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I
am a Toronto-based visual artist, writer, and occasional editor. The daughter of first-generation Jews in Montreal, I’ve been writing for almost five decades. In 1998, I mailed a copy of a memoir “The Best is Yet to Come” to Ashbel Green of the New American Library. I had heard Erica Jong had sent her work to this press and I saw some similarities in our work. The process of submitting work was new to me. I sent a bound manuscript and no return postage. Mr. Green called my home several times until he reached me. He gave me a list of ten agents from California and one from New York. “You can use my name,” he said, which of course I did.
The agent in New York loved the book. He said it was funny and raw, but needed some reworking; he’d talk to me; he had a dentist appointment that afternoon. He died in the dentist chair, or sometime shortly after─an allergic response, I heard. I didn’t link my book to his death, but I stopped sending work out. I never stopped writing.
In 2005, I completed "Naked Words," a memoir thinly disguised as a novel. I was in the midst of producing a festival for a non-profit I had created, and writing a Chicago drummer - warding off his work-related ennui by sending him sexy bits in the Anais Nin vein - when I realized I had another full-length book in me. I worked my ass off. Really. Twelve hours a day working as a personal trainer at a Thornhill prissy women’s gym and writing until the early morning hours, as my daughter, who is mentally ill sat talking, carrying on animated dialogues with invisible partners.
I continued editing the novel while working on a poetry collection and seeking out an agent. It took me almost a year to find the agent. “Beautiful writing” he said. “Like wow. Stunning. Except . . .” There was no plot. The work lacked conflict, build-up, resolution. I took and graduated from an editing program at George Brown. Worked from home as an editor. Spent almost two years in a master’s writing class. And started sending work out again.
I continue working part-time as strength and conditioning coach, as I have for the past twenty years. The master's writing class held its final session last spring, and I really miss reading my dirty bits for those eloquent writers. This Wednesday night, seven of my canvases will be exhibited in the Gladstone ballroom. And after seven evictions during a marriage to a bipolar investment banker, I finally am able to write from a secure room facing a shady garden in Roncesvalles Village. I plan to pass on the house to my two girls who live with me. And I’m applying for a grant for my work, which really is not a novel, but a lyrical memoir. And here I am on this BlogIt site, wondering and ready for whatever comes next.
- Primary occupation:
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editor/writer
- Dream occupation:
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Full-time writer (published!)
- Hometown:
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Toronto
- Favorite writers:
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see books
- Favorite books:
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Fiction by Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American magic realists, Anne Michaels, Barbara Kingsolver, Anais Nin, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Michael Ondaatje, E.L. Doctorow
- Favorite music:
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Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, LCD Soundsystem, Pete Seeger, Anna and Kate McGarrigle, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis,John Coltrane, Mississippi John Hurt, Jesse Fuller,Miles Davis,
- Favorite movies:
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Volver, The Science of Sleep, Amelie, Waking Life, Truly Madly Deeply, Sex Lies and Videotape, Harold and Maude, Annie Hall, Moonstruck, Paris Je T'aime, Jules et Jim --- more to follow as I recollect
- Gender:
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Female
- Religion:
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Jewish