Textibitionism

When I was 3 years old, I would tell my mom stories, which she would write in hand-stapled booklets because I couldn’t write yet, and I would draw the pictures. Eventually, I learned to read and write, and started writing and illustrating my own bedtime stories.

All throughout childhood I was praised by my family and teachers for my ability to write a story, so I just learned to communicate that way. I got to go to special writing workshops for kids through honours I earned at school, and for my grade 8 graduation into high school, my grandparents got me a fancy Smith Corona electric typewriter that even came with correction tape built-in. I thought, for sure, I’d write for Sassy or Seventeen magazines on Madison Avenue in NYC when I grew up, I just didn’t have the first clue as to how to get there. Severe endometriosis and being parentless ruined my ability to finish high school, which ultimately also ruined any chances for an unconnected Smalltown, Ontario girl to get a job as a writer in NYC, but at home I was exhausting our local librarians by reading a book or two a day, and making zines full of confessions and observations about life. When people ask me how I got so good at writing, I pretend I don’t know because no one really wants to hear the boring answer to that question, but I just read a lot. I guarantee reading a tonne of Anne Rice, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and every single Christopher Pike book as a bedridden teenager had a lot to do with it!

In 2000 I started college for advertising copywriting at Centennial College in Toronto, with plans to move to NYC and work toward becoming a creative director at BBDO. My boyfriend (at the time) lived in NY and was a sound engineer at a fancy sound studio in NYC that did a lot of audio for radio and TV ads. Since I wanted to specialize in radio – or “theatre of the mind” – ideally we would sometimes get to work together. Then 9/11 happened, decimating that dream because there was no longer a snowball’s chance in hell I was moving with my 3 year old to the US, let alone NYC. We broke up, I met someone else, dropped out of college to get married and have another baby, and I haven’t been back to NY since.

Being a stay-at-home mom, I had to create my own opportunities to write and find my audience, which I did on LiveJournal and this website, writing about my personal history and daily life in almost a living memoir. At the height of things, I was blogging 3000 words a day and my LiveJournal posts were regularly getting up to 30,000 unique IP addresses viewing them, at a time when the internet was a lot smaller and there was less to look at.

Since then, I’ve written all over the internet, on various platforms, in a radically vulnerable way I call “textibitionism”. I don’t believe in having personal secrets because personal secrets can be used as leverage against you. That’s why I’ve always found it best to not have any and just lay it all out there.

This page is where you’ll find links to all the places I’ve written or continue to write online, and to the projects I’ve published or I’m working on.

Happy reading! 😊👩‍💻💕🌸✨

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LiveJournal

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Patreon

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Medium

I started writing on Medium in 2015 and have since published several long pieces of writing there. Medium is my favourite place to write when I feel I need a larger audience than I’d get anywhere else. It’s where I address the world wide web directly.

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Instagram?

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Lollapalooza

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The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book

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Upcoming Projects

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