FAQs

Born March 12, 1951, Santa Cruz, California (of Canadian parents.) I am a fourth generation Vancouver Islander. I grew up near Victoria, British Columbia, in a cottage we called The Vinegar Jug, after the Grimm’s fairy tale.

Being alone. Reading. Playing with my imaginary friends and my imaginary horses.

Pookie Puts the World Right – about a rabbit with wings who is kicked out of the bunny warren because he is different. I identified.

Yes and no. My father read to me every night, but when I got older and started writing poetry it was seen as a subversive act and I felt highly disapproved of. Which is why I kept doing it, of course.

Teachers played an important role in my development as a writer. When I was in kindergarten I had once been sent out of the classroom for the crime of laughing (my friend tickled me), to sit it out on “The Thinking Chair”. In Grade 3 I kicked an apple core in line and spent my detention in the library. The message I got throughout my formative years? “Thinking is bad. So are books.” 

I started writing when I was in the fourth grade. Horse stories with tragic endings. I set my tales in Ireland and all my characters spoke with a brogue – because my teacher, Peter Seale, was Irish, and handsome, and I was secretly in love with him. I wrote epics for him, because I just knew he had nothing better to do in his life than go home after school and read my tragedies while his wife peeled potatoes. I admired him, too, because he was a rebel: he didn’t “follow the curriculum” as some parents complained, and he let me spend the whole day writing my compositions because, he said, “that’s what you’re good at.”

When I was older I started listening to Bob Dylan, and that’s when I began writing poetry, partly because I was so bored at school. Poetry was a kind of rebellious act. It was a way for me to channel anger, grief, sadness, confusion – and still is. 

I was a romantic. I wrote poems set in ghettos in Chicago, odes to drowned cigarette butts in cups of cold coffee. I called my poems “Ode to Existence” and “Futility #16 in Blue”. I wrote poems full of words I couldn’t pronounce – “Evolutionary Obsequies,” for example. The poem itself rolled off the tongue a bit more easily. “Life is like a candle. Blow it and it’s gone.”

In Grade 8 I began forging notes from my parents demanding I be released from all forms of Physical Education, especially gymnastics. My forgeries were so successful that the word got around, and soon everyone was paying me to excuse them from Math, Science, English, and, especially, gymnastics. I made enough money to invest in a shipment of Orange Barrel Acid, which I planned to sell to my friends who skipped school in the hopes of finding a less excruciatingly boring way to waste a Spring afternoon.

In Grade 8 I penned a series of rhyming couplets about Jackie Kennedy visiting JFK’s grave by moonlight, and won a prize. I was awarded with a copy of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . I’ve always wondered if the teacher who chose this book was the same one who taught us about irony.

I had just celebrated my sixteenth birthday – locked in Room 0 of the psychiatric wing at a Victoria hospital (I had a nervous breakdown after dropping too much of the LSD I’d decided not to sell to my friends) – when Robin Skelton, a poet and creative writing teacher at the University of Victoria, came to visit me; he had met my psychiatrist at a cocktail party. Previously, I had babysat his three young children, but we had spoken only casually. I remember being in awe of his house because there was art, modern art on the walls, and books everywhere. At least thirty of the books were ones Robin himself had written. I remember touching them, as if some of their magic might rub off. 

At the hospital Robin asked to see some of my work. After reading a handful of my poems, he told me, “You’re not mad, you’re a poet.” He published six of those early poems in The Malahat Review , and with my $100 earnings I bought my first typewriter. Subsequently he insisted that he simply pointed me in the direction my life was meant to be taking. 

I have never reached a point where I felt I was “good enough to be published”. I have just always written. Robin Skelton told me to start sending my work out to other literary magazines, which I did.   He said as a writer you have to get used to rejection. Five of the seven magazines I submitted to, accepted poems. This seemed to me like some kind of miracle! 

