Helen is a retired educator, writer, and photographer. Her writing has been published in books, journals, magazines and newspapers. She also served for several years as adjudicator with the Hamilton and Region Arts Council (HARAC) [short fiction and non-fiction].

Helen co-authored with Helen Lewis Schmid Iron in the Blood. The Bowmanville Foundry: One Hundred Years of Innovation and was copy editor of Bowmanville: 150 Years, 150 Stories. She also produced videos, including Our Grandmothers, Ourselves – inspired by the book of the same title (an anthology of immigrant grandmother stories), which was featured in an interview with Shelagh Rogers, airing on CBC’s Sounds Like Canada for International Women’s Day, 2005. 

With her partner, Jean-Michel Komarnicki, Helen’s photography and poetry have been featured in several collaborative exhibitions as the youmeus project, such as: Diapason Reach in “Crossing Borders II”, BluSeed Studio, Saranac Lake, NY (2016); Dis-carded in “WhiteOut”, Nuit Blanche (2014); Palimpsest in “Reading the Image”, Whitby Station Gallery (2012); and, In Search of Shoes ...and other herstories: Photographs & Poems at Artspace on the Mezzanine, Bowmanville Library (2009), among others.

Since 2023 Helen has served as the editor of Postcards to the Front international newsletter that features stories of postcard warriors around the world who support Ukraine via postcard messages of care and encouragement to Defenders of Ukraine, boosting morale at the front lines. 

Helen is currently working on a memoir about her father, a Polish survivor of WWII Soviet labour camp experience, and how the trauma of a stolen childhood impacted his life and the father/daughter relationship.