Dabbles Felted Creations And Fibre Art

Photo by Bibhukalyan Acharya on Pexels.com I’m sitting by my open windows, listening to the rain thundering down, thunder growling in the distance, the splash of cars as they drive by in the fast-forming puddles. One of the things I love most about living in Ontario is rain being nowhere in sight and then pouring down like a blessed shower. This year it has reminded me of standing under the…

Yep, it’s that week where everyone mouths platitudes about how wonderful nurses are and etc. (funny how it comes right after Mothers Day, another platitudinous day). And then they go back to their underpaying, understaffing, and underutilizing these people who are the lifeblood and structural framework of the health care system. Photo by Cedric Fauntleroy on Pexels.com Everyone talks about the…

A large flying book sculpture outside the Harper & Crow bookstore captivates pedestrians and traffic. When I first started out in this writing thing, I knew I needed deadlines. I work best when they are staring me right in the face and I can fill up on M&Ms and such and charge forward. So I entered contests. Fun ones, like the 3DAYNOVEL contest. Or the NY Midnight contest. Some serious ones…

CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE, USSR – MAY 1986: Chernobyl nuclear power plant a few weeks after the disaster. Chernobyl, Ukraine, USSR, May 1986. (Photo by Igor Kostin/Laski Diffusion/Getty Images) A typical April day in Germany, and I was hanging around at home because I was over 8 months pregnant with my firstborn. The Chernobyl Nuclear power plant in Ukraine/Russia had just exploded. We didn’t hear…

Why, it was only a few months ago that I danced madly around the house and streets and pretty well everywhere after receiving my acceptance to the prestigious University of King’s College MFA program in Creative Non-fiction. I’ve been wanting to do this program since it was set up, had a few ideas that I wanted to write about, loved the thought of hanging out with writers and publishers and…

My dear friend, and publisher/editor/author at Somewhat Grumpy Press, Tim Covell, recently published his first romance, Ocean’s Lure. The story is a sweet romance, where the protagonist is a feisty gal running a campground in Cape Breton (or is it on Cape Breton? Still, after years in NS, I am unsure of the lingo…). She meets a fellow there and, no surprise given the genre, romance blossoms. As…

As I start to research for my book about Ruth’s last year in nursing school (she’ll have adventures!), I’m awash in memories of my own nursing education. This is the outcome of one such reminiscence… Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com I’ve been reading the excellent Written in Bone, by Sue Black. It tells me that the TV series Bones, where everyone had to be dissolved to skeletons to…

Not that anything like that ever happened to me, of course…;-)

Hey – quick note – some of my ebooks are on sale for 99 cents! Why not collect them all! Check out Somewhat Grumpy Press or your online resource of choice for details! Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com Every day or two I get a message in my email box, praising my books to the skies and offering to help get them the attention they deserve…the writers are so earnest, so sweet, so…

Warning: this entry talks about violence and sexual abuse I’ve always had a difficult time sorting out guilt. Maybe it is my Roman Catholic upbringing (the Church does guilt so well…), or life experiences, but it’s always a challenge teasing out how I feel. My go to is to feel guilty about EVERYTHING, but as I get older, I realize this is probably a bit harsh. Perhaps I’m not actually…

A few years ago, I was offered the sensational opportunity to go to Greenland, to speak to a group of sheep farming women at their annual get together. We flew from Halifax to Reykjavik, then took a smaller plane to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. We were taken to a small town via helicopter, plane, and bus. It was amazing to see the country, the ancient carvings in the stone, the coloured houses…

I’ve been reading the excellent The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, in my continuing search to learn all the things about medical history to provide interesting challenges for Ruth in my next novel. It’s fascinating, as are most of Sacks’ books, but this is probably not his best. He tells multiple stories of people who have various visual losses, of the ability to read, to see with binocular vision,…

At long last the holidays are over. They seem to get longer and darker every year. Way back, I was already finding them hard. As I get older, and the world gets grimmer, they accelerate in darkness. Photo by Tim Mossholder on Pexels.com My marriage was weird, which didn’t help, and my father had died after horrid suffering on Christmas Eve. I’d lost my faith. And I’d been forced to attend…

Version 1.0.0 I remember buying another copy of this book about ten years ago, after my family had suffered through a series of infections of one sort or another. No idea where it is now, but I could have used it this past month as I fought my way through whatever-it-was that kept me coughing and hacking to an extent I didn’t dare go out in public, even with a mask. Everyone seems to have it at…

I’m confused. And annoyed. This funding request is everywhere these days, and it makes me steam gently, almost as much as the thick envelopes filled with junk from China given to thank you for a donation you haven’t even made yet. Surely they can’t expect us to believe that everyone has an “angel donor” who volunteers to donate to match all of the donations anyone sends in? I mean, one or two…