(a novel for young adults)

This much is in the history books: On October 24, 1593, a Filipino soldier named Gil Perez was found wandering the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. He claimed he had just been on duty in the governor’s palace in Manila, and brought news that the governor had just been murdered. He had no idea how he came to be in Mexico. He was promptly arrested for desertion and on suspicion of witchcraft.

When the Internet cast this story up at my feet, I knew I had to write it. I resisted for a while — the research required is overwhelming. But in the end I gave in.

I couldn’t help it. I’m in love with poor Gilbert, bouncing backward through the 16th century, falling in love and losing his mind. History has given me the battles in rainswept darkness, the hidden ships and flower-lined causeways — but what interests me is Gilbert’s struggle to grow up as the world grows younger, his struggle not to fall in love with a sorrowful future.

Is a tragedy a triumph if you tell it backwards? Does a love story become a tragedy? Is Gilbert ever going to get a decent pair of boots? I can’t wait to find out.

The photograph on the right is Caída de Tenochtitlan (2) by Jesus Guzman-Moya and is used with kind permission.

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(all-ages picturebook)

One Christmas my dear husband bought me a copy of W.S. Merwin’s translation of the middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I was knocked over by the weird and wonderful story, the great-hearted failure of the young hero Gawaine.

I would have loved it when I was, say, ten. So I wrote a new version for my child self.

The result is 400 rhymed quatrains. Possibly unpublishable. But a marvel, a marvel. I wrote it under a spell that lasted for months.

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(poetry for adults)

The great poet Basho kept a journal of his Narrow Road to the Interior, his thousand-mile walk to the remote and dangerous north, punctuating his traveller’s tales with haiku — a form called haibun.

This book is my narrow road — a road through grief and illness and through strangeness and joy. The death of my sister, the birth of my daughter. The narrowing of my life by degenerative illness, the slow blossoming of a long marriage.

yellow bird is a series of haibun sequences. It’s my first autobiographical book of poems, and it scares me to death. But I think it might be my best work.

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(a novel for young adults)

In a market town by a looping river there lived an orphan girl called Plain Kate ….

Kate’s is a colorful world of brokenhearted magicians, wandering gypsy clans, carved charms and stolen shadows. It’s a dark world of ghosts, fog and questions. It’s a dangerous world of witch burnings, persecution and plague. Her story is a coming-of-age story, a story about family and belonging, trust and betrayal, bravery and sacrifice, death and what lies beyond. Also, there’s a talking cat in it.

A Russian-flavored historical fantasy for readers twelve and up.

Coming in September 2010 from Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic) and simultaneously from Scholastic Canada

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(Memoir)

When my oldest daughter was a newborn, I used to send weekly bits of my diary to friends and family. After hearing a few dozen times that “you ought to write a book” — I did.

But while the e-mails where sweet if slightly hysterical, the book is sharper and wilder, still funny but also full of the strangeness of becoming a mom. Diary entries frame essays and poems, and chart my first pregnancy, the death of my beloved sister, and my journey into motherhood with my baby mongoose, Vivian.

Published in 2007 by Wolsak and Wynn (Toronto)

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(poetry for adults)

So, I wrote a book of poems about the Bible. Does it sound like the last thing you want to read? It’s the last thing I ever imagined writing. But sometimes great passions surprise us.

My favorite description of Thunder is this anonymous comment from Amazon.com: At last, poetry on scripture that is not saccharine or smarmy - not shy of difficulties and doubt - not proselytizing, not plastic - a rejoicing book, the work of an honest believer.

Published in 2005 by Wolsak and Wynn (Toronto)

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(poetry for adults)

Once upon a time, I was trying to write a novel about WWII. In trying to figure out they everyday lives of my characters — what’s in their pockets, how do you sleep in foxholes — I met a veteran, an ex-infantryman who lost a leg at the Battle of the Bulge. He agreed to help me with my questions, on the condition that we not discuss his own story.

What neither of us realized was how intimate the everyday was. Slowly we grew close, and slowly, the details of his own story came loose. When he died a year later, he left me his combat infantry badge.

I put my novel aside, and tried to honor my friend’s stories. Six years later, I found my way to this book of poems.

Published in 2003 by Wolsak and Wynn (Toronto)

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