The Laurence Prize and Lineage

As a young woman living in Peterborough, Ontario, I never would have thought that one day I’d move to Margaret Laurence’s home province of Manitoba. If a fortune teller had also muttered in my ear that I’d win a prize named after her for my second novel, I might have been skeptical too (yet also […]

Lie Down Within the Night: Behind My CBC Longlisted Poems

Last spring, and earlier, in the previous winter and fall, I wrote some poems about my brother. One came in the night, in a tent, camped on the rocky shore of the arm of Simonhouse Lake that leads into Second Cranberry as J. and I were pushing into wilderness on a canoe trip. The next […]

A Walk In the Woods (and a Giveaway!)

In Calgary, this past spring, I had the real pleasure of reading Leo Brent Robillard‘s fourth novel, The Road to Atlantis. The publisher had asked me to blurb it, which means to give it a tidbit of praise they can use on the cover, and I’m usually careful with these things so I didn’t agree until I’d […]

Island Clearances: Behind the Poem

Last spring, I had the great privilege of being mentored by the poet Jan Zwicky at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, along with seven other extraordinary writers. For those two weeks, I sifted through a manuscript-in-process about my great-great-grandparents’ 19th-century migration from present-day St. Catharines, up the Niagara escarpment, to Manitoulin Island. Along the way, […]

And the winner is…

Me! This morning the phone rang and a wonderful woman from down south in Winnipeg told me I’d won, actually won, and FIRST PRIZE at that, the Prairie Fire Fiction contest! Holy crap, I think I said! Not very genteel but, you know, as a writer you send off a lot of stuff. Submit, submit, […]