Both are ways of being in the world that   make you stop and notice or notice and stop.   First time you approach a subject you don’t know where it will take you.   Sometimes you need to get closer, sometimes to step back.   What you create depends on your angle in relation…

My Instagram profile identifies me as “A writer of kids’ books with a passion for photography.” This blog post offers you a sampling of pics taken so far this winter (all with my iPhone 11 Plus) that I haven’t posted there. One of my favourite subjects in every season is my dog Georgia, who inspired The…

It’s been a tough bunch of months. There are more tough months ahead. I know how privileged I am to be having, personally, a “not too bad” pandemic, as far as pandemic experiences go. I’ve been lucky to have writing projects on the go that are engaging my heart and mind. And I enjoy photography…

I do. I also love photography and playing with filters. Early this spring, impatient for tulip season, I found a photo from a year previous and played. Do you like these? Please follow me on Instagram!

Hard to believe perhaps but the author of Red Is Best — who thinks she knows a few things about taking pictures — learned only just last spring that there is a “Red Rule” of photography, which is quite simply: Looking at my Instagram posts, I was surprised how few contained red before I started a “Capture…

Here are two of my favourite quotes about photography, superimposed on photos taken at and near my home.   Both quotes help explain what I love about indulging my passion for photography. I see things I might not have seen, had I not been looking in the way I do with as a photographer. That can be…

Walking my dog one morning in the last week of 2009, lamenting the fact that another year had gone by and I had yet to figure out how to fit time for all my interests into my life, I came up with a plan I think will help me do it. (Notice I don’t call…

Sometimes a sentence flows to paper or screen on a writer’s first approach. Other times it takes editing to get the tone and intended impact just right. During online photography classes with Joy Sussman, I’ve been learning that this can also be true of photographs. Here is an early version and the final version of…

There are serious approaches a person could take to World Food Day, but one of my ongoing aims in life is to be less earnest in my writing. (Hard when my best ideas for books lately seem to be about serious stuff.) So on this WFD, instead of blogging about world hunger, genetically modified foods, or…

During the last week of 2009, I devised a plan to help me give more time to activities I enjoy, but never seem to find enough time for. I called it The PIRDY Plan (P for Photography, I for Internet, R for Reading, D for Drawing, Y for Yoga. And I was in the plan…

I love taking pictures. Last summer someone complimented me on my eye and even said she’d like to hang some of my work in her gallery. I haven’t done anything about that yet, but her encouragement gave me the idea of sharing some of my photos on my blog. I hope that what I pull…

This month’s photo, like last month’s, was taken in Nova Scotia – this time on the beach at the Kejimkukik Seaside Adjunct. We’ve taken our Seaside Writing Workshop Retreat participants there each year, and hope to again this year, but in this photo it’s my lovely daughter enjoying the enormous sky and exploring one of…

Of all the photos I shot during a spring river cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest a few years ago, my favourites fell into the category of “Doors & Windows”. This one was taken in Miltenberg, when I wandered away from the tour group, as I found I tended to do quite a bit. How about…

There’s a bit of a disconnect between the mood in this photo and the mood I’m anticipating at the Hackmatack celebrations in Moncton this week, when hundreds of kids from all over New Brunswick will gather to honour the authors of books they have been reading this year. But there is a connection. Both came…

A ten-minute walk from my home, I can enjoy this lovely view. Well, not quite. Since this photo was taken two years ago, a metal barrier of sorts has been embedded in the rock with a sign attached warning hikers “Deep Gorge Keep Back from Edge”. If I were drunk or otherwise inspired to foolhardy…

I love the colours in this hammock. I love reading in it, too. But although we’re coming into our fourth summer in our current home, we haven’t yet found a place to hang it. Soon I hope, though, now that the heavy-lifting part of the work on my upcoming ya novel is done. (More on that…

Is there anything more lovely than a summer sunset over a lake? This photo was taken looking out over Lake Huron on the way to the cottage in 2008. How many summer sunset photos do you have in your collection? 🙂

This is my mother dancing with my father in 1974. It’s one of my favourite pictures of her. Sadly my mother passed away in 1996 with COPD, the same condition that took the life of Peter Gzowski. She would have been 86 in a couple of weeks. If you’re still watching over me, Mom –…

Since the two Sock Fluff posts straddling this one address some of my reading pleasures when I was growing up, I thought it would be fun to post a photo of me taken during that period of my life. Here I am with my dad. I blogged about him in the month of his birthday…

It’s easy to love the colours of a Caribbean sea, captured during my first ever vacation to a warm place last month. But there’s beauty to be found in the often monochromatic world of a Canadian winter too. On the first day of this winter, I was struck by the bits of ice forming on…

