Marie is a remedial reading teacher who is passionate about helping children learn to read and love to read. Sharing books and stories with her students has been a highlight when she meets with them, one on one, or in group settings.
Marie tailors each presentation to the children in front of her, sharing her experience as a storyteller, researcher, and writer in order to inspire them to read for the love of it and write to share their own stories. Her mid-grade novel The Girl From the Attic is a time travel story that offers historical insight into rural Ontario, explores family dynamics past and present, and touches on themes of health/disease pertaining to asthma, tuberculosis, and pandemics. Her children’s story “Grammy’s Mittens”, about a young girl dealing with the death of her grandmother before Christmas, appears in Volume Three of Cloud Lake Literary magazine.
Workshops
Storytelling with Q & A, featuring The Girl From the Attic (grades 2-6) This workshop includes sharing the book’s backstory and additional historical information about octagonal houses (book’s setting), rural life in the early 1900s, and the plague of tuberculosis before the advent of antibiotics. A Teacher’s Guide is available for classrooms who either read the book before or after the visit.
Time Travel Writing Workshops (grades 5 & 6) – In this workshop, Marie will help children brainstorm ideas for past or future time-travel, choose characters and settings, discover portals, plot story arcs, and devise story endings.
Nuts and Bolts of Editing One’s Own Writing (grades 2-6) – This workshop includes brainstorming creative writing ideas (“what if”), using a writer’s notebook, working with learning buddies, rereading to check spelling & grammar, and using examples from the editing process of The Girl From the Attic and “Grammy’s Mittens” to demonstrate how one edits own writing.
Classroom, library, workshop visits – Virtually for 2021/2022, on Zoom or Google Meets (willing to try other platforms) with school or library hosting the event. Storytelling Presentation – either one or multiple classrooms; Writing Workshops prefers small groups of 15 or less.
Will consider small, in-person groups in a library or similar setting.
Rates: $225 for one session, $400 for two, $600 for three, $800 for full day (4 sessions), plus travel fee of .50/km round trip
Virtual Visits Only at This Time – $150 for one 40-60 minute session, $125 for each additional session on the same day