I write novels, stories, and personal essays. Whatever the form, I hope to craft work that is absorbing, funny, and serious — as is life.
If Sylvie Had Nine Lives is now available as an audiobook. Look for it wherever you buy or borrow audiobooks.
Award-winning writer
My novel-in-stories, If Sylvie Had Nine Lives won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, the High Plains Book Award for Short Stories, and the John V Hicks Manuscript Award. My stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including American Short Fiction (where Chapter 2 of If Sylvie Had Nine Lives won the story prize) and The Journey Prize Stories. My first book, Sightlines, a collection of interlocking stories that form a portrait of a town, won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Excerpts from my novel The Art of Salvage, a story about messing up and finding hope, were shortlisted for novella awards on both the east and west coasts of Canada. Personal essays have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United States, and won creative nonfiction awards from the CBC and Prairie Fire Magazine.
The wall above my desk
Where I write
My favourite places to write are at my home in Saskatoon, in Treaty 6 territory; in a cabin in the boreal forest; and at the winter writers’ retreat sponsored by the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and held at St. Peter’s Abbey, a century-old Benedictine monastery on the prairie. A quiet place to write, yes, and also to stand in the orchard and watch for owls, cross-country ski, skate, walk in the woods, build a quinzhee (and sleep in it on a frigid winter night if you dare, and I have), feed chickadees and nuthatches from the palm of your hand, and visit with other writers.
Sunrise from the abbey’s guest wing
A late-comer to writing
I came to writing after a varied career that included work as a freelance editor, adult education program developer, librarian, waitress, and garment factory worker. A few days after I defended my thesis for a Master of Continuing Education, my family and I moved to Australia for a year. I was in my late thirties, at home with a toddler. The first of the stories that would appear in Sightlines, were drafted in a small house just over the dunes from a beach in Perth, Australia. Though they were written in a setting that offered a breeze off the Indian Ocean, these first stories had to do with children lighting fires in Saskatchewan pastures and digging deep dark holes in backyards in a small prairie town. Sometimes you have to be far away to see the important things about home.
When I’m not writing
I’m a keen cyclist, cross-country skier, hiker, paddler, camper. A reader, too, of course. And I try to be sure to dance a little every day, often in my kitchen to whatever music’s coming through my headphones.
Experienced editor, mentor and workshop leader
I’ve served as writer-in-residence at Stegner House in Saskatchewan and Mackie Lake House in British Columbia, and as a mentor for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in Writing. I’ve taught workshops for colleges, high schools, writing groups, and community organizations. My two areas of emphasis as a mentor are to challenge writers to delve below surfaces and to find their own ways to bring scenes and sentences to life.