About

My name is Karen and I’m an author, professional editor and writing coach. I know what it’s like to feel compelled to write. And how hard it is to actually do it.

I’ve written while the baby’s napping, while riding the bus to class, while working overtime, while unemployed, while living abroad, while being taken to court, while falling in love.

For a decade, I worked as an adjunct professor of Literature, Creative Writing, and Professional Writing courses, mostly within adult education. What I enjoyed most was working one-on-one with my adult students to help them navigate the creative process. They were definitely motivated and had plenty of life experience to draw from, but they were sometimes short on time and sticking power. Maybe this sounds familiar?

Freelancing as a writing coach and editor enables me to support authors at the beginning phases of their projects, most typically. Because of my background in higher education, I’ve worked with a lot of academics over the years, but also physicians, law students, environmental scientists, marketing specialists, art teachers, nurses, therapists, accountants, professors and “ordinary” grandmothers. I am proud to have supported my clients on a wide range of creative endeavours, from self-help books to memoirs to tales for children.

As an author, I too have sometimes worked with a writing coach, and I know from personal experience how helpful it can be if you can find a coach/editor who is the right fit for you and your project.

In 2006, before I embarked seriously on my own writing practice, I earned a PhD in Philosophy. In many ways, I think of the fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction that I write as philosophical explorations. My approach is a bit rebellious in that I write in different genres and I dispute some of the common writing wisdom, such as ‘write what you know’ and ‘write every day.’ I enjoy research and I remain fascinated by the human imagination and how it works. While exploring the field of writing therapy, I began thinking about how reading and writing, as practices, relate to selfhood.

Over the past 20 years, my short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry has been published in a variety of North American literary magazines, including Grain Magazine, Geist Magazine, FreeFall, In/Words, Obra/Artifact, The Fieldstone Review, Woven Tale Press, and many others. I’m a contributor to the volume When All Else Fails: Motherhood in Precarious Times and the League of Canadian Poets’ collection Heartland: Poems for the Love of Trees. My debut novel, The Parasol Flower, was published in 2020 (Regal House Publishing).