Moving back to Ontario after 23 years in Vermont, and leaving my partner behind for a few months to finish a work commitment has been a privilege that comes with many challenges. Even with the challenges, landing in Barrie, Ontario, during autumn, a time of release, has supported my process of self-deportation in solidarity with so many whose consititutional rights have been violated. A long-time writing task completed, I've sent off my first children's book, Albert Jones Goes to School to Annick Press. 

While in the US, I wrote two novels, one set in 2010 Toronto, the other in Essex County, on a small organic farm, in 2000. Writing about characters in my adopted home of Toronto (The Kinder Sadist, 2020), and my birthplace in Windsor, Ontario, (The Buttes, 2024), my sense of identity as a Canadian strengthened despite living in Vermont, a landscape I loved. Perhaps because I lived in a rural area of deep woods I felt more at home with trees than with the few human neighbours in the area. Or perhaps the differences between American and Canadian socialization became more distinct, especially when I taught at the Community College of Vermont, and therefore contributed to my feelings of being "the stranger."

During my time in the US, I also wrote a memoir about an early trauma and my process of recovering (Once Upon a Body, 2022), and a brief support booklet for others struggling with a protracted healing process (Adverse Childhood Experiences, Adult Trauma, and the Return to Wholeness, 2025). Albert Jones, the children's book I sent off to Annick Press when I landed in my native Ontario in September of 2025, has been percolating since the mid 2000s. Many of us learn first-hand the value of a happy and exciting early school experience because our own were challenging. Too much testing and too little exploring and discoveing create a climate of fear. In Albert/Alberta's little blue schoolhouse, children are free to discover not only the world but themselves. I hope Albert/Alberta's school experience will contribute in some small way to young children's joy of learning, expecially about things and people and animals and birds who begin life one way and who take a magic carpet ride into transition and have the remarkable experience of landing as someone else. Yes, I can write these words, because I am home, because I live in Canada once more, because we enjoy freedom of speech here.  It's good to be home.