My maternal grandmother, Dr. Flora Gauld Little, started medical school in 1918, when she was only sixteen years old. She retired when I was eleven and she was seventy. My great aunt (her big sister) was a nurse who worked much of her life in a leper colony in China. My mother was born in Taiwan shortly before the war, the daughter of two Canadian medical missionaries (one of them the grandmother already mentioned); Mum was a nurse, head of the geriatric ward at the hospital at the University of British Columbia and, later on, at Vancouver General, and she has raised four children and two grandchildren. Mum’s older sister, my aunt, was the Canadian children’s author, Jean Little. She died in April 2020, with almost sixty books to her credit, and after co-parenting those two grandchildren, her great niece and nephew, with my mother. Aunt Jean was blind all her life.

Me with my Aunt Minke in her room.
Photo Credit: Roland Kokke

My paternal grandmother, Dieuwertje Kikkert de Vries, wrote several children’s stories before she had children of her own. Dad’s older sister, my aunt Minke, was a protestant nun for sixty years, and the head of her community in Switzerland for a quarter of a century.

As you can see, I have some strong female role models!

And given that I was showered with books throughout my childhood, and that I had a children’s writer for an aunt, I don’t think it’s surprising that I gravitated to writing when I was a kid, and have now written an adult memoir, two teen novels, two children’s novels and six picture books, or that I was a children’s book editor for seven years (at Orca Book Publishers in Victoria), or that taught children’s literature and creative writing courses at universities for more than thirty years, before retiring from UBC in 2022.

The public speaking and coaching parts of my life came a bit later on, and sprang from tragedy.

My sister, Sarah, went missing from Vancouver’s downtown eastside in April 1998. You can read more about her in two of my books. Here I will simply say that after she disappeared, I changed; I learned so much, and gradually realized that my thinking had been part of the problem, that we as a society tend to see sets of stereotypes instead of human beings when we look at people like my sister (sex workers, drug users). As I learned, I wanted to share, to invite others along on my journey, so I wrote Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss and, later, a novel, Rabbit Ears.