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 with our black 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.