About THE AUTHOR
I grew up in several, mainly small, communities in Northern Ontario where my parents were educators. I am the second oldest of four daughters. We often heard and participated in conversations about the challenges many students faced while attending school.
My first memory of wanting to be a writer was at ten years old, when I wrote mainly poetry and some short stories, wanting to find places to publish them. One kind editor wrote back giving me great encouragement and feedback. I wish I had kept that letter.
But my life took another track, first as a youth social worker and then as an academic at a small university in northern Ontario. There, the childhood conversations at family meals ignited in me a desire to develop ways for learning opportunities to be accessible and equitable for every student. One of the ways of fulfilling this ideal was working with representatives of local Anishinaabek First Nations in their creation of the second Indigenous Social Work program in Canada. I learned a great deal in this work about appropriate boundaries and my role as a settler in supporting education for and by First Nations.
I left my academic career in 2018. In March 2020 the pandemic arrived in North America, highlighting the flagrant inequities and injustices that still shape our societies. The stark images of violence against BIPOC contrasted with white privilege left me with feelings of despair. I searched for something that could give all this tragedy some kind of meaning, something to serve as an inspiration for change and hope.
Much to my surprise, I found myself writing a novel. The creation of a world fifty or so years into the future opened possibilities of optimism to comfort me, just as the difficult events of 2020-2021 in the real world swirled around all of us.
And so, Spindrifts is my first novel, and I am finally realizing my childhood dream of being a writer.
- A-M Mawhiney
My first memory of wanting to be a writer was at ten years old, when I wrote mainly poetry and some short stories, wanting to find places to publish them. One kind editor wrote back giving me great encouragement and feedback. I wish I had kept that letter.
But my life took another track, first as a youth social worker and then as an academic at a small university in northern Ontario. There, the childhood conversations at family meals ignited in me a desire to develop ways for learning opportunities to be accessible and equitable for every student. One of the ways of fulfilling this ideal was working with representatives of local Anishinaabek First Nations in their creation of the second Indigenous Social Work program in Canada. I learned a great deal in this work about appropriate boundaries and my role as a settler in supporting education for and by First Nations.
I left my academic career in 2018. In March 2020 the pandemic arrived in North America, highlighting the flagrant inequities and injustices that still shape our societies. The stark images of violence against BIPOC contrasted with white privilege left me with feelings of despair. I searched for something that could give all this tragedy some kind of meaning, something to serve as an inspiration for change and hope.
Much to my surprise, I found myself writing a novel. The creation of a world fifty or so years into the future opened possibilities of optimism to comfort me, just as the difficult events of 2020-2021 in the real world swirled around all of us.
And so, Spindrifts is my first novel, and I am finally realizing my childhood dream of being a writer.
- A-M Mawhiney
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