About Rowena
Me at age 8 (holding the book) with my sister and future co-author on Pender Island, BC.
I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I explored nearby beaches, forests and islands with my family. Much of my childhood was spent outdoors and I typically had a book close at hand.
At 17 I left to explore other parts of Canada and the world. I studied freshwater biology at university, first at the University of Ottawa in Ontario and then at Laval University in Quebec City. There, I learned to speak French and became a francophile, which I remain to this day, heureusement.
During my university years, I also had the extreme good fortune to do field research on an assortment of lakes of all sizes: BC’s spectacular Kootenay Lake, small southern Ontario lakes, large Lake Erie, tea-coloured tarns in subarctic Quebec, the exquisite and “upside down” Lake Vanda in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys and hyper-salty ponds on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, also in Antarctica.
Finally, armed with nine years of university education and two biology degrees, I found my way to Prince George in northern BC, where I worked for a short while before moving to Christchurch, New Zealand, to work on … yes, more lakes! Mainly on the South Island’s large lakes, especially Lake Wanaka.
During all the lake work, I never stopped reading, and I began writing. I’m not sure when I started wanting to be a writer, but the feeling became stronger and I knew academic writing wouldn’t satisfy me. So I skipped sideways from being a lake biologist to being a science writer.
To help me make this leap, I enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where I did an MA in science writing. Even so, the leap was really more like a series of small hops. With my new degree and internship experience at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and also JHU Press, I returned to western Canada and began working as a freelancer with wee stints at biology mixed in. My first stop was BC’s South Okanagan for four years, combining biology consulting (on Okanagan and other large interior lakes) with science writing and editing.
Here I’m using a hand auger to drill a hole through the 3.5 metres of ice that lies on top of Lake Vanda. It took three of us the better part of a day to finally get to the water surface!
I held my first-ever book launch party for my first published middle grade book on February 22, 2020. Four weeks later, life on Zoom began in BC, like in so many parts of the world.
Then came a move to the city of Victoria and the arrival of my babies—my two beautiful daughters. Suddenly my life was full of children’s books (along with diapers, mashed bananas and lack of sleep). Not only did I read scores and scores of board books, picture books and chapter books, I began getting ideas for books. So I started writing them down. I wrote, I took classes, I wrote, I went to workshops, I wrote, I attended conferences. Finally I built up enough nerve to submit my writing.
Today I’m a children’s author of science books for upper elementary and middle grade. Check them out on my books page. I also co-author, with my sister who’s a literacy teacher, a series of fiction phonics books for children learning to read at an older-than-typical age because of dyslexia or another language-based learning difference. The Meg and Greg series has books with short chapter stories written for shared reading between a buddy reader and a child learning to read.
When I’m not researching, writing, revising or talking about my own books, I’m a freelance editor and coach helping other people with their writing. I do this work as a partner with West Coast Editorial Associates.
I’m incredibly thankful to have skipped and hopped my way into my current life filled with words, revisions, manuscripts, books and young people. And I’m especially grateful to be living this writing life on the traditional lands of the W̱SÁNEĆ and Lekwungen-speaking Peoples. I’m once again near a breathtaking seashore and a forest of magnificent trees, special places similar to those I explored as a child.
From a small mountain named Pkols, I can look down on the community and lands where I live on southern Vancouver Island.