My story

I’ve loved reading and writing since I was a child. Growing up in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, the English-section of my small-town library was tiny and the English children’s section was miniscule. Needless to say, I read literally ALL the books. I then got a special dispensation from the librarians to take books out from the grownup section. Am I bragging about this? Yes. At any rate, the gateway to the adult section allowed me to power through every single Agatha Christie novel and attempt some confusing forays into Jackie Collins.

I studied English literature at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where I worked as a bouncer and cocktail waitress at the student pub, The Swinging Axe Lounge. I did my Masters in English lit and started my PhD at the University of Western Ontario in London Ontario. London is located on the Thames River and I lived on both Regent Street and PallMall Street.

I had a great time in London [Ontario] where I worked as a bartender at the Grad Club. Did I spend my quiet Sunday afternoon shifts reading Beowulf and other course work? Yes. Did I also find inventive ways to “fully load” a baked potato? Also, yes.

Sick of being broke and unmotivated to continue my PhD, I applied for a job at Canada’s national archives. I didn’t know what an archives was, and had never set foot in one, but it appealed to my interest in history and vague idea that I’d learn some juicy secrets. I took my eyebrow ring out for the interview in Toronto, and sallied forth, a newly minted professional with no “radical” piercings.

Archives are super interesting, and archivists (and librarians!) are great people. My eyebrow ring would have been FINE. A couple of weeks into landing the job, I was photocopying contact cards of the Yukon Gold Rush and a tall, bespectacled nerd in a sweater vest came along and started flirting. I married him five years later.

Newly arrived in Ottawa, I hooked up with an Adult-Ed writing course and through that I met some excellent critiquing partners. They have been telling me to stop going for the cheap joke for more than twenty years now.

My husband and I moved to Belgium because he got a job being the NATO archivist (who knew?) and we lived the expat life for almost three years. In Belgium, I returned to my PhD and wrote 460 pages about the representation of disability in Canadian novels of the First World War. If you give me even the slightest opening, I will talk about this subject for hours.

I got pregnant, we moved back home, bought a house, had a baby and returned to work at the national archives.

The murder mystery I wrote while living overseas was a finalist in the Canadian Crime Writer’s Association Unhanged Arthur Award, but despite attending the gala dinner in Toronto, I didn’t win the prize.

I landed part-time gigs teaching about archives and information at both Carleton University and Ottawa University. After about five years, and feeling the itch to live abroad again, I lined up a one-year contract being the archivist in The Hague for the United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (who knew?) and we moved overseas again.

When the year was up, we came back home, got a dog, and I got into gardening. These days I’m back at the national archives (now called Library and Archives Canada), my garden is not great, the dog is fantastic and after twenty + years of trying, THE HONEYBEE EMERALDS, my debut novel, weaving in expat experiences, archives, mystery, love, humour and fabulous and inspiring divas, was published in March 2022.

Cherry on the sundae? That mystery novel that was a 2008 finalist in the Crime Writer’s of Canada Unhanged Arthur Award? Was published in 2022 under its new title, THE FOULEST THINGS.