Blog: Notes From the Blanket Fort

Dinner with friends I don’t see enough – one of them a friend I first met 37 years ago – someone I knew when I was impressionable and young (you were never impressionable…and some days it feels like you were never young….) She was a mentor to me, as well as a friend, and I don’t think she even knows it. A crucial three…
Read more

Friends,  The wait is over. I am delighted to announce that The Date Square Dharma, my second novel and the sequel to The Kitchen Sink Sutra, is available now. I’m really proud of it and I think it will make the perfect addition to your late summer reading list. If you’d like a copy (print or ebook), you can buy one on Amazon here…
Read more

Lovely people, Well, against all odds and a few predictions, I survived the last bit of the school year (shout out to all my educator peeps for making it through another year!) and now I am on vacation, at my teeny tiny cottage on the shores of Georgian Bay. Gavin and I came early and got settled and then Mariann joined us for two…
Read more

You guys. Today, at 2:32 pm EDT, I wrote the last sentence of my second novel, The Date Square Dharma. Twenty eight chapters, 114,553 words, many cups of coffee and a whole lot of work, but there it is. A completed first draft. I feel proud, excited, and tired, in that order. There’s still tons of editing to do, there are covers to finalize,…
Read more

Can I tell you about Lucy Boxer? No, not the fictional one who lives with Nana and Mort and Ophelia in Stafford Falls. I mean, the real Lucy Boxer, the one I knew and loved and who inspired the fictional one. My partner is a dog walker and she specializes in individual walks which means that usually the dogs she takes on neighbourhood rambles…
Read more

I’m in the in between these days. It’s not quite spring here, but it’s also not quite winter anymore – although the ten inches of ice in my driveway might beg to differ. It’s sunny and things are starting to melt and you can feel the sun on your skin for the first time in months, but then the next day it snows, thick…
Read more

Exactly a year ago today, I wrote the following sentence: “So, apparently, I have a blog now. Trust me, no one is more surprised than I am…” This sentiment is still true, twelve months on – I am constantly amazed to be in possession of a blog. (Small confession: I am an intensely private person who was once honoured by The International Association of…
Read more

Let me start by saying that I grew up in a place where it snowed in a serious way. We measured the ferocity of any given snowstorm not in centimetres fallen or km/h gusted, but by whether or not we could still see the neighbours. The wind could be blowing the roof right off the house, great drifts of snow could be burying the…
Read more

I forgot how long a chapter can take. I forgot how you start off and then you realize you don’t know where you’re going and then you figure it out, but then pretty soon, you get lost again and that this is basically how the whole book goes, over and over. I forgot how much you doubt yourself. I forgot how deep-down-in-your-bones wonderful it…
Read more

I am not ashamed to say that I wept a little today when I read that the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver had died of lymphoma at 83. I’d never met her, but like all great poets and writers, she made me feel like I knew her – like we went for long walks in the woods together as friends, remarking on the…
Read more