It’s been really amazing to me how people across the world have come to know about my work. I once was interviewed by a lovely Italian lady  named Monica who was kind enough to even send me a postcard of the place where she lives in Portofino in Ligutia. She said how she wanted to […]

For the first time in about 22 years, hubby and I went away alone for the weekend! The girls of course are married and gone, but my seventeen year old son’s always been around till this weekend, but he was away, camping, so hubby and I packed up our stuff and headed east towards the […]

And my brain feels like mush. Omigosh have I ever matured in the way I deal with people. A while ago, a contentious issue arose during some discussions I was having with some people where it was myself against everyone else in the room. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to defend my perspective like […]

discombobulated from the murky depths of adult literature! One question. How does anyone read that stuff? Especially the LITERATURE! 90% of the stuff I read was purple prose. Writers trying to be fancy. Yuk! And I read an essay by a poet who actually said that one of the things a poet does is flirt […]

The first time I’d ever heard of Norman Bethune was probably in passing in Grade nine history. Mr. Regan, our very handsome history teacher, let us choose different topics to present to the class, and one of the topics was Dr. Norman Bethune. I didn’t pick that one. I picked something about the Palestinian/Israeli situation, […]

Oprah said luck is preparation meeting opportunity. And somewhere else I heard that it’s really good to ‘develop in the dark’. That is, use the years that you are unknown, to hone your skills, so that when the spotlight shines on you, you’re ready to shine back. And I think it was while I was watching the […]

On Friday I got one of those characteristic thick envelopes that always signals that a teacher has assigned her students to write me a letter after one of my presentations. This was from a school up north I visited a while back. It was odd too, because I’ve often judged how well a presentation has […]