I was also writing adventure stories where the main character was always a girl. I was into adulthood by the time I attempted to have anything published and collected my share of rejection slips before I found a voice.

My great-great-great grandfather was murdered on the Hastings Road near Bancroft, Ontario in 1862. I wrote the story in poetry in the voices of my three times great grandmother and the imagined voice of the woman who killed him and who was, along with her husband hanged for the murder in the last public hanging in Belleville.

I have written a suite of five poems about the Irish workers who died in the construction of the Rideau Canal between Ottawa and Kingston from 1826 to 1832 for a ceremony in erecting a memorial to the workers at the Ottawa end of the canal. I translated the poems into Irish and they won the Oireachtas Gaeilge given by the Irish Government to literary works by the Irish diaspora.

I also put together a bilingual Irish/English group of stories with Mary Coffey, an Irish speaker and teacher in Ottawa. Titled “Nuair a bhí mé óg or “When I was young”, it was a collection of biographical stories. A second book, Memories of the Past traced the immigration stories of members of an Irish Society which was set up in Ottawa.

The Canadian Authors’ Association ran an annual contest in the National Capital region and I began submitting my poetry. I have won first, second, third prize, or honourable mention just under a dozen times for poetry and two for short stories. In my 50’s I started to enter the City of Ottawa’s annual contest and won on four occasions.