Like Playing Store—Only Better

May 10, 2026

I’ve always been my own boss. As a child, I sold my sister’s belongings* at a lawn sale, painted stones at the cottage, and tadpoles from a bucket on a Toronto street.

I seem to prefer self-employment to sanity, and for some reason I take orders best when they come from me.

The pay, admittedly, has often been insulting.

As a teenager, I sewed clothes and sold them on consignment in a hippy boutique. I bought Vogue patterns, taught myself French seams, and specialized in Victorian-looking camisoles with pintucks, ribbons, and small pearly buttons I searched for everywhere. Soon I had a whole assembly line going on my mother’s dining room table.

After a while, the women that ran the hippy boutique started asking me to help with little jobs around the store. Clothes came in from India in disintegrating cardboard boxes and had to be ironed into something recognizable. I stood at the back of the store, upstairs by the changerooms, ironing on a wobbly metal board while the smell of hot cotton rose into my face mingling with the incense burning on the counter.

Someone had the bright idea to print labels and sew them into the clothes. I got the job; taking home armloads of clothes in my parent’s car, hauling them up the stairs, and piling them onto the dining room table.

Each label had to be sewn into the neck of the garment with matching thread and only a backstitch or two at each end.

15 cents a label. That was the pay. I had to keep track. I had to submit an invoice. I was 16.

These days I still stitch for a living, only now it’s words. I’ve just finished my longest novel yet, Where the Night Winds Wail, and it took the same patience as those labels: slow work, careful placement, one small exact thing after another.

My labeling job ended when the labels ran out and no one got around to printing more. Eleven years later, I had the chance to buy the store. Being my own boss suddenly took on colossal proportions, and for the next twenty years it was like playing store—only better.

I’ve spent most of my life making things from scratch, including a whole complicated adult life. I’m drawn to writing about mothers, daughters, and women trying to hold themselves together.

This week, in honour of Mother’s Day, I relaunched my novel, Odd Mom Out with a new cover. If you look real close you might see remnants of that hippy boutique in the picture. Oh, and that boutique also makes an appearance in Where the Night Winds Wail. One of the characters also had a job there when she was a teenager too.

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