I believe the best stories tell us who we are and who we can become. 

My story begins on the shores of Georgian Bay, on an apple farm in an idyllic valley. After two decades of rural life, I left home and travelled to Mexico, the West Coast and France before putting down roots in Hamilton, Ontario. In this proud, gritty, “Steel City” I’ve found inspiration in the local arts incubators and hope in the vibrant faith networks. I’ve had the privilege to work in the intersection of these worlds and contribute to the flourishing of many creative efforts as a teacher, writer, story coach and community builder.

When not sitting around a boardroom table, I can be found tucked under the eaves of my bedroom office, writing my own stories and trying to figure out who I am and who I can become. I claimed my story began here in Canada, north of the city where I now reside, but like so many other people, my story is wrapped up in a larger narrative that goes back decades and crosses oceans.

Growing up on a steady diet of WWII literature, everything from The Diary of Anne Frank to Starring Sally J. Freeman as Herself, I believed the world was divided into good and evil, the Nazis and everybody else. As my bookshelf expanded beyond this narrow lens, I began to consider class, colonialism and what WWII stories remained to be excavated. My research took me from rural villages to European capitals, from garden plots to graveyards, from my own family history to far flung camps in eastern Europe. This journey through personal memoirs and fragile correspondence alongside  the “official data” broke my heart. There were so many incomplete stories. I began to see the enduring legacy of WWII as an attempt to give voice to the millions of lives cut short, a way to imagine what could have been.  

Today, as I contemplate the scale of untold stories, of marginalized voices, I am deeply humbled. I am committed to elevating the stories of the oppressed, of those on the margins. This is the tradition I was raised in and hope to pass on to my children. I believe that when we inhabit one another’s stories on the page, we begin to belong to one another in the flesh.

Sometimes working on heavy, ambitious projects can get, well, heavy. A couple years ago, to give myself a break from my WWII novel, I began to write a series of vignettes about small town life. 

The “Valley Hardware” stories revolve around Lorne, a city guy who’s inherited a hardware store from his ex-wife’s late father. (Yes, it’s convoluted. That’s sort of the point.) He’s come to love small-town living in the cozy apartment above the store he shares with his new wife, the Reverend Monica. Across the street, his ex, Sharanne, runs a successful beauty salon. Hopping between these two worlds is Ella, the product of Lorne and Sharanne’s teenage romance, a girl whose head is always in the clouds, birdwatching. Between farmers and townies, city folk and hippie nomads, the stories of life in the Valley portray unlikely souls becoming friends, and the kind of community I think each of us long for, a place where we truly belong.

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Want to know what I think about politics, books, faith, my mother, WWII and a bunch of other stuff? Check out my blog, the virtual version of me slapping my hand on the dinner table.

Here in beautiful Hamilton, Ontario, I’ve contributed to the Globe and Mail, the Hamilton Spectator, the Christian Courier and the New Quarterly.

In the spring of 2019, I placed second in the Toronto Star Short Fiction contest with a story titled North of Us. This story was the inciting incident (hello writer nerds, I see you!) of my “first” novel, a manuscript that took on some Frankenstein-esque qualities and now sits in a drawer, but whose protagonist I still dearly love. Enjoy meeting Judy and Ray, as they try to figure out if there’s something to save after an affair.

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Cover photography Hibma Photography