My grandfather was a publican.  He ran a pub in Cambridge, called the Tailor’s Arms, and my father was born in the back rooms.  My grandmother expected that my dad would become a policeman, in keeping with his social status.  But he had higher ambitions.

He became a radiologist.  He spent a bit of time in the Middle East (it was called World War II), then took a job in Scotland.  There he met my mother, who sometimes had an eerie way of knowing things would happen.  She had dreamed her life of a set of stairs, and she saw them on her honeymoon, in Venice with my father.

They had a son in Aberdeen, then moved across the sea to Canada. My father went to work at the hospital in Sault Ste. Marie.  That’s where I was born.  It was called “the Sault,” which rhymed with zoo.  Once a year my brother loved to sing to me: “Happy birthday to you.  You were born in the Sault.”

My father was always improving himself, moving on to something better.  He took us first to Toronto, then west to Calgary, gathering a daughter and another son along the way.  Then it was back to Toronto, only to move once more, all the way out to the coast at Victoria. By the time I left high school I had lived in eleven different houses and gone to nine different schools.  It was hard at the time, as I was shy and friendless, but now I think I was lucky to have grown up that way.

My Grade Three teacher told my parents that I would grow up to be a writer.  Others encouraged me later, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, and I wish I could thank them now.  I hated anything that drew attention to me, and remember squirming in my chair as a teacher read aloud a story that I’d written.  But there was more than embarrassment; I was proud and pleased as well.

When I finished high school I wanted to be a writer.  I started with short stories and bits of non fiction, but had very little success.  I worked at different jobs that didn’t last very long: logging in Ontario; fishing for salmon off the west coast; picking daffodils at Easter; inflating balloons and setting up skittles at a traveling carnival; clearing streams in the Rockies; fighting forest fires on Vancouver Island.  Then I studied journalism in Vancouver and went to work at the small-town papers of northern B.C.

I loved the north, and for the most part I enjoyed the work.  I stuck with it for ten years, learning a lot about writing: how to do it quickly without fretting over every phrase; how deadlines could be inspiring; how to tell a story in as few words as possible.  Like my father, I moved from job to job and ended up on the coast again, at the Prince Rupert Daily News.

I meant to stay just a year and a day, then move along again.  But I missed that deadline badly.  Prince Rupert’s a beautiful city, just thirty miles from Alaska, with the sea at its front and the mountains behind it.  I went canoeing on the rivers, and sailing on the ocean.

In Prince Rupert I began to write fiction again.  I joined a writer’s group and met a woman called Kristin Miller who had written a book about quilting.  She lived across the harbor in a tiny community called Salt Lakes, where there was no electricity, no telephones, no cars or pavement.

I fancied Kristin’s lifestyle more than mine.  I moved to Salt Lakes, quit my newspaper job and became a fish farmer instead.  We started sailing together, on voyages that grew ever longer in time and distance.  I felt freed to write again, and started with a novel, and another and another.  But I had no more success than the last time I’d tried it.

The fish farm went bankrupt.  We moved from tiny Salt Lakes to a house on a hill, to work as caretakers for the radio transmitter on Digby Island.  We had a small house ringed by a meadow, exposed to the winter storms.  In the rigging of the radio tower, winds that sometimes grew to hurricane force made unearthly shrieks and howls.

Kristin sold her quilting book and introduced me to her agent, Jane Jordan Browne, in Chicago.  Jane took on my novels, then nudged me toward stories for younger readers.  It was ten years before she sold the first one – The Wreckers.

The next books came more quickly.  It seemed that Jane had found my proper place, and I was thrilled with where it was.  I couldn’t imagine a better life than telling stories to myself.

When the broadcasting company decided that it didn’t need caretakers any more, we moved down from our lonely hill, and six hundred miles to the south.

We have a home now in the Gulf Islands.  We have a dog and a cat, and we still have a boat, though we don’t go sailing as often as we used to.  Life seems busier now.  But I love what I do, and I wouldn’t change places with anyone.