My earliest memory is about sea and rocks. When I was four years old, a family friend and my mother drove to Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. I sat in the back seat while my mother complained about her life alone and the difficulty of looking after me. 

At the time, my father went away for six or seven months at a time on a hydrographic ship in Hudson’s Bay, specifically to the area around Chesterfield Inlet. He brought back Eskimo stone carvings and sealskin coats. 

Now I live in a place called Brentwood Bay, a one street village and streets of white settler families alongside four Indigenous reservations. A ferry takes cars and walkers across to Mill Bay and then on the highway up to North Vancouver Island.

It comes naturally to me to live on an island because I was born on one. I arrived on this planet in a small place called Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, U.K. I have been back twice, once to swim in the surf and enjoy the semitropical environment. 

Also, for about ten years my deceased husband and I divided our time between Calgary, Alberta, and Pender Island in the southern Gulf Islands. We owned two houses there and also a sloop, in which we cruised inland waters. 

My family life included my house in Chester, N.S. where I met some of what locals called “the Chester scribblers” and I published an interview with a famous diarist and diplomat, Charles Ritchie. 

My personal beliefs include pacificism and conflict resolution, neither of which is functioning well in the globe today. 

For many years, I taught courses in women's studies. Overall, I have shaped my life and my writing around two women writers, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

People watching is one of my favourite pursuits. Since I trained as a newspaper reporter, as well as completing three university degrees, I notice things, especially as I travel by float plane, buses, subways, boats, and planes.  I am saddened my the fact that we pay little attention to children, much downward study of phones,  and judge people by what they buy and consume. For me, that would be an obsession with books and bibliotherapy, which is learning how to solve problems through reading.