Mary Soderstrom: Writer of Fiction and Non-Fiction

Montreal Gazette Columnist Highlights the Making Waves

2010-11-25T20:48:00.005-05:00

The Montreal Gazette's Mike Boone likes the idea of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure. In a column the day the book was launched, he wrote:

"It is tempting to make a piscatorial comparison:

In Making Waves, Mary Soderstrom's latest book, the Portuguese are packed like sardines into 171 pages.

Soderstrom's style, however, isn't dense, claustrophobic or oleaginous. Making Waves is not a bite-sized condensation of 600 years of history but rather an appreciation of people who have fascinated Soderstrom since her 1950s childhood in San Diego."

He goes on : " Making Waves includes a timeline. But the meat of the book is taking readers to particular places and explaining the locales' significance in Portuguese history. And if you want to skip ahead, the chapter titled Sex begins on Page 78. "

Well, yes, the story contains some steamy stuff, and not just because a lot of the Portuguese adventure took place in warm climates. It will be interesting to see just how much other readers are hooked that part...

Making Waves Arrived on the Fall Tides!

2010-11-15T08:29:00.003-05:00

The first copies of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Aventure arrived at Véhicule Press a week ago, and bookstores are getting them as I write. We'll launch the book officially on Wednesday, November 24 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Bobards, 4328 St. Lawrence in Monteal. It's a bar just across the street from Parc du Portugal and where Brazilians hung out during the World Cup last summer.

All Lusophiles are cordially invited.

Coming Soon: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure

2010-08-31T11:38:00.003-04:00

The revisions are nearly completed and we're headed for a publication date in early October for Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure.

The book is the latest in a series of non-fiction books arising from reflections and travels over the last decade. While it seems to be quite a departure from The Walkable City and Green City, there is a direct link. As I traveled to research them, I kept coming across the Portuguese, who had been there before other Europeans.

As I investigated, two things happened. First, the great story of the Portuguese adventure became clear. Second, I began to remember my own contact with stalwart Portuguese immigrants as a child: people who had come from mainland Portugal, Madeira or the Azores to San Diego and whose children and grandchildren I grew up with.

Other reflections followed. Amazingly, Portuguese descendants in Brazil seemed to have built a multi-racial society where skin colour mattered much less than in the US where "any known blood" was enough to make you a second-class citizen. The Portuguese had also overthrown a dictatorship almost without bloodshed, and the Brazilians appeared to be rebuilding their civil society successfully after decades of dictatorship, also.

The result will be, I hope, a readable account of under-appreciated cultures and societies, which offers some hints of what might be done elsewhere.

Stay tuned for details about a book launch near you!

The Walkable City Continues to Make Its Way: An Interview with Mary

2010-03-22T13:03:00.004-04:00

Susan Olding, a Kingston-based writer and reviewer, asked Mary a few questions recently for her blog which regularly features interviews with writers. She thinks highly of The Walkable City, particularly the idea of having the architect of Paris's 19th century make-over, Baron Georges-Etienne Haussmann, and urban cage-rattler Jane Jacobs exchange ideas about cities.

The book, she says, is "an original idea, gracefully executed," which " compels us to think harder about our own neighbourhoods and what we expect and hope from them. "

She also asked about what project Mary's working on these days. Here's the reply:
" Well, there are two. One is a novel I’ve just sent to a possible publisher. It’s called River Music, and is about three generations of women: the grandmother is a pianist, the daughter is an engineer and the granddaughter is a harpsichordist. The time runs from 1935 to Dec. 6, 2009, and I hope in addition to a good story, the novel says something about North American women over the last 75 years.

"The second, called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure, is a direct outgrowth of my three non-fiction projects, although it doesn’t seem so at first glance. During the travel I did for them and for Violets, I kept running into the footprints they left—in Brazil, of course, but also in East Africa, the West coast of India, and Singapore as well as other places. Then I began thinking about the Portuguese kids I grew up with in San Diego, whose families had come from the Azores and Madeira to fish tuna off California, the Portuguese sailing ship we saw in 1972 in St. John’s Newfoundland (one of the last of white fleet cod fishers) and the 40,000 people of Portuguese descent in Montreal. In short, I was bowled over by the worldwide legacy of this small nation on the edge of Europe.

