Members – Sooke Writers' Collective

Linda Green Abraham, BA (Spec), CRI Linda has been a member of Sooke Writers Collective since 2012 and has contributed to SWC anthologies and chapbooks. She receives with gratitude the input and encouragement shared so generously by other SWC members. Her muses also have risen from memories and lessons encountered throughout her life, and from her extended family, both present and past. Being retired and living in Sooke have endowed her with the gifts of time and incentive to be still and allow the echoes of the past and the whispers of the present to hold conversation with.

Denelda Bendsen: Her 13-year-old Sooke team won her first provincial basketball title in 1957, and since she had represented Canada on the international scene. Victoria’s first Female Athlete of the Year in 1967, Denelda Mary Bendsen takes her place as the first woman basketball player inducted into the Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame. Since she and her husband moved back to Sooke in 2021, she has published four novels. Scorched is the Prequel to her time-travel romance series, Kindred Chronicles, available on Amazon and through www.denelda.com.

Leslie Ann Bent: As a retired chartered accountant, Leslie Ann resides in the quiet hamlet of Shirley on the Juan de Fuca coast. She’s traveled to many corners of the globe and enjoys sharing her amazing experiences and adventures, but she also dabbles in fiction from time to time. She enjoys gourmet cooking, music, reading, running and cycling. She is passionate about improving literacy and has a deep volunteer history with libraries, children and health.

Jim Bottomley: A graduate of the Humber School of Writers, Jim loves collaborating with musicians to write songs. Jim’s psychological thriller novel Hypnotizing Lions, a finalist for the 2019 Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished Canadian mystery manuscript, will be published in 2021. Jim’s short “Running with Salmon”, a finalist for the 2018 Federation of BC Writers’ Short Fiction contest, was featured on the www.StoriesLessSpoken.com podcast, episode two. You may see Jim on the Sooke trails, finding outdoor offices to write shorts and poems. His uncommon career as independent futurist and professional speaker informs his writing, providing a different perspective on our world. Link with Jim at www.JimBottomley.com/writer, or on social media.

Kathrine Brown is a master-level life coach, non-fiction writer and self-amusing poet. Her work history has spanned the corporate, education, government and non-profit sectors and has taken her across Canada, to Australia, and to the United States. She currently coaches others around the world as she staves off a beckoning retirement. She grew up in the mid-Vancouver Island area and now calls Sooke, British Columbia her home and writing – in any form – her calling. Enjoy more wisdom and wit from her atconsciousweightloss.com and wisdombites.com.

dl clay (Deb Clay) is inspired by small moments of beauty and works with words, pattern, light, colour and texture to share those moments. She writes poetry and story, blends words into her art and thrives on experimentation, exploration and interaction with different media. These elements provide her with many languages to give voice and share a little more beauty. You can find her at dlclay.com.

Valerie Couture is a Vancouver Island Author. An avid reader, Valerie gets her inspiration from local history. She loves to delve into old British historical events and legends. Valerie was born and raised in Victoria and lives happily with her husband of 25yrs and her small dog GusGus

Tatjana Darling in choosing Sooke as her final resting place, never imagined that 2020 would be such a crappy year. Being inundated by television, news and social media on what was happening south of the border, she chose to find her own version of the truth. But the high point in 2020 for Tatjana was that Vedmack, her cat has grown to trust the hand that feeds him.

Nancy Davies moved to Sooke ten years ago, after many years working at the Vancouver Public Library. She lives in a little house in the trees with her dog, Ed. In the carport is a lonely, turquoise 1974 VW bus which is just waiting for the all clear for travel. Nancy and Ed can’t wait.

Angela Dorsey is a recovering juvenile fiction author who has turned to writing screenplays and novels to feed her writing addiction. Her first novel for a grown-up audience, SUMMER GOES NORTH (under the pen name Angie Dorsey) will be released in 2021, and more of her juvenile backlist, plus new and exciting audiobooks, are also slated for release. Read more at aydorsey.com. When she’s not writing, Angela enjoys walks along the shore with her hubby and pup, having tea with her grandkids, and fiddling with visual digital art that she would never inflict on anyone.