I wasn’t crazy about writing when I was a kid, but I did like it when the teacher gave us a picture as a starting point, especially if the picture inspired questions. Who? What? Where? And the best one: Why? What would I have written if she’d given us this photo (which she couldn’t have…

I sometimes get teased because I like taking pictures of my food. Like this spinach salad full of strawberries, blueberries, and toasted almonds. What makes this salad special is that it was made by an old friend who insisted on bringing it to my house when we got together this spring for a long overdue…

When I posted Photo of the Month #1 almost two years ago, I had every intention of showcasing one of my photos each month. It hasn’t turned out quite that way. Although this will be my last official “photo of the month”, I’ll still be putting up a photograph from time to time, but I’ll…

A big thanks to Annick Press for making this adventure possible. Thanks also to Kerri Poore of Politics & Prose for her part in making the bookstore event such a success. For the photos that make up the slideshow, thanks to David Schuller, Marketing and Publicity Assistant at Politics & Prose for those taken at the front of the…

This post serves as a reminder – especially to those who have been braving this winter’s wintry weather for weeks now – that there are other seasons in the year, and the one pictured here will come again.

It’s great to travel but I must say it’s great to get back home too.

No, this post has nothing to do with “The Sound of Music”. Before anyone gets offended because they’re not in this photo, let me point out that I’ve clearly stated these are a few of my favourite things, and yes, I do know that people and animals shouldn’t be referred to as things anyway. I…

I’ve often thought of November as an ugly month. It’s cold compared to what’s come before and it promises colder to come. Leaves that offered brilliant colour to the landscape have fallen and are likely blowing around in a raw wind or else lying sodden on the ground. I’d once have said “November beauty” is…

It’s not every day that a mom gets to hang out with her daughter on a beach on the Indian Ocean. Thanks, Peter, for capturing this moment at Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa — and to Peter and Kelly both for helping make it possible.

Often when I’m walking in the woods near our home, I’m struck by the light filtering through leaves, hitting the trunks of trees, or the water, a heron perched on a log, or a rocky cliff on a distant shore. I sometimes take pictures at such moments and this week I’ve started an online photography…

I’ve found a passion that rivals writing. For me, that’s saying a lot. I’m not new to photography. I think I took my first pictures, black and white, with a Brownie camera during a visit to Niagara Falls when I was ten or eleven, and have continued shooting with various cameras throughout my adult life.…

Every writer I know has had trouble making the statement “I am a writer.” I can say it now — after 30+ years spent writing — on most days. I’ve been making photographs for a shorter time. Taking them for a long time, yes. Making them, no. So I am not yet comfortable saying “I…

My passion for Photography, which I wrote about in the fall, continues unabated. I’m now taking my second online class with photographer, Joy Sussman. (Many of her students are taking their fourth or fifth course with her, she’s that good.) I’m also working on completing a draft of a novel. Thus the brevity of this…

Did you know that Paul McCartney was 16 years old when he and John Lennon wrote “When I’m Sixty Four”? Paul and Ringo are the only two Beatles who lived to see 64. John was murdered at 40 and George died from lung cancer at 58. When the song was released in 1967, I was…

Sure, I wrote Red Is Best – first published in 1982 and still going strong. Those Green Things – first published in 1985 and again in 1995 with new illustrations when sales began to flag – has now been officially declared out of print.    Don’t tell anyone, but I actually like green more than…

How lucky I am to be waking up with Peter to this view again this summer. 

. . . that takes away the need for words.

Labour Day weekend on the south shore of Nova Scotia included happy hours with family and then with beloved writer-friend, Budge Wilson. My first weekend home after a long summer away, I made seeing family here a priority: son, daughter, sister, dad, and attachments where applicable (including this lovely boy I hadn’t seen since July). …

So, I thought I’d taken a pretty cool photo of a clam shell on the beach this summer and posted it for the assignment on symmetry in the class I’d been taking the month before. (The “classroom” stays open even when the class is officially over.) The instructor, Joy Sussman, suggested: I think this would…

Photography – it’s becoming almost as big a part of who I am as writing is. So I’ve added a new page to my website. And I recently joined Instagram which will be only about  photography. I hope you’ll check out both!

One of my favourite photo editing tools, PicMonkey, recently came out with templates for all kinds of neat photo projects, including one that helped me create this — How many selected significant events, captured here, can you identify? To the first person to list all 9, I’ll send a big e-hug. Oh what the heck.…

I’ve been taking another online photography course. Different instructors this time — the folks who set up oopoomoo.com and oopoomoo Creatives. I was delighted to win free entrance to the class with a couple of my photos back in the fall. Thank you, oopoomoo! Samantha and Darwin’s Resolve, is more about discovering who you are as a…