For more than forty years I made my living in the field of adult education and community development, although I have never seen these skills as ends in themselves, but rather as tools in the struggle toward social justice. One of those tools is writing. Along the way, I have co-authored five non-fiction books, including The Land of Milk and Money (with Pat Kerans and Lucien Royer), Development Education Basics and Tools (with Alyson Huntly, Susan Isaac, Maureen Johnson and Lily Mah-sen)  and Grassroots Leaders Building Skills (with Jeanne Fay). I am the author of another two, Becoming an Ally and Beyond Token Change.

There has always been the dream, however, of writing a novel. When Beyond Token Change was published in 2005, I had the feeling of  “now or never.” I joined Susan Haley’s creative writing course in the Adult Lifelong Learning program at Acadia University three times and then the Correspondence Program of the Humber School for Writers, where my mentor was Susan Swan. With ten years of work and huge support from the NS Humber writing group, Marla Dominey, Marina Harris and Bosko Loncarevic, and my winter writing buddy, Nina Newington, one novel is complete and another well under way. The first one, now titled Under the Bridge, won the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s H. R. (Bill) Percy Novel Award in 2016, and was published by Roseway in April 2019.