My Journey Around The Courage Room

My Books, My Life

In my twenties and thirties, my path to courageous change was writing & learning in other cultures. The record of this began in Touch The Dragon, the joyful memoir of the year I lived in Thailand at 17. A national bestseller for almost three years, the book set me on an exciting career path as a writer and traveller. The adventure continued through my other books.

A few of my greatest teachers have been 1) an old Greek shepherd (in One Room in a Castle and many of my poetry collections) 2) former political prisoners, refugees and Buddhist monks (Myanmar) (in The Lizard Cage, Burmese Lessons, The Border Surrounds Us ) desire and trauma (all of my books, in a way, but especially The Change Room, a more recent novel about sexuality, motherhood and hidden trauma and, 3) my complicated family (Grace and Poison, Come Cold River, and my book-in-progress).

During my later thirties and forties, many of my writing students at both the graduate and undergraduate level were wrestling with and writing about traumatic family and political histories. Their courage, pain, and ability to create and to keep going, growing, led me towards a new career as a psychotherapist. (My own led me there too, as explored and documented in my books, especially in my poetry.)

Cultural awareness, respect for sexual and racial diversity, and anti-racism are essential parts of my lifelong experience and continued learning in community.

I am vocally anti-genocide, anti-colonialist and appreciative every day of the Indigenous lands that I live on and honour across Turtle Island. I talk to the trees, the plants, all the creatures and land around me; I practice reciprocity and gift-giving as a way of life.

I’ve been taught these practices from my childhood, by my adoptive families in various countries, and by my friends and mentors in the Olive Grove where I live and work part of the year in rural Greece.

In Toronto, I live just a few blocks below Davenport Road, one of the oldest known roads in Canada, known in Anishnaabe as Gete-Onigaming. For at least 13,000 years, the Wendat, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and other First Peoples walked there along the ancient glacial Lake Iroquois, then on their later portage journeys between the Humber and the Don Rivers. These are sacred lands—as is every land, our whole Earth.

As a psychotherapist, healing at the personal level was a fundamental to my therapeutic education: the curriculum involved being in the same Group Therapy training cohort for five years. Panayeia mou, as we say in Greek (Holy Mother!) The program was hard. And it changed my life.