ON SUBMISSION: young adult (YA) novel, nonfiction picture book (PB).
New Release: middle-grade (MG) novel, O’Malley the Mail-Order Dog (Perpetua Press, 2025).
WRITING: & EDITING: MG fantasy novel, new adult novel.
Dorothy’s YA novel, Escape from the Wildfire, spends just over a year with a family whose home base is Lytton, British Columbia. The main character, Jack, is a teen who loves mountain biking much like Dorothy’s kids. Jack’s dad works in forestry, and his mom is a teacher. His older sister finished high school early with online school, and she’s off to plant trees. The story is told from the teen’s point-of-view. The theme is family and resiliency, and Dorothy used her personal experience fleeing from a wildfire to write this story to encourage kids that life will be great again–it just takes time to recover. This novel is full of facts and leans heavily on research. For adults, the narrative non-fiction compilation of stories called Muscle and Heart, Fort McMurray Fire Stories, published in 2017, reads like a novel but is true first-hand accounts of the contributors. Published as a way to raise funds for community rebuilding, it went out of print but due to demand, is available again.
After writing about wildfire so much, Dorothy switched to a heartwarming family story (MG novel) called, O’Malley, The Mail-Order Dog (forthcoming from Perpetua Press, 2025) about a boy’s longing for a dog best friend, and the dog’s journey to him.
Her YA novel on submission is a story about a teen refugee to Canada who winds up in foster care, while Dorothy’s non-fiction picture book is a nature story.
Dorothy’s other two bound works, Summer North Coming and Nature Divine, are poetry. The first, Summer North Coming is a lyrical picture book which follows a family living in a northern sub-arctic region as they romp through the seasons of a year engaged in outdoor adventures and family activities. Nature Divine is free verse, a poetry chapbook with an inspirational flavour. Her memoir in verse (which means it is easy to read and understand poetic verse), Three Girls in a Cherry Tree, is now available Here. In the coming year, it will be translated and published in Budapest for the European market.
Dorothy earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, and she has taken numerous courses and mentorships with more accomplished authors in Canada and the USA. She wrote a family-focused column for the Fort McMurray TODAY Saturday newspaper weekly for seven years in addition to a parenting column in Snap’d Wood Buffalo for two-and-a-half years. Concurrently, she wrote articles, interviews, poems, short stories, humour pieces, drew a cartoon, and edited and published newsletters and magazines for non-profits. Her work appeared in periodicals and anthologies across Canada and the USA. More recently, a short story, multiple poems, and an interview were featured in an international Budapest literary journal.
She has engaged with the writing community in multiple ways: mentoring other writers as an editor, serving as a judge for writing contests, teaching creative writing courses and workshops, hosting author conversations, presenting at conferences and festivals, and teaching workshops for young writers in schools and in the community.
OPEN TO PRESENTATIONS AND WORKSHOPS
Current and past Presentations.
