About Me
I was born and brought up in Collingwood, Ontario. My father was a teacher (and yes, I attended his sixth grade class); my mother, an artist, was the homemaker in our family. I remember a happy childhood made of forts, board games and books. When I was about seven we moved out of the town proper to live near the base of Blue Mountain. I was lucky enough to live a stone’s throw from a cedar woodland and creek that has since turned into a subdivision, of course. To my young mind, this extended backyard rivaled the tundra in Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens. Some weekends we hiked sections of the Bruce Trail on the escarpment, enjoying spectacular views of the countryside and bay. As a kid I was what people call a “big reader”—I could polish off an entire book in a day or two of serious, isolated reading. Geek alert: I liked to read aloud, doing accents and everything. My favorites were classics like E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and the Anne of Green Gables series. I adored Olwen in the Monika Hughes sci fi trilogy The Keeper of the Isis Light. But I also raided the study for adult books by Dickens and Orwell. I remember that Nevil Shute’s On the Beach made a big impression on me; equally, Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. I made my family laugh by mispronouncing bookish words like melancholy and harbinger, ones that I’d never actually heard spoken. After graduating from Collingwood Collegiate Institute (go fighting owls, go!), I attended McMaster University’s Arts and Science Programme, graduating in 1997 with a B.A. & Sc. Degree and combined honours in Philosophy. The Arts and Science courses—a unique liberal education in an era bent on training rather than educating—were formative for me. I met many special people who have gone on to change the world for the better. I moved to Toronto for more schooling—a Masters degree in Philosophy. I like thinking about questions that have no answers, I guess. Big, important topics like death and love and happiness, they just get at me, if you know what I mean. Lucky for me, my future husband, Aly, decided enroll in the same programme. Even luckier for me, he decided to go back to a paying job after we graduated.
Today I live in Oakville, Ontario with my husband Aly, our children Maya and Zakir, and our American dog Mickey. |
Looking for my 
At some point in time I convinced myself that graduate studies in philosophy were a more lucrative and sensible bet than trying to write for a living. (Which only goes to show you that I could argue the hindquarters off a donkey.) Not that I’d seriously considered writing novels…or that even more mysterious thing called “freelancing.” For fun, though, I’d taken a comparative literature course on Dostoyevsky and fell in love with his poignant and vivid dramas and…ooh, his dialogue! Imagine, I thought, being able to conjure up even a pinch of the same magic.