I was named after my mom, Mary Lou (Louise), and my dad’s Aunt Anne. I’m not really sure I like my name. It’s too long and rarely fits into the spaces provided on forms and tests. And I always get called other names: Anne Marie, Rose Marie, Mary Louise, Rose Ann, or just plain Anne, which isn’t me either. My dad always called me Weezie and my oldest niece spent her early years calling me Aunt Anjeweeze.

I was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, in a time when we never locked our doors and our phone number was 531. Antigonish is famous for its Highland Games, Saint Francis Xavier University (X for short) and the Coady International Institute. Every summer bagpipes called and my dad wore his Clan Ranald kilt. In autumn the population almost doubled as students piled into town to study and party. And people from all over the world walked around in colorful native dress, many shivering under new parkas and toques when it was barely cool outside.

I was born in love with horses. As a baby, anything horsy caught my attention. When I was four my mom made the huge mistake of getting my photo taken on a pony. I begged for my very own horse ever after.

I’m the third child of seven. Big families were normal in the fifties. The seven houses on our part of Hawthorne Street provided 38 kids for wild games of kick-the-can, Red rover red rover and backyard baseball. There were stacks of comic books for trading, slingshot-chokecherry wars and snow forts of epic proportions.

I was a very shy kid. Animals were easier to understand than people and I spent much of my time alone with my imagination, craft and art projects, my family’s many cats and the neighborhood dogs … the bigger the better.

When I was old enough to bicycle, I spent as many hours as possible hanging around horses or ponies within a five mile radius of town. A herd of Welsh ponies taught me a lot of important stuff, like how to feed treats without losing fingers, how to keep toes from under hooves, that trees are hard on riders knees and never go into the pasture with a box of sugar cubes.

When I was twelve my mom found a place where I could get real riding lessons. The following year she helped me buy my very own best friend – the biggest German shepherd I could find. I named him Shazan (shortened to Zan) after two of my favorite books, Shane and Tarzan.

I loved to read – to get lost in stories of adventure and people braver than me. I consumed C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and the early masters of Science-fiction (my father’s collection). I got a diary one birthday and all I wrote in it were plot outlines and words of dialogue from my favorite movies and TV shows so I could relive them in my mind whenever I wanted. I often imagined what happened to the characters after the movie ended or I’d finish a TV show that got turned off at bedtime. I even made up my own characters and stories, but I never thought to write them down.

My teen years were a challenge. Filled with massive highs and lows. Hormones are a nasty business. I learned to play the flute and in school I got involved in theatre and hung out with the artsy/hippie crowd.

 

When I was sixteen I bought a horse, a half-thoroughbred yearling that promised to grow extra large. I named him Highland Laird and trained him myself and loved him more than anything – until I met Frank.

 

We met my first year at university. University didn’t stick, but Frank did. We are still happily together traveling the roller-coaster of life. I have worked as a veterinary assistant, dog trainer, dog groomer, commercial artist, and presently I’m the Manager of Animal and Plant Care at X.

Frank and I never had children but many pets came and went: two Siamese cats, over a dozen goats, two German shepherds, an Arabian horse, birds – lots of birds, a shepherd/lab, a huge tabby cat, and currently a giant goat, a Friesian Sporthorse mare and a Canadian gelding that live in my backyard right now.

Over fifty years of family, friends, work, building a home, loved ones with Alzheimer’s, too many funerals, cancer, hope, joy and love. In the middle of it all I started writing.

One spring day the soft hues of the wooded hillside begged to be a watercolor painting. I knew I had no time to paint that week so I tried to describe the scene in writing for future reference. The effort of painting with words was so difficult … and so exciting … I’ve been writing ever since.

I wrote a picture book first. I thought shorter was easier. Ha! I tried and missed with several stories until I wrote Nanny-Mac’s Cat (Ragweed Press, 1995). It took me a year to write less than 1000 words! The Memory Stone (Ragweed Press, 1998, Nimbus Publishing, 2003) and The Dog Wizard (Ragweed Press, 1999) were published next and then I finally started on novel writing. Again I thought I’d start with an easy one, putting together my two great passions, writing and horses. The Ghost Horse of Meadow Green (Kids Can Press, 2005) took three years to write and two years to reach store shelves! Whew! Not so easy, but so much fun.

The Ghost Horse of Meadow Green was printed in five languages and sold very well in Europe. That’s when I started working part-time at X to have more time to write and pursue my newest career teaching natural horse and hoof care.

My next novel, Seeing Red, took two years to write and was released in the spring of 2009.

Early 2010 saw the release of My Natural Horses. This book was an amazing adventure to create, combining my writing, my teaching experience and my photographic and artistic background.

I am currently working on another novel about an twelve year old girl named Charlotte, an injured horse and a side step into the paranormal.