Read More

Cherry red armour

I had a boyfriend once who said “sometimes when you talk I just watch your bright red lips move.” I wasn’t even insulted. I could probably trace every tube of red lipstick I own to an […]

Read More

Flipping the bird

Getting the finger from an 8 year. Is that funny or fucked up? When you work with kids you learn it can be both. Sometimes it has to be. Her tiny little hand shaking in rage. […]

Read More

One day and then another

This past week was pretty hard for me. Even after sixteen years of working with vulnerable kids, kids beaten up by poverty, cultural genocide and addiction, it is still hard to know that a kid who is talking about suicide can’t get a bed in a hospital for a night. To know that when you call for help for a kid what you’re going to get is cops with guns questioning them. Some cops are nice and some are not but everything about them: their handcuffs, their tazers, tell a kid they’re in trouble.  And after they talk to the kid they will more than likely leave them behind because they know when they get to the hospital they won’t admit them.  “I’m happy to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours until they send her home,” the cop tells me. “But my boss is not going to like it.”  Sometimes even if the hospital takes them they release them a few hours later in a taxi alone.

It’s like a kid coming to you with a broken arm and having to tell them: It’s not broken enough.

Blue (pill) Christmas

That year my room-mate Francois was a med school drop out who was studying pharmacology, both academically and personally. He had drugs for waking up, falling asleep, calming down and perking up. Still it never occurred […]

Read More

About me

As a child I went to nearly a dozen different schools and lived in several communes and a cult. A childhood weird enough to write a book about. As an adult I’ve  worked as a telephone solicitor, bartender, […]

Read More

Writing credits

Books Red Star Tattoo My Life as a Girl Revolutionary (Penguin Random House Canada 2016) Winner of the 2017 Edna Staebler Creative Non-Fiction Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 Hilary Weston Creative Non-Fiction prize Listed on CBC, National […]