Hello! I am a writer, teacher, folklorist, journalist, mom, editor, audiobook aficionado, disability ally, and an expert salad dressing maker. I am a slow runner (like the slow food movement but with sneakers), I like bird-watching, and I believe that olives are an essential food group. That’s the abridged version—there’s more about me below.
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 few 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’ve taught courses on creative writing, research practices, communication and various genres of folklore. I mentored student, staff and faculty writers as Wilfrid Laurier’s Edna Staebler Writer in Residence and returned to the university’s Brantford campus to teach literary nonfiction. I went on to teach creative writing and communication in the sciences as a sessional lecturer at the University of Waterloo, which was exciting because some of my earliest memories take place on that campus, sitting in on my dad’s studio classes in the fine arts department.
And, I grew up to write about art and collaborate with visual artists! Last spring and summer I was the writer-on-site for a serial collaboration of twelve artists called A Hole in the Ground.
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.
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.