I’ve always wanted to be a writer . . .

After hiding inside the pages of the Misty of Chincoteague series and Enid Blyton's stories, I knew that I wanted to be a writer, someone who could transport readers, as I was transported in my teen years by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. You’d think I would have ended up writing fantasy, but fate intervened in the form of my mother, who often escaped the vagaries of life itself by reading wrist-bending historical fiction tomes. Lovely, I thought, you do you, but how can historical fiction be anywhere as transportive as Tolkien?

I found out one day when I bent my own wrists and picked up the book she'd left carelessly lying about. The clouds parted and God rays shone down on the pages of James Clavell's Shogun. Immediately, I was in 17th century Japan, immersed in a battle between light and dark, and an epically gorgeous love story that I still hold in a very special place in my heart. After that, I virtually haunted my small town library, searching out historical novels, learning more history than I did in school, and bonus—there were happy endings! I yearned to grow up fast and write historical adventure novels rife with battles between light and dark, where real people from history fell in forbidden love.

I should have gone straight to University and earned an MFA, but I was cursed with an obsessive interest in fashion (still am) and in 1979, my Singer sewing machine and I arrived in L.A. to attend fashion merchandising and design school. After graduating, I moved to Toronto and became a sometime model and sad disco queen, surviving a traumatic experience that haunts me to this day. If you want to know more about that, you’ll need to buy The Last Secret and—only after enjoying the story, mind—read my Author’s Note.

I lived in Toronto for 37 years, where I was variously an administrative assistant to the Treasurer of Ontario, a Registered Massage therapist, and a Craniosacral therapist. You guessed it, I soon became a crystal-wearing new ager, then a Certified Hypnotherapist who did past life regressions, taught women's empowerment workshops and Ovarian Kung Fu. In my spare time, I got married, had a wonderful daughter, and wrote short stories and novels that didn’t get published.

Fast forward to 2013, where I’d wisely unmarried the first husband and unwisely married the second, and my short stories did start getting published. Encouraged, I dove into researching and writing my first historical novel, Song of Batoche, a story close to my heart and also to my Métis intergenerational trauma. I almost gave up writing that story about Louis Riel and the Northwest Resistance of 1885, including the Métis women’s perspectives. But write it I did, and Song of Batoche was published by Ronsdale Press in 2017.

Here's a lovely video that Rogers Media did for Raven Reads (who picked Song of Batoche as their Winter 2018 Read for Reconciliation) in 2022, where I talk about my inspiration for writing historical novels and Song of Batoche:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkfatHgrJiw&ab_channel=RavenReads

In 2019, I moved to Vancouver Island with my family to return to my spiritual home and escape a malignant narcissist. I began writing a book, as one does when in desperate need for a happy ending, if not for me, then two other women based on real-life characters. Did you know that historical novelists basically, fundamentally, write dialogue for the dead?

You might think this is strange, but I didn’t realize that The Last Secret was my happy ending book (until my editor basically told me during edits), that I was writing through my own past experiences, to dramatize real-life women of history’s past experiences, women who lived through harrowing events and patriarchal oppression, and not only survived worse things than I did, but kicked hardship (and the patriarchy) in the teeth.

I'm finally living my happy ending, hiking the wilds of Vancouver Island with my family and a fierce little pug called Scout.