Biography
History of a retired educator now pursuing my second passion
I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s in the Peace River county of northern Alberta, Canada, reaching my teenage years as the Beatles and groups like Simon and Garfunkel were getting popular. I had always enjoyed writing, but seeing these groups writing their own songs opened up a whole new world for me. A friend and I started writing songs together, signing both our names to all songs, no matter which of us wrote it, a la Lennon and McCartney. I actually had one song published but never got credit for it. My writing partner took my name off the song and handed it in as his assignment to his teacher who then submitted it to a poetry writing contest. It won the contest and was published in a magazine under my “friend’s” name. My first lesson in copywriting.
When this phase was over, I mostly did academic writing through my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, which I also really liked. I loved working out my ideas through writing and refining my thoughts as I crafted the piece to its final product. I had one of the articles I wrote on how writing contributes to learning published in the NCTE journal, Language Arts. This time I did get credit for it.
I never really did any writing that was more on the creative/poetic side until I started teaching English. In my writing workshops for my junior and senior high students, and later for my university students, I wrote along with the students and used my pieces to model the process of giving and getting input for revising. Some of these pieces, I used years later in writing a middle school novel.
I started writing songs again when some of my university students brought songs they had written to the workshop sessions. I always found writing song lyrics fairly easy, but I didn’t know how to create the music until I got some ideas and encouragement from these students.
Now that I am fully retired, I have lots of time to write. I have finished a draft of my novel and completed a research project on teacher leadership, presenting my findings at the Leadership for Learning symposium at Cambridge University in 2019. I have also had time to write numerous songs and am now creating an EP of some of them.