I swear I have premonitions. Something told me that today’s presentation wouldn’t go right. Something told me that I should check on the address of Maple Leaf P.S., but did I listen? Nope. They’d invited me to present a little story and hand out certificates at their recognition assembly. It was an assembly where they’d be […]

Today I went to a school about half an hour outside Toronto and presented ESL to Author to a group of grades six, seven and eights. ESL stands for English as a Second Language. Basically I talked about how I was an ESL student when I first arrived in Canada. For me to become an […]

is why did I become an author. The answer is simple and two-fold. The first and foremost reason is because I love stories. Ever since I was a kid I loved stories. I grew up during a time when teachers still read Bible stories to the class. I didn’t have a problem with that, and […]

It seems I’ve gotten rusty at writing picture books. It’s so weird. It’s the genre I started with and now it’s giving me a lot of trouble. I think I know why. When I first started writing I quickly realized that picture books were a lot harder than I thought they were, so I switched over to novels, wrote […]

Just found out that the illustrator of one of my books, Coming to Canada/A New Life  died. Never met her, but her work really moved me. She was an Iranian immigrant, came to Canada and lived here with her beloved husband for a while. He was an architect and died in a tragic accident a […]

A while ago some scientists did an experiment on putting some people in a kind of earth dome where they were sealed in and had to grow their own food and live off what they could produce. It was its own little microcosm and unfortunately pretty soon food began to run short. People lived on a […]

is that they’ll just be polite and say they liked your work. And feedback is crucial. It’s because you can get too close to your story and not see whether or not what you’re trying to say is really getting through to others. I feel like I’m writing a tutorial for goodness sakes! And the […]

My granddaughter came over to visit tonight.  We went for a walk before it got too late, her, my daughter and my grandson. She’s only three and I thought the two kilometre walk I normally take would be too much for her, but she’s such a little trooper, she had no problems keeping up. She even insisted on pushing the stroller […]

One of my friends has disagreed with my theory on confident people. It was bound to happen. I even said I wasn’t sure my theory had any merit. She said:  “…your theory was very interesting, though I don’t think it’s completely true. I know many people who are very confident but are also mean to others. […]

I had an interesting exchange on the internet the other day, on that politics forum that I frequent. Basically this elderly man from Winnipeg suggested that Muslim women wear hijab basically to stand out. To distinguish themselves, and if all the women in Canada started wearing the hijab, then we would instead go bare-headed. I’m […]