About Me

Art & Design Diploma | Grant MacEwen College (now University) | 1978 – 1979
BA Honors English |First Class Honors | University of Alberta | 1991-1995 
MA Publishing | Simon Fraser University | 1995-1997

In the ten or so years between college and university I freelanced for magazines, newspapers and book publishers. In the twenty or so years, since university, I began to focus more on online publishing.

My first online publishing experience began in 1995. At the beginning of my last year of studies at the University of Alberta, I was hired by a professor to convert his Romanticism textbook to an online version which meant adding hyperlinks to existing online references and images e.g. Wordworth crossing the Alps. I continued to work with this professor on the Orando Project funded by a SSHRC grant and other similar projects (e.g. Women Writers of the British Isles).

With the help of these publishing projects, I supported myself as a mature student, single mother of two, while working towards a Master of Publishing degree at SFU and working part-time for Chapters in Burnaby, where I lived in student residence. The campus I attended was in downtown Vancouver so I spent a lot of time reading on buses.

At the grand opening of the Burnaby location, the first Chapters store outside of Toronto at the time, I met Chapters’ CEO, Larry Stevenson, who agreed to hire me as an intern the last term of my Master of Publishing degree. During my internship, I worked on Chapters first book loyalty program with the head of marketing whose name I forget but she was smart as a whip. I learned a lot from her.

My office was three doors down from the exective offices. It was fascinating to be a fly on the wall watching the consequences of the largest disruption in the publishing industry since the invention of the printing press. At the end of my internship, I returned to Edmonton and worked with Steve and Sharon Budnarchuk, owners of Audreys Books, to create their — still very successful — book loyalty program.

In the early years of returning to the workforce after six years as a full time student, I also had the pleasure to meet and work with Barb Dacks, founder & publisher of Legacy Magazine, Jackie Flanagan, founder & publisher of AlbertaViews and as a member of the team creating an online version of the venerable LawNow magazine.

I was then, and still am, passionate about publishing, especially designing websites, blogs and online publications with people who share my interest in publishing and design and have something interesting to say.