"A great deal of research and some more travel followed, and I’m now revising a manuscript for Véhicule Press which is scheduled to publish the book next fall. Although I picked up enough Portuguese on my own to be able to read newspapers, magazine articles and history, I ran into a wall, trying to speak it, so this winter I’ve been taking an intensive course at the Université de Montréal. So I’ll sign off, and get back to the oral presentation on Brazilian singer/songwriter/novelist/dissident Chico Buarque that’s due for Monday."

Photo: Strollers in the Chiado district of Lisbon, taken in May 2009 on a research trip to Portugal.

Talking about Walking in One of Canada's Least Dense Cities: Mary at Kamloops' Walking Lab

2009-10-29T20:14:00.004-04:00

On Saturday November 7, I'll be giving the closing address at the Fields of Walking conference at The Walking Lab in Kamloops, British Columbia. The gathering will feature walks around the town and much talk about the social and other benefits of walking. It is being organized by an inter-disciplinary group from Thompson Rivers University.

They got my idea of including me, I gather, from reading The Walkable City. For more information, contact Bruce Baugh at TRU: bbaugh@tru.ca Here's what I told them I'd be talking about:

Baby Needs New Pair of Shoes: the Gamble Necessary on the Road to Walkability

The idea that a city might not be walkable would never have occurred to anyone who lived before 1800. Walking was the way everyone but a few gentry and soldiers got around, but the Industrial Revolution changed that, as it changed so many other things. The private automobile pushed walkability only further into the background in the 20th century.

Why should that bother us? We’ve got our cars and our patch of green outside the center of the city: we’re pretty well set, aren’t we? Perhaps, as long as we don’t put much value on the time we need for commuting, for what we’re doing to our planet as we guzzle petroleum products, or for the kind of social interaction and convenience that living where walking reigns can bring.

Is there any exit from this highway along which we’re racing toward social and environmental crisis? That is a question that will occupy us increasingly in the 21st century. We are going to have to take some chances, and make some gambles about the way we live in the very short term if we are to survive in the long term.

Noted Urbanist Christopher Leinberger Praises The Walkable City: From Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs' Streets and Beyond

2009-09-18T08:38:00.002-04:00

It's always encouraging to hear words of praise from someone who cares passionately about cities and who has thought about them carefully and in depth. That's why the words of Christopher B. Leinberger, author of The Option of Urbanism, are particularly welcome.

The Brookings Institution Visiting Fellow writes: "Mary Soderstrom's The Walkable City addresses one of the most important environmental, economic, social, public health and foreign policy issues of our day that is also the most unexpected and simplest; building walkable urban places. Using an approach I personally enjoy, taking a long historical perspective from pre-history through the various ages of city building, Ms. Soderstrom demonstrates that we as a civilization know how to build walkable cities. We just have to speed up our efforts."

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein Wishes I'd Written a Different Book

2009-07-19T20:38:00.002-04:00

What to do when a review isn’t a particularly good review, especially when it is published some place where a lot of people are going to see it? The past few days I’ve been faced with this dilemma over a review of The Walkable City by Ezra Klein, the Washington Post reporter and master blogger, in The Barnes and Noble Review.

Klein, in short, says the book isn’t tough enough. He likes the chapter about Carlsbad, California, and shopping centers, but says that the book doesn't include enough research about questions of urban policy. Nor does he like the conversations I imagine between urban planning icon Jane Jacobs and Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was responsible for rejigging Paris in the mid-19the century (which, by the way, are taken word for word from their writings or interviews, as is noted in the book.)

Well, I’m sorry I didn’t write the book he would have liked to have read, but I wanted to make my book as amusing as possible. I tried to keep the tone light, particularly because the implications are pretty heavy, and I’m convinced that ordinary folk turn off when things are painted in somber colours. Klein and I had a very civilized e-mail/Twitter exchange about this, from which I think we both gathered that we don’t disagree very much.

And there’s a lot to be said about getting even a doubtful review from Barnes and Noble. They haven’t carried my books in numbers in the past, but apparently they are with this one. An old high school friend just wrote that she’d been able to get her local B&N store to order it for her, and I know my publisher did a reprint because of B&N orders.

