ponderer who publishes sporadic blog posts, essays, memoir, and occasional short fiction.
After my early years as a back-to-the-land wife and mother during the 1970s and 1980s, I settled on a career as a freelance writer and editor. I started out writing articles for the Algoma Steel News, which sent me deep into the bowels of the local steel plant, wearing a hard hat and carrying a tape recorder. I also wrote for various government departments, but gradually I found my niche, writing articles, speeches, and reports for the education sector, a natural evolution from my years in local and provincial educational politics. During those years, I wrote Education in Canada: An Overview (CEA, 1997), which is now almost entirely outdated (and sells on Amazon.ca, used, for $70!).
When, two years later, I was offered the editorship of Education Canada, the flagship publication of the Canadian Education Association, I had my dream job—one that I kept until I retired in 2012.
What I like best these days is reflecting about the world around me, and then, to regain my sanity, the world as I remember it used to be. Sometimes, when I put them together, I discover something new about myself and my relationship to those worlds. And because I’m not that different from anyone else, I like to think other people might also discover something new.
Although our active farming days as depicted in my memoir, Shifting Currents, are long gone, I’m still living on that farm in northeastern Ontario, beside the river that changes directions. My most recent book, The Stuff of a Life, is a collection of essays that focus and reflect on events and memories from the 1950s to the present.