About

I grew up in a town on Lake Ontario's north shore, Oakville – this is a feature I wrote about its feel, its rituals for Toronto Life magazine.

After leaving there, I went to school … for a long time. At Dartmouth, I studied English and Russian, then, after a year of working, did a master's in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College (Dublin) and, finally, a law degree at the University of Toronto.

As an associate at a civil litigation firm in downtown Toronto, I practiced media and aviation law. Though the work was interesting, and I made good friends in law school and in the practice, a few years in, I exited, as gracefully as I could.

Transition projects: A play, Cruel Summer: The Extended Play Remix, produced at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, and two texts on privacy law (co-authored with Colin H.H. McNairn) — the cover of one is pictured.

If at first you don’t succeed … I found a new professional home at Toronto Life magazine, starting by fact-checking there, and then moved into editing and writing. I also found my people: storytellers, often rakish, vivid in various ways, passionate about their city and good writing. It was the first office I’d been in with dogs, plural. For five years, I wrote a column on the arts for the magazine, coming to grips with the work done by painters, singers, photographers, a prima ballerina, a composer, assorted novelists, actors, film-makers and one amazing puppeteer. I did cast one backward glance at my years in the practice: My Toronto Life piece about leaving the law was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

I've also worked as a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, an editor at Saturday Night (RIP) and a columnist at the Globe & Mail.

Since moving to the San Francisco-Bay Area, I've been writing features for various outlets and, recently, working on a book about my adopted hometown, Oldest San Francisco — just out from Reedy Press.

I also took up travel writing, going on assignment all over, from Argentina to Zambia and many points, alphabetically, in between — to Australia, Dubai, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Uruguay. Islands have been a preoccupation, with pieces on the Shetland Islands, Vancouver Island, Grenada, Hawaii, Cuba. My travel pieces have frequently made their way into anthologies — like the one pictured.

I always wanted to try my hand at fiction — to become, what I thought of as “a real writer”. And so I took draft pieces to workshops at Stanford and Berkeley, and to the writers’ conferences at Banff and Bread Loaf. One result: The first of two paired novels came out in 2022 (from Ace of Swords) — this one was called Until It Shimmers. I have received a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to work on the second, working title, The Freshman Book.

My husband David and I share a bungalow in Oakland. (This is David, or his arms at least, with our recently deceased, dearly beloved cat Robbie.)

Awards

My work has been nominated for 13 Canadian National Magazine Awards, winning three. The nods came in a wide range of categories: Profiles, Society, Arts & Entertainment, Columns and Business.

In the U.S., my articles have won a North American Travel Journalists' Association gold (for an article in enRoute on Germany's car city); a Bay Area Travel Writers' Best of 2016 award (for a piece in the Globe & Mail on San Francisco's tough, historic Tenderloin district); an Eureka! Award for Best Newspaper Travel Piece of 2016 (also for the Tenderloin article); in 2021, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers (for a feature, for Sunset magazine, on a trip to Clayoquot Sound); and, in 2023, a Solas Award, a gold in the Travel and Environment Category (for a piece, for Sierra magazine on the Western Monarch migration).

Teaching and Public Appearances

This is the syllabus of a travel writing class I recently taught at Stanford. I've also taught style and usage in the digital age, also at Stanford. I have led, from time to time, small workshops on travel writing, and guest lectured in classes on editing, on writing about the arts, on fact-checking, defamation and freedom of expression. I have been a guest on television and radio programs in Canada and the US. This is a short segment I did for NPR’s All Things Considered.