Coming Soon!
What I’ve been up to since March 1, 2025. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do! Continue reading Coming Soon!
Category: Uncategorized
The Elora Sky Sanctuary
This excerpt comes from a series of chapters I wrote during Labour Day Weekend 2020 as part of The 3-Day Novel Contest. It was inspired by a few friends who proposed I write about a group of women living in a forest and suggested titles like The Hidden Resilience of Women and A Journey Worth … Continue reading The Elora Sky Sanctuary
How Bali’s Sharma Springs Inspired My Eco-Fiction Novel
At some point between its release date of April 17, 2020, and the following September, I watched Bali: Sharma Springs, an episode from Apple TV’s documentary series Home. I know this, because it inspired the setting of a series of novel chapters I wrote over the Labour Day long weekend of the same year. During … Continue reading How Bali’s Sharma Springs Inspired My Eco-Fiction Novel
Tolkien’s Eucatastrophic Tale: A Lifeline for Today’s Youth
In 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and the father of Modern Fantasy, presented his essay “On Fairy-stories” at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In the essay, Tolkien attempted to answer the following questions: What are fairy-stories? What are their origins? and What is their function … Continue reading Tolkien’s Eucatastrophic Tale: A Lifeline for Today’s Youth
Reflections on Censorship: Lawrence Hill in Conversation with Debra Thompson
How banning books from classrooms because of racial slurs hurts the very students our schools are trying to protect Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to watch a live, online conversation about censorship between two prominent Black Canadian authors. The webinar was called “We can’t teach a book with that word in it”: Reflections on … Continue reading Reflections on Censorship: Lawrence Hill in Conversation with Debra Thompson
Discovering Trees: A Year of Reading for Reforestation
I could tell you that my recent decision to read as many books about trees as possible is solely based on the fact that I’m conducting research for my latest novel. That would certainly be a reasonable argument, since my book is about a 22-year-old woman whose dream is to reforest the world. To help … Continue reading Discovering Trees: A Year of Reading for Reforestation
The Failure of Dystopian Literature
What if, instead of spurring us to save the world, the post-apocalyptic tale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Images of the last human lurching across a burning, barren landscape or standing atop a mountain of concrete rubble have become so commonplace they now haunt our collective consciousness. Many of us carry their loneliness in our … Continue reading The Failure of Dystopian Literature
Hopeful Narratives: Transforming Our Future with Imagination
I learned about Rob Hopkins and the Transition Movement in 2018 through a friend who defined herself as a regenerate. I can’t remember which podcast or video she pointed me to that formally introduced me to his work, but I will be forever grateful for the discovery. While reading his book The Transition Companion: Making … Continue reading Hopeful Narratives: Transforming Our Future with Imagination
We Are. Here.
I think we are most ourselves when we float along the stream of life in a state of non-doing, in a state of allowing, of not trying to control the outcome of anything and with no destination in mind other than a gentle idea of how we want to feel when we arrive. I know I … Continue reading We Are. Here.
Monique Chénier - Author in Evolution 