About

I was born and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Traveling at age 11 to Vancouver and Disneyland with my grandmother instilled a love of travel. As a college student I traveled through Italy and France, and across Canada by bus and train, fishing boat and hitchhiking.
After college I traveled to Europe and across the Soviet Union on the TransSiberian railway. Crossing the Sea of Japan from Vladivastok to Osaka, I studied in Japan, then traveled back to North America by way of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Hawaii. My travels took me to Europe, India (where I worked with a medical missionary treating lepers in Kashmir) and Asia (where I studied batik, and taught in Hong Kong and in Beijing).

Returning to North America, I worked as a reference librarian in the Canadian Consulate in New York and also studied photography at the International Center of Photography. After the retirement of my husband, we moved to Bennington, Vermont where we thrive on hiking, kayaking, cross-country skiing and other outdoor activities with the local Green Mountain Club as well as involvement in Second Congregational Church and the community’s Restorative Justice program. I am a member of the ShapeShifters Improvisional Dance troupe which has performed around Bennington, including at the museum, at Bennington College, at the JuneArts! Celebration, and which has offered liturgical dance accompanied by my poetry.

Over time I have documented this life thru paintings, photography, and poetry — I present some of these here.

POET

I believe that my first poem was my rhyming verses expressing the anger and frustration with which my teenage self hiked down into the river bank forest not far from our house and how nature calmed me. Not long afterwards I was moved to write quatrain verses honoring the emergence of the transient loveliness of crocus in spring. Half a century later, I still have that tribute to crocus' evanescent beauty, my immature handwriting on looseleaf paper. Throughout my twenties and later decades, poetry became my vehicle for processing angst and psychological pain, particularly after I somehow stumbled into a twentieth century American poetry course at Carleton University in Ottawa, the city where I was living and working. I still recall my excitement at discovering William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman and others - models for my urge to express myself. While living in China, I wrote a number of free verse celebrations of what I saw and experienced; I submitted a selection of these to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and they were read on the radio; my parents made a cassette of the reading for me to hear later after I returned to Canada. Recently, a long hiatus in my writing poetry ended when I joined the Catamount Lane Poets, a group in Bennington whose members meet to read and criticize each other's poems, as well as to talk about poetry, rhyme,and meter. Poetry-writing may be a solitary act, but I found involvement in the group has stimulated me to create new poems, after years of simply re-working my old ones.

WRITER

I first started writing a journal in a girly-pink, plastic-covered book and found I could process experiences of my life more satisfyingly by writing about them than by percolating them in my mind, particularly the troubling and unhappy times of my life. But most of my journal writing has been during my travels because of the intensity of experiences and my attempt to retain as well as process them. Travel provided the stimulus for my writing letters home to my family, and my parents' response, that I wrote well, naturally stimulated my urge to write. Why did I not become a journalist? In my meandering course through life, I did not know how to create contacts with the world of journalism. The poet Theodore Roetke's line "I learn by going where I have to go," resonates deeply with me. At the University of Alberta, in my late teens, I did take a creative writing course but felt very untalented and not encouraged, my stories probably reflecting the the angst of coming of age.

ARTIST

Painter

My very earliest memory is of myself at age 4 1/2 making a picture for my father and grandmother to take to my mother who was giving birth to my sister Ruth. My younger brothers and my father and grandmother were watching admiringly, instilling some seminal memory of myself as an artist. Yet, other than going into the art room outside of class time in high school and sculpting an Indian head that the teacher recognized as a self-portrait, I focused on academics, even while envying my siblings David and Ruth's art lessons with Miss Fields down the street. Traveling, my camera let me make images. In India, I became fascinated with batik and, when my camera malfunctioned, I transferred my image-making passion into learning something of the various styles of batik in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Decades later, a woman friend in New York City, who was considering enrolling in the art therapy program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, invited me to go with her to a Saturday art therapy workshop. That day of sitting on the floor in groups making pictures with cheap paints and no judgment or expectation of quality, only the freedom to express oneself freely, opened a new world, and I began making an outpouring of artwork on cheap paper with cheap paints in my apartment after work, free to pour out paintings without concern for quality or about wasting materials.

