Works in Progress
My first published short story, Spring Fevers, appeared in Skylines, Mount Royal College Calgary March 1984: 3-21. A short story, Lost, from a collection of linked short stories on which I've worked for many years, with the working title "Blue Willow Stories" was published in Sulphur, Laurentian University's literary journal in 2012. It also appears in Gateways: A Collection of New Writing from Alumni of Fairleigh Dickinson University's MFA in Creative Writing, for which I was Chief Copy Editor. The story, Russian Ties, is published on-line in the May 2021 issue of Cannery Row Literary Journal. Other stories from this collection are under consideration by literary journals. These stories are linked by the theme the effects of war on ordinary people, the members or friends of one extended family, and the historic china pattern, Blue Willow.
A personal essay, Do My Impulses to Write and Garden Compare? appeared in Imagination in Action: Thoughts on Creativity, which is the first in a collection of essays on which I'm working that could be considered a memoir. Another essay, Celebrating Thirty Years of Conspiracies: One of Canada's Longest-running Reading Series was published in Write: The Magazine of the Writers' Union of Canada Issue 46.3 (2018). I am also working on a middle-grade novel with the working title, "Big Shore," about a young woman growing up in poverty on Lake Nipissing's shore, during the 1930's depression.
Funding Support
I would like to acknowledge support from The Ontario Arts Council, for a Works for Publication grant in support of The Burden of Memories published in May 2022. I have also received two Writers' Reserve grants for work on my short story collection, both from the Ontario Arts Council.