So maybe the old adage is correct: it doesn’t matter what they say, it’s whether they spell your name right. Check out the review, take a look at the book, and see if you agree. In addition to Barnes and Noble, it’s available at many independent book stores, on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, and directly from Véhicule Press.

Back from Portugal, and at Work on a New Book

2009-06-16T11:34:00.005-04:00

Véhicule Press is taking a chance again: we've just signed a contract for a new book, tentatively called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure. Doesn't sound like it has much in common with my recent non-fiction, but, never fear, there is a direct line.

As I've traveled around over the last few years, researching my trio of books about nature, cities, and history and my recent fiction, I've been amazed at how frequently I encountered the Portuguese and their descendants. That wasn't a surprise in São Paulo, Brazil, featured in Green City, but in Kochi, India, I visited the church where the great explorer Vasco da Gama was buried after his death in 1524. Then there were the people with Portuguese surnames I met in Tanzania when I went looking for the home of wild African violets for The Violets of Usambara. Long before then, though, I saw Portuguese cod fishermen playing soccer in a parking lot in St. John's, Newfoundland, and even farther back, I remember the local grocery in San Diego, founded by a Portguese family to provision the tuna fleet.

In short the Portuguese were everywhere, and, as I discovered when I began research, they were leaders in other ways too--Lisbon was rebuilt along rational, Haussmannian lines a century before the Baron rejigged Paris, while the Carnation Revolution of the 1970s is a model of how to change a regime peacefully, to name only two.

Now all I have to do is write the book!

Photo: the view across the Tagus River, not far from where it flows into the Atlantic.

Joseph Beaubien's Statue is Meeting Place

2009-04-29T09:45:00.002-04:00

Here's the picture of the statue where we'll be meeting for a Jane's Walk of Outremont on Saturday Mary 2 (in French) and Sunday May 3 (bilingual.) As you can see the park is beginning to turn green. The forecast for the weekend is sun, too, so be there or be square.

Meeting Place: Parc Beaubien, Côte Ste-Catherine Road between Stuart an McEachran in Outremont.

Duration: An hour and a half, or so.

End: Parc Saint-Viateur, where those who want can picnic together.

Jane's Walk comes to Montreal this year, and Mary will lead two in Outremont.

2009-04-14T10:01:00.002-04:00

In May 2007, a year after Jane Jacobs died, her friends in Toronto began a tribute to her--free walks led by people passionate about a neighborhood in honour of the urban pioneer and great champion of the walkable city. Since then the Jane's Walk idea has spread across the continent. This year there will be more than 20 cities participating, and Montreal will probably have about a dozen individual walk, all taking place on May 2 or 3.

The Centre for Urban Ecology is the organizer in Montreal. So far walks are set for Mile End, Milton-Park, NDG, la Petite Patrie, the Gay Village, St. Henri-Tucot interchange area, Villeray and Ouotremont, with some neighborhoods getting more than one walk. Since this is a citizen's initiative, the walks will probably be quite eclectic.

Among them will be two in Outremont led by me, one in French on Saturday May 2 and a bilingual French-English one on Sunday May 3. The title is: From Dr. Beaubien's Farm to Bernard Avenue Bling. Both will begin in Parc Beaubien before winding around the neighborhood where I've lived for ages. We'll go past the remnants of one of the first farms in the area, go along an old Amerindian trail (Côte Sainte-Catherine Road,) past some truly lovely big houses, check out the eruv and some much more modest housing before ending up along the Bernard Avenue shopping street. Then those who want can picnic in Parc Saint-Viateur, either feasting on a lunch they'd brought or on goodies bought at one of the restos on Bernard. Sign up here.

Mary's Featured at GriLit and Sense and Sustainability

2009-03-01T21:29:00.004-05:00

As the equinox approaches, it's festival and conference time. Mary will be take part of the English Graduates Students Socieety conference Sense and Sustainability Saturday March 14 at the Université de Montréal while on April 4 she's appearing at Hamilton's GritLit literary festival. She'll be talking about and reading from The Walkable City at both events.

She's also involved in planning Montreal's first Jane's Walk, to take place the weekend of May 2. First started two years ago in Toronto as a salute to the late Jane Jacobs, the walks will be held in several cities this year. Mary will be leading one around her own Outremont neighborhood. Stay tuned for more details.