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Photographer

My father Ross was an accomplished photographer, having documented his World War II experiences in the Canadian navy, his courtship and the succeeding years of his growing family. As an awkward teenager, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in front of a camera. It was a relief when I first got on the other side of the lens. My first camera was a twin-lens reflex Rolleicord, bought when I was in university, and probably chosen because I coveted my father's Rolleiflex, I liked the 2 1/4 inch negatives in which I could see detail, and perhaps because I liked something so idiosyncratically different than the 35mm cameras in vogue. Documenting my travels has always been important to me. I especially liked making images of people in foreign countries in their environments, working or at leisure. I often found I related comfortably to ordinary people in foreign lands through my camera and they were often honored and intrigued that I wanted to make their picture. Now, I cringe at seeing those images I made unaware of the subjects' unwillingess to be photographed.

Dancer

One of my earliest memories as a pre-school child is of my mother being present when I was in a dance class and of my being too shy to dance down the room alone banging a tambourine, as the European dance mistress had instructed me to do. I don't recall any further dance lessons, although I rather envied my sister Ruth who was vivacious and elegant in her Scottish Highland dancing kilt, practicing and performing the Highland Fling.

Having been told in Grade 5 that I should just mouth the words rather than sing when our choral class performed, I concluded that I was not musical. However, I found I greatly enjoyed the songs we sang around the campfire at Canadian Girls in Training summer camp. And, when I was working in New York and a friend and I went one Saturday evening to a “Country Dance,” I was captivated by American Contra dance, with its lively fiddle music, and its tradition of changing partners each dance as well as of interacting with the whole line of dancers. A man I dated very briefly introduced me to English Country Dancing which was more challenging but had the same community interaction of changing partners and of dancing with the entire line of dancers. Before long, I was attending dance weekends which were fanatical plunges into festive music and dance, and I was introducing, to English Country Dance, the man who became my husband. He and I dance our own idiosyncratic style of waltz and also do some Cajun dance as well as having survived one ballroom dance course without divorcing. Stumbling into some line dance music in California, I improvised movements in a corner of the hall and afterwards several people asked me about my "routine." Back in Bennington I did briefly attend line dance classes, stretching my brain to memorize the routines. And, after seeing a local improvisational dance group perform at the one year anniversary commemorating 9/11, I debated joining the class when new sessions began; almost reluctantly trying it out and surprised by how energized the dancing made me feel. Originally called "Movers and Shakers," the ShapeShifters Improvisional Dance troupe has performed around Bennington, including at the museum, at Bennington College and at the JuneArts! Celebration, and has offered, during worship at Second Congregational Church, liturgical dance together with poetry that I composed.

TRAVELER

 Alberta, Canada June 2013
 Japan & Korea 2010

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, I had no particular attraction to travel until my paternal grandmother took me at age 11 by bus to Vancouver and California, including Disneyland. That experience instilled in me a love of travel as a time of adventures, of the new and unexpected. After my first year of university, I spent half the summer working and the other half on a summer archeology course in Rome, followed by travel with a classmate through Italy and France. The next year, I traveled across Canada by bus, train and hitchhiking, even getting to go with my aunt and uncle on their salmon fishing boat from Prince Rupert to Vancouver along the west coast of Canada. After college I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and traveled with 3 college friends in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Back in London my friends flew back to North America, while I traveled on the TransSiberian railway from Dover to the Hook of Holland, and then to Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and across the Soviet Union, stopping in Irkutsk in Siberia. Crossing the Sea of Japan from Vladivostok to Osaka, I spent eight months studying in Japan, then traveled back to North America by way of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Hawaii. Later travels took me back to Europe, to India (where I worked with a medical missionary treating lepers in Kashmir) and Asia (where I studied batik, and taught kindergarten in Hong Kong and in an international school in Beijing). Most of these travels were by myself but later, with my husband, I traveled to Australia and New Zealand, the Philippines, and Fiji. For me, travel is an intense kind of living, each day filled with more new experiences, so that a week in Korea, for instance, remains memorably fuller and longer than almost any week at home. Travel's inevitable in-your-face difficulties are tangible challenges that stimulate me, in contrast to the vaguer challenges at home of charting my course through life. The inevitable waiting and long flights involved in making one's own travel arrangements (rather than going on a tour) can be frustrating to me but I notice that, with a long delay or wait, I sink into a more patient, accepting mode than at home. Travel's appeal for me has been both escape from ordinary life as well as the search to find myself and discover the world.