From the category archives:

A Writer’s Life

The Perfect Day (memoir)

February 2, 2013

This  piece, published in Carte Blanche,  centres on a day out with two nonagenarians: one of the last excursions my parents and I took together.  http://carte-blanche.org/the-perfect-day/    

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How it Grows (memoir)

November 16, 2011

This article about emigration, gardening and family, was first published in Aqua Magazine, p28 on.   Click to  read it in the turning pages magazine format  with original illustrations. The text is below. What I am planting, how it grows In one of those windy, sunny days when  the light and sound levels are in constant [...]

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Lost & Found

May 3, 2011
Hunting Fossils

It’s with some trepidation that I stuff my suitcase with copies of my latest novel  and set out for Lost and Found: In Search of Extinct Species, an Explora International Conference at the Toulouse Natural History Museum. The last time I  attended an academic conference was during my research for The Find. The 2005 Symposium [...]

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Coming Undone

January 16, 2011
Hornby Island Pterosaur

It’s unsettling when life imitates art,  and a story you have written starts to happen around you.   For example, shortly after I finished the Story of My Face, I met the teenage version of my character, Natalie, in a motel swimming pool near Vancouver airport.   She was called something else and she was in [...]

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Lifestory

January 16, 2011
The Story of Life, by Lorriane Mallach

Thinking ahead to an illustrated talk I’ll give in March, I was leafing through a box of research materials for The Find, and came across this image, a detail From The Story of Life by Lorraine Malach. The post card was pinned to my office wall  for at least two years while I wrote the [...]

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Vanished: a thousand words for my mum (memoir)

January 8, 2011
Kathy and Madge Page 1963 thumbnail

In the “bio” section of this site,  written way-back-when, I begin by suggesting that  that my desire to write springs from “my father’s love of books and my mother’s habit of exaggeration.”  It’s true that these were both huge influences.  I remember Dad, on his birthday, giving me Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, [...]

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Fate of the Book: Fear Not, Beware, Some Great Art & One Happy Man

November 10, 2010
Carare Barer's book art

  Is the (paper) book dead?  What is its fate?  Will writers survive?   Will the next generation read? And if so, which platform/reader will they use? These questions, along with related topics (blogging, how to promote your book using social media etc.) were hot  panel topics at the book festivals I recently attended, rivalling [...]

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Seven Minutes

August 16, 2010
Image form the jacket of The Find

Here is a  brief  reading from The Find made for a book club site.  I postponed making it because I expected, and dreaded, techno-trauma, but it turned out to be very easy – I simply talked to  my laptop about my two main characters, read a little from the novel and and then saved the [...]

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Book Club

August 10, 2010
readers

It was because of a woman I met while accompanying some guests on a sailboat tour that I became  anxious about the local book club visit I’d agreed to. I started to think how the noun club has two meanings. A group, yes… but also  a weapon. I’ll call her Jen: fiftyish, fit,  designer spectacles, retired. [...]

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“It’s because of your book that I’m going in for surgery next week.”

July 20, 2010
Quercus garryana

I’m sitting in the shade of a Garry oak tree with a group of other parental units, as our children call us these days. Clare, the grandmother of one of my son’s friends, (one of those fresh-faced grandmothers who look five years younger than I do), looks up from her book and turns to me. [...]

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