Download Reading Guide for The Violets of Usambara

2009-02-04T16:38:00.003-05:00

Cormorant Books has just put a series of reading guides on line for their recent fiction list on their web site. Among them is the one for The Violets of Usambara, published not quite a year ago.

It's a story full of action and echoes from today's headlines. Taking place in Montreal and Bujumbura, Burundi, it draws on first hand experience as well as long reflection on the hearts of men and women. Download it to get a better appreciation of this interesting novel.

Season's Greetings from Montreal and News from St. John's, Newfoundland, about The Walkable City

2008-12-23T08:53:00.003-05:00

As the first storms of winter batter North America, the desirability of a walkable city becomes increasingly evident. Montreal usually does pretty well with snow cleaning and removal, but this year three snowfalls in relatively quick succession left a lot of icy sidewalks and snowy streets.

After another storm on Sunday, the crews were on the job so yesterday when I walked downtown the going wasn't bad. Some stalwart souls were back on their bikes while folks with skis were gliding along Park Avenue as it passes through Jeanne Mance Park.

Two weeks ago I had an interview with The Scope, the alternative weekly in St. John's, Newfoundland, where we talked about the problems of snow removal. It snows even more there than in Montreal, but sidewalk snow removal is not high on the list of municipal priorities, it seems. As published, the interview doesn't include that discussion but it does talk about The Walkable City, and how you can try to make a sprawling city denser.

All that snow makes one think of end of year holidays, though, so I'd like to extend our season's greetings. Check out our holiday blog if you'd like to read more: it's part rant, part update.

Flurry of Talk about Walking the Walk

2008-12-04T09:15:00.004-05:00

This week has seen Mary featured in several media. Tuesday Ryan Young of CKUT's Ecolibrium program interviewed her about Green City and The Walkable City. Check it out at the CKUT site by clicking on Ecolibrium for Dec. 2: the interview begins about half way through. On Thursday, Robyn Fadden reviewed The Walkable City in Hour Magazine: "Walk On," she writes.

Saturday Dave Bronstetter will interview Mary on All in a Weekend, the weekend morningn show on CBC Montreal radio. And the last issue of the neighborhood weekly Le Point d'Outremont gave her front page coverage. The occasion was not only the publication of her books, but the prize she received from the Quebec Writers' Federation for her work to promote writing and reading over the last couple of decades (Scroll down to see a photo of her and the saucy librarian Ms. Julie comparing their shoes.) Rather nice, given that this year also saw her winning the Batisseur d'Outremont award from the borough council for her part in the fight to build a new library.

Alexander Weisler chats with Mary about Sidewalks, Cities, and Urban Sprawl

2008-11-04T14:33:00.004-05:00

It's always a pleasure to talk about The Walkable City, and last week Alex Weisler checked out Park Avenue while we talked about cities and how to organize them. He'd obviously read the book carefully, and he begins his combination interview/book review by talking about the historical background: "In 1852, Emperor Napoleon III commissioned Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to rebuild his capital, transforming Paris from a mélange of industrial slums into the deceptively compact and eminently walkable cultural hub we know today.

" If a top-down grand plan for urban redevelopment was presented to Montreal – or any other North American city, for that matter – that included modifications such as mass evictions in working-class quarters and the widening of roads to increase police power, citizens would be aghast. Such a plan presents a veritable “what not to do” checklist for urbanists. Ironically, Haussmann’s model is still considered an exemplar of urban planning.

"Canada’s own darling of urbanism, anti-development activist Jane Jacobs, managed to avoid commenting on the Haussmann affair throughout her career. An opponent of urban renewal, it was hard for this woman of contradictions to deride Paris, a city that she enjoyed as a tourist. After all, the strollable rues of Paris exhibit the vital street life that Jacobs celebrated in her own neighbourhoods: New York’s Greenwich Village and Toronto’s Annex.