Jen Ebersohn is a poet and regular human living in Otter Point. Born in Cape Town she is the mom of twin boys and has a love for travelling and experiencing all the world has to offer. Jen writes poems when an image or emotion arises to try capture the beauty in fleeting moments and the nuances of human experience and individual emotions.

D. K. (Doni) Eve grew up on Vancouver Island and when she returned to her hometown of Sooke after living in Victoria, Regina, Ottawa, and Montreal, her mother said she had come back to the Sooke River to spawn. She’s been a journalist, public servant, hockey mom, and failed politician. She draws on Vancouver Island’s characters and settings in poetry and short prose published in seven anthologies for the Sooke Writers’ Collective, Art & Word (Sooke Arts Council, 2018), and emerge20 – The Writers Studio Anthology (Simon Fraser University, 2020). She is a graduate of Simon Fraser University's The Writers Studio, Carleton University's School of Journalism, and an active member and past vice-president of the Federation of BC Writers. Her home in Sooke is a haven for hummingbird, deer, Max the cat, Bonnie the dog, and a couple of humans. Follow DK Eve at www.Facebook.com/DKEveWriter

Kathryn Guthrie: Kathryn celebrates the vitality and mystery of Sooke; its ‘thin places’ inspire her writing.

W.M. Herring lives at Gleann Eilg, an acreage on the south shore of the Sooke Basin, in the traditional territory of the T'Sou-ke Nation. This homesite, with its orchard, fields, forest, and wildlife, features in much of her current writing. Her poems have appeared in ARC Poetry, Freefall, Geez, Literary Review Canada (LRC), The Nashwaak Review, Queen's Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. Her first slim volume of poetry, A Sure Connection, is upcoming in Fall 2021, from Now or Never Publishing.

A.M. Home has lived in the Sooke area for twelve years. Previously, she taught and carried out research at universities in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa. She has published many scholarly articles and is now trying her hand at other forms of writing as well.

Veronica Knox (V. Knox) writes cozy ‘metaphysical’ novels under the name V Knox for discriminating bookworms who savor reading long strange books as slowly as possible. Her invented genre of choice is ‘art history delivered in a ghost story’.
‘CHILDHOOD 1’ Veronica was born in England, spent her childhood enduring the furious winters of the Canadian prairies, and became a graphic designer ‘MIDLIFE 1’ she obtained a Fine Arts degree from the University of Alberta and developed an imaginative take on art history that led to an untapped source for stories. She discovered that inanimate objects were rarely bereft of life. Shoes, cats, and paintings told her juicy stories.
‘MIDLIFE 2’, she moved to the magical Findhorn Community of Scotland, and turned an abandoned Scottish church near Loch Ness into an art gallery. ‘MIDLIFE 3’ She returned to Canada and delved into the creative inner worlds of autistic savants and master artists, and in one case, the unknown child in the Titanic cemetery. She explored the discrepancies between reality and lucid dreams, fished the depths of the subconscious, the afterlife, reincarnation, the anomalies of parallel lives and dimensions, the classic psyche of ‘the ghostly lover’, reconciled historical facts with surreal fiction, and wrote a dozen novels. ‘CHILDHOOD 2… ongoing’ “I remain intent on listening to the ethereal echoes from objects in museums and the voices of the Italian Renaissance – the artists as well as their anonymous subjects and companions. I grant them second chances to air their grievances, tell their stories, and together we set the dreariest history books on fire.” Visit VeronicaKnox.com

D. Lambert has been forcing her overactive imagination into sword and sorcery-style fantasy novels and shorts for decades. Her first novel, “Dragon's Voice" was featured in the Greater Victoria Library's Emerging Author program in 2020/2021. She followed with the “Weapons of Espar” series, then, in 2021, signed with 4Horsemen Publishing for the high-fantasy series "Son of No Man.” She enjoys bringing out the grey characters, the sarcastic-under-pressure heroes and, of course, massive dragons.
In her other life, Deborah is a nature-loving veterinarian living in Sooke, BC, with her husband of 15 + years, their two sons, and three demanding felines.
Visit DLambertAuthor.com

Laura Lee grew up in the Northern BC wilderness about 30 miles outside of Dawson Creek. The family homestead was situated at the top of Fellers Heights overlooking the expansive, productive fields of Upper Cutbank with endless Crown land forest for a backyard. She grew up with an appreciation for the joys and challenges of life, like the memories of learning to drive in a 1951 Chevy pick-up truck with manual windshield wipers and the mystery of the kidnapped pig. Those stories are for another day.

