Because of my long "history" as an upper elementary school teacher and librarian my #1 priority after retirement was to write for a young audience. Free of classroom duties I finally had the time to devote to this important project. 

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But please, no worries about my senior status. This old girl is as much a child as you are. Revisiting my childhood, lightly disguised as fiction, is a great lark for me and huge fun to share. 

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If you listen to any of my readings you may notice that my accent is not very Canadian. There is no good excuse for this since I have been living in Canada since I was eleven. Maybe I can blame it on all those people who kept saying, "I just love your accent, Noelle!" And who doesn't want to be loved for something? So it stuck and after a while the opportunity to change just vanished. It became part of who I am. 

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I was born in Scotland during WWII. That part of my life comes into my first novel Shire Summer. The house in that book Lincluden, is the home I lived in for my last years in the UK. They say you never get over your childhood. That place remained so vivid that it was easy to set my novel in that house in the small fishing village of Crail. Being Pete is another piece of me, the one that had immigrated to Montreal, and is set there. I was also a huge fan of the cowboy film star Roy Rogers. Tex Canyon in my novel is modeled after him. 

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Funnily enough, I did not always like to write. Some of my teachers over the years drummed that out of me with their silly insistence on choosing topics for me then grading my efforts based on grammar and punctuation. It wasn't until I got to teacher's college that a professor there opened up the joy of words and their power to create a world of their own. Later some writing courses I took with Peter Carver and Sharon Jennings added skill to enthusiasm and so it went. A husband, friends, family and many total strangers became fans giving all important encouragement for my work. 

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And here we all are at the end of a grim year looking forward to better days ahead. Perhaps some lazy reading hours with one or both of my books will be just what the doctor ordered.