"Finally, two years after Jacobs’s death and over a century into Haussmann’s time residing in Pêre Lachaise cemetery, the two are now in dialogue with one another thanks to prolific Montreal writer Mary Soderstrom. The Walkable City explores the concept of an accessible, sustainable urban landscape at a time when concerns of the climate, economy, and resources are forcing us to reconsider our geography. 'A walkable city, in modern terms, is a city with a core that is still vibrant, that has housing, street life, and neighbourhoods that may be on a transportation hub,” the author explains in an interview.' Read more.

Headline in Toronto Star: Long road back to walkable city, author suggests

2008-09-29T08:27:00.003-04:00

When in Toronto for the launch of The Walkable City, Mary talked to the Toronto Star reporter Iain Marlow about transportation and what makes a city walkable. Here's part of what she said:

"Q: What's your gut reaction when you get to a suburban development that is so drastically different from its idealistic origins?

A: I feel really sad. People really want to have a little bit for themselves. And they want to have a place they can call their own. And I think they get disappointment. Maybe not initially, but long term."

The Walkable City Starts Its Journey

2008-09-14T13:01:00.005-04:00

Mary Soderstrom's newest book, The Walkable City: Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs' Streets and Beyond, was launched in a mini-tour the week of September 22.

It's available from Amazon.ca, and should be in good bookstores. If not, just ask for it to be ordered!

2008-04-19T14:18:00.020-04:00

Mary Soderstrom’s latest novel The Violets of Usambara is from Cormorant Books. (ISBN 978-1-897151-25-9)

Antanas Sileika says it is "a moving novel that explores the possibility of redemption in a morally complex world. Cutting between Canada and tension-filled Burundi, it has echoes of Graham Greene both in setting and tone, but it is above all Soderstrom’s intelligent investigation of power and its absence and love over a lifetime of a marriage.”

Green City:People, Nature and Urban Places
Véhicule Press.
ISBN 1-55065-207-9

Mary Soderstrom’s Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places was one of The Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2007. Through visits to 11 cities, from Babylon to São Paulo and back to Babylon, Green City explores how people have brought nature into urban settings over history.

”...this book is likely to appeal to a professional readership as well as to a general one. Urban planners in particular will find the book, I trust, worth reading." Avi Friedman professor of architecture at McGill University. The Gazette

“Important and meticulously researched....(an) ambitious book that
raises as many questions as it answers.” The Globe and Mail

"Though Soderstrom does a superb job chronicling the work of well-known green cities, it”s in her explorations of less-familiar urban centres that she really shines.... A snappy, entertaining prose style, bolstered by meticulous research and many firsthand interviews." --Quill & Quire starred review

To order

Other books by Mary Soderstrom:

After Surfing Ocean Beach

Praise for Mary's novel of love, death and the whole damn thing published by the Simon and Pierre imprint of Dundurn Press.

“…the back cover actually got it right-After Surfing Ocean Beach is 'a haunting and engaging tale.' Soderstrom is a writer of significant talent.”
Desmond McNally, Books in Canada

"The plot is ... absorbing, and lent an atmospheric charge by coastal California's cliffside beaches." Quill and Quire,

Soderstrom “expertly engage(s) us at the start with a calm narrator who appears to confide in us readily. The main drama of the book is revealed in the first chapter and lures us onward with relish. And it only gets better....” Christine Thomas, The Globe and Mail

“This is a thoughtful book, one with a mysterious plot and a dramatic twist. Perfect reading for any beach...” Jacqueline Turner, Georgia Straight,

Read about After Surfing Ocean Beach and Mary Soderstrom in the cover feature of the Montreal Review of Books
ISBN 1-55002-509-0

A trip around the world to look at the history, science and philosophy behind botanical gardens:

Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens

Published by Véhicule Press ISBN 1-55065-151-X

Preview visits to nine of the world”s most beautiful botanical gardens

"A splendid work that traces in detail-- in a way that is both historically and botanically interesting-- the diverse ways in which botanical gardens have developed at different periods of time and in different countries. Excellent research, and an outstanding writing style." Dr. Peter H. Raven--Director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

"Each chapter is pleasingly and instructively illustrated with antique illustrations of floral species, along with archival and contemporary
black and white photographs of the gardens under discussion. There”s also a cluster of colour photographs in the centre. . . Since this book deserves a long shelf life, I hope it will be updated and reissued at intervals. " Louise Abbott, Montreal Gazette

