My new project is tentatively titled “The Opposite of Drowning” and is set in Toronto in the early 1990s. Twenty-year-old Bea Porter is a lifeguard on the edge of Lake Ontario and the novel explores memory and grief through one young woman as she comes of age…

The novel explores memory and grief through one young woman as she comes of age. The novel vacillates between Bea at eight years old, at sixteen, and in the present day at twenty where Bea has recently arrived to Toronto from a small town near Oshawa, Ontario.

After Bea’s mom leaves the family, Bea moves in with her grandmother, Nan, who has recently lost her husband. Nan and Bea form an odd alliance, processing loss and mourning: for Nan, Pop’s death, and for Bea, the dissolution of her parent’s marriage and the family she had always known.

As a result of her grief, Nan will not speak of Pop, but instead throws herself into various projects including her newly discovered fascination with fungi. Bea’s relationship to Nan grows increasingly strong throughout the two years they live together.

At sixteen, Bea’s parents have tenuously reconciled, but they argue constantly about her father’s obesity and her mother’s unhappiness. Despite her unsettled home life, Bea has just landed her dream job – lifeguarding on Lake Minnetawa, the lake she learned to swim on as a child.

When Nan has a debilitating stroke midway through the summer, grief threatens to subsume Bea – a grief that is blinding and eviscerating, mental, physical and emotional. Nan’s memory is severely compromised and Bea cannot reconcile the Nan she used to know with the Nan that lies first in a hospital bed, and then in a nursing home.

The core of the novel is set in the present tense with Bea at twenty, lifeguarding down on Lake Ontario and Nan still in a nursing home. For Bea’s twentieth birthday, her parents, who have since split up again, give Bea the keys to Nan’s house with the condition that she will pack up the house and get it ready to sell. It is the first time since Nan’s stroke that Bea has spent any time at Nan’s house and as she wraps objects in newspaper and puts them into boxes, Bea remembers the Nan she grew up, replacing the incapacitated stroke victim present-day Nan who lives in a nursing home.

Though Nan can’t always remember who Bea is, or what she even had for breakfast, she begins telling Bea stories of Pop, Bea’s grandfather. This is how, at twenty, Bea begins learning for the first time about her grandfather and the tender relationship he and Nan shared.

~

My work has been published in various literary journals including The Lampeter Review, Taddle Creek, Descant, dandelion, Grain, filling Station, room of one’s own, the Dance Current Magazine. She has read through various reading series and festivals including the Pivot Reading Series, Art Bar Series, Eden Mills Writers Festival and the Hillside Festival.

I also write poems and non-fiction bits…