Labbaika la shareeka laka labbaik. Innal hamda wal ni’matha laka wal mulk, laa shareeka lak. This is the chant that all pilgrims going for hajj, going to visit God’s house in Mecca, make. It means: Here I am, O Allah, at Your service; here I am at Your service. Here I am at Your service. […]

All this talk about bullying has me thinking. At first I thought I’d write a book, a non-fiction book, kind of a how-to guide for all those geeky nerdy bullied kids that remind me of myself when I was growing up. But then I thought what kid would pick up a book like that? It would […]

Yesterday I just got another rejection from a publisher out west for my controversial teen novel. That in itself is of course not remarkable. What was remarkable, was that it was a FORM rejection! And this after a number of interesting phone calls back and forth, and after I’d been considerate enough to include a […]

Last week my husband ordered the Al Jazeera English channel from our cable provider and I must say wow! This is not a commercial for Al Jazeera, but rather a lament at what CNN has become and a further lament to the lack of depth in most North American media. When CNN is still dithering […]

I went up to Ottawa on Monday. It was another beautiful fall day. Did I mention that fall is my favourite season? And yet it was bittersweet. So many memories! There’s a picture in our old family albums of me and my sisters and brother, at the picnic area on the shores of Silver Lake. I […]

It’s Thanksgiving weekend in Canada and a fall tradition with my family has always been to go on the studio tour up in the Haliburton Highlands. It’s a region of middle Ontario that is known for it’s spectacular fall colours and protuding bits of the Canadian shield. (I can’t even say it’s in Northern Ontario because it’s only […]

They say that the eavesdropper never hears anything good about himself, but there can be exceptions to that. Just found out that my book Wanting Mor has been nominated for the Red Dot Award. What has been happening is that many of the international schools, in order to foster a greater love of literacy and […]

Today I did a presentation at Seneca College, Newnham campus, to a group of students in a children’s literature class. That wouldn’t be very significant except that in 1980-1982 around, I went to Seneca College, at that same campus, to study what I thought would be my life’s career: biological chemical technology. To say that […]