I was born in July 1962 in small-town Chatham, Ontario, a rural community near the border to Detroit, Michigan, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, a landscape that would become the backdrop for my first three novels. From early on I was inspired by Chatham’s unique history as a hunting ground for the neutral Indians, as a battleground for the War of 1812, as a terminus on the Underground Railroad where slaves from the southern United States sought freedom, and as a hotspot for bootlegging during prohibition. The history of my hometown plays a character in my first book, Rush Home Road, as the protagonist, Addy Shadd, is a descendant of fugitive slaves who settled in a fictional community called Rusholme, inspired by the village of Buxton, Ontario. In my second novel, The Girls, the memoirs of conjoined twins, one of the sisters is obsessed with collecting the native artifacts turned up by the farmer’s plow each spring. The landscape called to me once again as I wrote my third novel, The Wife’s Tale, the story of Mary Gooch, who leaves her safe existence in ‘Leaford’ when her husband disappears on the eve of their silver anniversary.
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