Members – Sooke Writers' Collective

Linda Green Abraham, BA (Spec), CRI Born in MB, and having lived in the four western provinces, Linda believes she finally has found her "forever home" in Sooke. Her poetry and prose have been published in ON, AB, and BC, and she has received positive responses to her work in several competitions. Writing, art, and music have been her passions all her life, and she continues to be inspired by the people and scenery that make up her personal universe.

Lorrie Beauchamp is a published poet and short-story writer, whose long and boring existence has gratefully been fuelled by a wild imagination and lots of spare time. Yearning for tall trees and ocean views, Lorrie found Sooke (or was it the other way around?) just before the pandemic closed down the country. She is exceptionally grateful to be cloistered on beautiful Vancouver Island and within an amazingly supportive community. As a social activist and story collector, she often turns her gaze to the traumas of injustice, using words to explore the vulnerable imbalances within our souls. In her spare time, she has fun doing medical research to pay the bills and likes to explore BC's awesome outdoor trails with her rescue dog Rosie.

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 Jim’s psychological thriller novel Hypnotizing Lions, a finalist for the 2019 Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished Canadian mystery manuscript, will be published in 2021.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 the developer of the proprietary Conscious Weight Loss® coaching process and the author of the Wisdom Bites™ blog. She is a weight loss expert from the perspectives of personal evolution, harm reduction and unconditional love. Through her process, she has helped people all over the world live bigger lives in smaller bodies. Her pioneering work draws upon the latest findings from the fields of coaching, psychology and addiction, as well as wisdom traditions. Her powerful bridging of the practical and the spiritual is redefining the way the world approaches weight loss. She still eats french fries occasionally but no longer drives while under their influence.

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.

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.

Mel Denys sometimes spends more time thinking about writing than actually writing. But when pen meets paper, she makes a point of amusing herself with words and the illustrated imaginings that pop into her noggin. She sincerely hopes you get a good chuckle too.

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.

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

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.

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: At a young age, Deborah's rampant imagination kept her up, lending great detail to all the terrible things lurking in the night. In desperation, her mother suggested she invent her own stories to distract her brain. She has been doing that since, channelling her ideas into mainly sword and sorcery-style fantasy novels and shorts. Her debit novel Dragon’s Voice was released November 2019. It has since been joined by two additional novel, Dragon’s Talon and SoulBurner, as well as the short stories available in Sooke Writing Collective Anthologies #6 and #7.

She considers this only the beginning. Visit DLambertAuthor.com

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 twelve-year-old son to explore and when the pandemic of 2020 began they were both in England on an adventure.

Joké L. Mayers is a brilliant story-teller, biographer, poet and author of several books and multiple other publications. Though born and raised in Nigeria, Africa, she has lived in Victoria & Sooke, BC Canada, for decades. She is also a mother, teacher, public speaker and entrepreneur. Her latest publication is: “Under The African Moon – Short Tales That Teach Good Values ”. eBook version is available from: http://www.jmayersgroup.com

P. Pallot, aka Arcade, is a queer trans-masculine Asian person who is often found roaming beaches, stargazing, watching Japanese sci-fi flicks or enjoying old video games. He comes out of his dwelling at the bottom of the sea to destroy Tokyo, illustrate the cover of these anthologies, and write one story. When his grim task is finished, he returns to the sea where he belongs, while fabricating extremely supid biographies to make up for the fact that his existence is mostly just telling people that they're using the wrong pronouns for him while talking.

千里の道も一歩から

David Reichheld: Sometimes life’s line flattens out and the spark gutters. Sometimes the person who lit the spark gutters and despite youth and beauty, goes out, leaving behind a survivor clinging to memories that are more real than the world around him. In “Washing Up” David Reichheld explores how the game of fastball helps one man live beside his past.

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.

C.E.M. Winstanley was born and grew up in the UK. After diverse careers in publishing, finance and education, she immigrated to Canada, eventually moving to Vancouver Island with her young family where she set up a tutoring business. She has been an active member of the Collective for the past four years. She has recently published a book of poetry, Bits of String & Thread.

Visit Clare's website.

more member listings and bios coming soon!

2023 Membership