The longer version

I am a Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English and Film at Wilfrid Laurier University. I’ve taught courses on creative writing, the creative process, science communication and various genres of folklore as well as introduction to English literature. I also coordinate the Edna Staebler Awards at WLU which includes a creative nonfiction prize and writer-in-residence program. Years before taking on this role, I served as the 2018 writer-in-residence and during that time I wrote the first story of my essay collection, Ordinary Wonder Tales. The story was later featured on CBC IDEAS.

I have worked as a freelance writer for two decades and my narrative nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in Guernica, Longreads, The Walrus, The Rumpus, The Literary Review of Canada and The Toronto Star among other publications. I am a five-time National Magazine Award nominee (I won Silver in 2014 and Gold in 2023), a Digital Magazine Award nominee, and years ago a bizarre story I wrote about a radioactive house won an Alberta Magazine Award.

I have a doctorate in folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and for my field research I relocated to a small outport community on the island’s east coast to record the arrival narratives of local and seasonal residents, analyzing these texts using the motifs and characters of traditional folk tales.

Following my PhD, I drew on my folklore background and my evolving knowledge of disability and ableism in my first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes, which was nominated for the Kobo First Book Award, a British Columbia Book Prize, and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a Globe and Mail Best Book.

My second book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, about creativity and aging, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire.

My third book, a collection of essays called, Ordinary Wonder Tales, was reviewed favourable (yay! thank you critics!) across Canada and the US and listed as a top book of 2022 by the Globe and Mail and The Telegram and it was a finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction!

I have been on many, many literary prize juries including the Kobo Emerging Writers Prize and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Why do I do this? Because I love reading. Sometimes I think reading is the only thing I’m truly good at.

I run creative writing workshops for people of all ages and backgrounds. One of my best experiences was running a three-day workshop for the CNIB Writing with Feeling: Braille Writing Retreat for kids between the ages of six and 18 at CNIB Lake Joe. I finally found a way to revisit my summer camp days!

Finally, I’m a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and live in Kitchener, Ontario with my husband, an ecology professor at the University of Waterloo, and our two amazing kids. My children appear often in my writing, sometimes because they are interrupting me and other times because I’m their mother and find them endlessly interesting so they make their way into my nonfiction narratives. So far, they have not objected to this.