About

 

Photo Credit: Gerry Kingsley, Studio Nine Eight, Sudbury.

I live and write in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. My publications include You Must Imagine The Cold Here (Your Scrivener Press, 1997), braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001), The Narcoleptic Madonna (Penumbra Press, 2012), Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017), and These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019).

My first literary mentor was the late Timothy Findley, through the Humber School for Writers, back in the late 1990s. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to him, and always will, because he helped me to realize that I was a writer above all else.

In 2016, I took part in a historical fiction intensive with Lawrence Hill at the Banff Centre in Alberta and visited Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, to work with brilliant poets John Glenday and Jen Hadfield as my mentors.

From 2016-18, I was named the fourth Poet Laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury, and was the first woman appointed to that role. As laureate, I worked with the Northern Initiative for Social Action (NISA) and Open Minds Quarterly (OMQ) to raise awareness of how creative writing, and poetry in particular, can help those with mental health struggles to rise up creatively. I also worked with the Greater Sudbury Airport to put up ‘airport poems’ on the windows of the security area. In addition, I collaborated with Health Sciences North to display stanzas of poems in the windows of the palliative, oncology, and long-term care wards of the North Tower.  Beyond the scope of my projects, though, I hope that I helped to raise the profile of the literary, poetic, theatrical, musical and visual arts in Sudbury.  One of my key goals was to bring a sort of ‘poetic graffiti’ to the city, so that people who normally don’t read poems were exposed to them in a playful manner.

In the last four years or so, I’ve fallen in love with writing plays, thanks to Playwrights’ Junction at the Sudbury Theatre Centre (STC), under the guidance and direction of Matthew Heiti. So far, I’ve had two short plays presented there in staged readings, Ghost of a Chance and Sparrows Over Slag. I’m continuing to work on my plays, and received an Ontario Arts Council Theatre Creators’ Reserve grant in January 2017 to work on “Sparrows” and get dramaturgical input on the piece.  Sparrows had a staged reading at the Sudbury Theatre Centre in May 2018 as part of the PlaySmelter New Work Theatre Festival (organized by Pat the Dog Theatre Creation). My first novel, a piece of historical fiction titled The Donoghue Girl, is now looking for a press to call its own.  So far, it’s still out there looking for a home. Currently, I’m taking time away from formal classroom teaching to write the draft for the second novel in the trilogy.

At present, in Spring 2019, I’ve received funding from the Ontario Arts Council Theatre Creators’ Reserve program to complete the first full draft of my play, Letters to the Man in the Moon.

In April 2019, I’ll be taking part in the Battle of the Bards at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, and reading in Windsor at Biblioasis on Friday, April 26. The Sudbury launch of my new book of poems will take place at Laurentian University on Thursday, April 11 at the Indigenous Sharing and Learning Centre.

In May 2019, I’ll be traveling to Newfoundland, to work on my writing projects, and to launch These Wings in St. John’s on May 16 at Broken Books.

I am a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and PEN Canada.  In my spare time, I love to cook for friends, travel, write, hike in the woods, canoe, snowshoe, and listen to (and sing!) traditional Irish music. I also practice yoga regularly, and love dancing. I mostly love to walk…wherever and whenever I can…but especially out in the woods because I love birds and trees.

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