Rene Low: It has been almost a decade since his return to Vancouver Island after nearly two decades off. His stories are about his journeys, inward and outward, and are infused with flavours of his past. His proudest accomplishment is being a father and it often usurps any time put aside for his writing. He is currently working on a memoir about his time spent living at a famous Parisian book store and excerpts of that work have appeared in the previous six Sooke Writer’s Collective Anthologies. He hopes to inspire his son to explore and when the pandemic of 2020 began they were both in England on an adventure.

Andrew Moore is an architect specialising in community development. He works with First Nations around BC assisting them to create a vision for their future and helping transform this into reality. He is a musician, performer and producer having worked with many musical groups in Canada, UK and Africa. He also produced 22 short films now shown on PBS, Knowledge Network, Discovery Channel, Radio et Television Quebec and TV Ontario. Andrew had beginners’ luck as a writer. CBC radio asked him to read the first story he wrote across the nation from their Victoria studio.

Lynda Moore works with her family in story creation and sharing for participants and partners in paediatric rehabilitation science and mini-film celebration for accessible recreation and overcoming barriers. You can find them at the end of a dirt road having a picnic.

P. Pallot, known as Arcade, is a queer trans-masculine Asian individual with a passion for Ryuichi Sakamoto, stargazing, Japanese films, and vintage video games. They are an avid science fiction fan, aiming to initiate a project with this year's short story.

David Reichheld: Studies in biological anthropology indicate that from our most ancient roots, grandmothers have been crucial to children’s development and learning. When we have Gramma to help teach and nurture us, we live longer and better. And this wonderful advantage is passed down generation to generation. In “Old New Ground” (anthology 11), David Reichheld explores the two-way street of learning and love between a woman and her granddaughter. Along with Nature’s gifts to nourish our hearts, love and grandmothers nourish our souls. When our children bask in such bounty, they grow up strong and wise, balanced and kind.

Madelaine Roig is a recent arrival in Sooke, after growing up in California and spending more than 2 1/2 decades in Ontario, Canada. She is awed by the natural beauty of Vancouver Island, and appreciates the warm friendliness of its people. A visual artist as well as a poet, Madelaine finds daily inspiration and peace looking out at the Sooke Harbour.

Lorraine Sinclair grew up in a French town on the outskirts of Ottawa. She moved to Sooke in1993. A fractured right wrist in 2017 sent her on a journey of discovery. A cell phone, social media, and the internet became a portal to the people and places of her youth. More importantly it brought back the joy of writing . A special thank you to SWC you are truly a part of this writer's journey.

Mark Smith has recently moved to Sooke. He has also recently retired and taken up poetry again after a long interval. He takes comfort in Ben Lerner’s thought that any poem tends to be insufficient; “the fatal problem with poetry: poems” (from The Hatred of Poetry). Mark is originally from Scotland, and has been a nurse, educator and community worker. He is now enjoying being a beginner, dabbler and rank amateur.

Frank Stanford is a retired journalist and commentator. He lives in Sooke with his wife, Janice, and rescue cat. He writes real world, contemporary fiction when he’s not playing bridge or cheering on the Toronto Blue Jays. He’s the author of one novel: In the Shadow of the Cards is a story about the scourge of gambling addiction.

C.E.M. Winstanley was born and grew up in the UK. A core member of Sooke Writers’ Collective, Clare is proud to have been published in its annual anthology for the past seven years and of collaborating with Collective poets in four SWC chapbooks. She published her debut solo anthology, Bits of String & Thread., in July 2021, and has a second volume ready for publication in 2024. Listen to live readings on her author website cemwinstanley.com

more member listings and bios coming soon!

2025 Membership