« Il faudrait lire le nouveau livre de la montréalaise Mary Soderstrom, publié en anglais par le trés montréalais éditeur Véhicule Press, et sorti en plein pour la saison du jardinage... vous apprendrez une quantité de choses sur les jardins botaniques partout dans le monde, de Singapour à -- bien sûr -- Montréal. Même avec les illustrations et les photos en noir et blanc et en couleurs, ce livre, qui est à la fois un guide touristique, ne coûte que 24,95 $. Je salue l'éditeur d'avoir pensé au consommateur! » David Homel, La Presse

Short stories by Mary Soderstrom:

The Truth Is
Oberon Press
ISBN 07780 1159 3HC
ISBN 07780 1160 SC

Now available from Éditions de la pleine lune À vrai dire, the French version of The Truth Is , translated by Michel Saint-Germain and Élise de Bellefeuille. The Truth Is consists of fourteen stories about Montreal women who have to come to grips with the truth. Read one of the stories

"...when it comes to craft, and particularly structure, these are stories that any writer would benefit from studying. Because the truth is, there just aren't enough stories out there that are this good." Juliet Waters, Montreal Mirror

"The skilful author challenges our habitual ways of seeing, giving us a chance to discover new perspectives on the familiar." The Montreal Gazette

"Clever, touching, troubling,...funny." The Montreal Review of Books

And advance praise from T. Coraghessan Boyle
“Manifest Destiny” is "a superb, tightly-constructed and disturbing story."

Also:

Finding the Enemy

Oberon Press ISBN 07780 1068 6 HC
ISBN 07780 1069 4 SC

Finding the Enemy consists of fourteen stories, stretching in time from the first test of the A-bomb at Los Alamos to the War in the Persian Gulf.

Praise for them include:

The collection "reads with the grace and sweep of the finest novels....Soderstrom”s clear and concise prose does beautiful justice to the lives of her six main characters as they journey from Los Alamos to Montreal over a period of 50 years." Ottawa Citizen,

"What remains with the reader ...is the strong sense of mood and uncompromising artistry which illuminate and entertain, marking this book as one of the year”s best."
Montreal Review of Books,

"Underlying all are big issues--the search for meaning in modern life; whether physics is a path into the mind of God; humanity”s need to create, to control, and destroy.."
Quill and Quire

The stories, ten of which were originally published in literary magazines, take place between the first A-Bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 and the beginning of the War in the Persian Gulf in 1991. They are concerned with that slippery ground were the private and personal touch the political and public.

Another Political Novel

Endangered Species
Oberon Press
ISBN 088750 993 2 HC
ISBN 088750 994 0 SC

It”s the summer of 1990. The Meech Lake Accord has failed and a by-election is being held in Montreal. Far away in the United States an environmental hearing is under way. These events all have a dramatic effect on the life of Claire Tremblay, who until now has lived a convenitonal life in her big house in Outremont. The illness of a husband, the appearance of an old lover, these both compel her to see herself in a new and diffent light.

Like her characters in Endangered Species, Mary Soderstrom has spent most of her life in Montreal or California. In 1968 she moved from Berkeley to Montreal when her husband accepted a three-year contract at McGill University. They're still there.

"You couldn”t move from Berkeley to Quebec in the late 1960s, and not be intrigued by the political debate," she says. At first she was active only on the fringes but by the 1980s she was a political organizer in her home riding of Outremont.
In the 1990 by-election in Laurier-Sainte-Marie she was there too, as Bloc Québécois candidate Gilles Duceppe wiped all others off the map. That experience, and the thanks a Conservative organizer gave her in 1988 because her candidate split the vote to allow a Tory victory, led her to step back from politics and concentrate on writing in the 1990s.

Not that she hadn”t been writing all along. Her novel The Descent of Andrew McPherson was on the short list of the Books in Canada first novel award the year that Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields also published their first novels. Her children”s book Maybe Tomorrow I”ll Have a Good Time was written when her daughter, now a professional musician, started daycare. Magazines like Grain, Windsor Review, Fiddlehead, Galaxy and Oui have published her short stories and her reporting has appeared in The Montreal Gazette, Le Devoir, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

She currently is the Quebec correspondant for Quill and Quire, and leads a series of book discussion groups at Montreal-area libraries.