A Memoir of the Imagination in Three Parts

Part One:

“Small Rituals”

Memoir & Short Stories, 31 Chapters, 55,000 words

“Small Rituals is a collection of stories that bring together memoir and imagination in unique ways. A lively literary experience.”

‘I am sitting outside the airport in a bubble of my own smoke waiting for a connecting flight to carry me home to a moldy old boat anchored on the dark side of the island — that I share with Rock, who, at that moment, I feel has tricked me. I don’t think I made a conscious decision to disappear, I wasn’t on a quest to find myself by getting lost, or anything so cliché as that. Times were different then, for one thing there were no cell phones or social media, people sent postcards when they travelled. There was no ‘Google Maps, so getting lost was easy. You can’t do that now. Turns out, that was the very last time a person could get lost.

Small Rituals (55,000 words) is a collection of 30 short, interconnected stories (memoir and fiction). These are the stories of a solo female traveller in the tradition of Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ (only with more sweat and grit and less love) and Cheryl Strayed’s ‘WILD’.

A Brief Synopsis:

When the journey begins, I am on my way home. Home was an old weather-beaten wooden sloop tied up in a lagoon on a small Caribbean Island — that I shared with Rock, who was equally old. And weather beaten. I had a two-hour layover at the Chicago airport, so I went outside for a smoke, missed my connection, and jumped on a shuttle to the Greyhound bus station to begin a journey with no destination and not much cash. With my little suitcase on wheels following behind me, I walked across the Mexican border. High in the mountains of Oaxaca I joined a 4-day magic mushroom ritual. Surrounded by volcanoes on the shore of Loga Atilin, Guatemala, I lived for months with no cash. On the banks of the Rio Dulce, I worked in a bar that raised money for a school for Mayan children living in tiny villages down the river. In Honduras, I worked with a group of ‘Seven Day-ers’ to help open a small university (turned out they were also big-time drug smugglers). In the end, Rock sailed our ‘home’ from Cayman Island and joined me in Honduras, but I was a different person.

I’ve lived and worked in Cuba, Mexico, Belize, Grand Cayman, Guatemala, and Honduras. I’ve sailed around the world 3 times and 900 miles up the Amazon River. In my youth I was a Fringe theatre artist. My productions garnered attention as I toured across Canada. CBC’s Morningside’s host called me ‘The High Priestess of the Fringe’.

Alice Monroe, Thomas King, Jane Urquhart and Isabel Allende and four of my favorite authors. My narrative style is also inspired by writing for small theatres. And the traveller in me is endlessly excited and motivated by the books and essays of Wade Davis.