About Heather

Heather has lived on a Canadian Gulf Island for most of her life, but when she was ten or so she lived on a farm in Southern Ontario and that experience is fictionalized in the Patti Stories. However, many of Patti's experiences are a blend of that setting and of raising her own family of three girls in a rural setting on Saltspring Island. These stories draw on the realities of both places and it is this that gives Heather's writing that extra ring of truth.

Heather has been a teacher, a CUSO volunteer in South America, and has sailed the Pacific in a wooden schooner. She has two BA s from the University of Victoria, in English and Psychology and in Creative Writing. She has also published poetry and magazine articles.

She is presently writing an adult novel set on the West Coast.




Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Heather visits the setting of the Patti Stories.





A few years ago we had the opportunity to visit the farm just south of Ottawa where Heather experienced many of the events that found their fictionalized way into the Patti Stories. As usually happens on visits to one's childhood home it all seemed smaller and stranger. Time had been mucking about in the meanwhile with places stored away in memory: the old house still there but added to, tall hedges and trees where there had been none, and distances strangely abbreviated. What happened to the gravel pit, Joan's house, all the outbuildings? But the landscape remained even if fences had disappeared from the now larger fields, and the river was still there somewhere beyond the trees in the woodlot. There beside the house was where the ice rink was made....



What this brought home to me was how the stories Heather wrote were based on what was stored away in memory, altered and made into something new through her imagination. The actual place did not matter that much any more.



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