I still question whether my poems are “good enough”. I hope I always do. (I can only make each one as good as it can be for what it is. I try not to compare myself to other writers, but often when I find a poet I think is “great”, I am intimidated enough to stop writing poetry for a while. If I were a wholly strong, secure person, I probably wouldn’t write!)

Songs of the Sea Witch was published in 1970 by Sono Nis Press. I was 19. I sent a copy to my grandfather, who had read the Classics at Oxford. He wrote back to me, “Even Shakespeare had to write a lot of rubbish to begin with.” A backhanded, but very high, compliment.

I like to have the house to myself. I can’t stand noise – a clock ticking or a dog barking next door.

I write poems longhand in pen or pencil. I type second drafts (I do up to 100 drafts sometimes) on a computer. Journalism and fiction I often type directly onto the computer.

Some of my poems are “autobiographical” and in others the “I” is a persona. Most of my poems have parts that are “made up”. By the time I finish a poem it has become more real than the event, situation or person that sparked it! That is, the poem is a truth in itself, regardless of the “real” truth.

These change all the time. I’ve loved and been influenced by Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Stevie Smith, Tom Wayman, Al Purdy, Patrick Lane, Stephen Dobyns, Sharon Olds, George MacBeth, Brian Patten, to name a few. Paul Durcan, Tell Gallagher, Ai, Norman Dubie, Lorna Crozier, Anne Sexton……. 

I draw my inspiration from what I read, from my personal experiences, from my dreams, from travelling, from love, death, loss, grief, my kids – you name it. I get ideas from stories people tell me, things I overhear on a crowded streetcar. From everything all around me.

The poem or novel I am working on at the moment is what means most to me. The one I’m struggling with. Books that are published, strangely, have very little meaning to me. I check to see if my name is spelled right on the cover, that sort of thing. I like the feel and the look of a book that’s been produced well. But the content? It’s almost as if someone else has written it.

Characters evolve the longer you live with them. They may start out based on real people but they turn into their own selves with their own lives after a while. Real people are too complex to be rendered into characters in books!

Sure, I enjoy performing. But most of all I like being alone, writing. I think it’s good to have the contrast. If I never left my office I’d get bored, and if I was always appearing in public I’d hate it.

In Hawaii (as a child), Vancouver Island, the west of Ireland, England, Panama, Colombia, and Haida Gwaii.

In a seven-sided house on the banks of the Sangan River on Haida Gwaii. I still have The Treehouse on Vancouver Island (in North Saanich), built by a poet in 1928, around a 400-year-old, 200-foot-tall Douglas fir tree, which still grows through the middle of the house.

In the fall of 1984, when I was Writer-in-Residence   at the University of Waterloo, I received a manuscript from a convicted bank robber. I read the manuscript and fell in love with the novel’s protagonist. I began to correspond with Stephen Reid, who wrote the book, while he was serving a twenty-year sentence for a gold heist in Ottawa. I worked as his editor, and his novel, Jackrabbit Parole was published in 1986, the same year we were married in a maximum security prison. Stephen was released on full parole in June of 1987. In 1999, addicted to heroin and cocaine, he robbed a bank and was sentenced to 18 years.

I have two daughters, Charlotte (born 1982) and Sophie (1989). (Sophie died on September 8, 2021 of an accidental overdose of Fentynal and Benzos.) Charlotte has two daughters, Beatrice and Lucca, born September 16, 2009.

My father, Edward, died in 1985. I had an amazing mother, Judy (we travelled to Ireland together every year; Mum died in 2019 at the age of 93. ) I have two brothers, Robert and Anthony and a sister, Mary.

I have none. I like to quote the Hindu saying: “Keep your eye on the fire at the beginning and have no destination.” I hope each book I write is a little better than the last, that I have learned something in the process of reading and writing over the years. I write because I love the process, not for fame or money. I make a good living from writing but I have to do about ten jobs – editing, teaching, giving readings and speeches, judging contests, etc. My actual income from the writing itself is very small.

I don’t make plans. The future comes soon enough.