Writing
I've been a writer since I was about ten years old. In public school, I was part of an enriched writing program in which we wrote and performed a radio play for the CBC. I think it was about bears.
My experience and interests are eclectic. I hold a PhD in English, for which I studied women's Holocaust memoirs. My MA research was on a little-studied Middle English long poem by Chaucer. Before I went into the humanities, I studied physics and did electromagnetic field research. And since finishing graduate school, I have worked as an open-source web developer as well as doing freelance writing, research, and photography.
I sometimes blog about things that interest me.
Photography
I love making photographs that combine geometry and proportion of composition with human context and emotional meaning. My photographic idols are masters of this, and include Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nan Goldin, Lee Friedlander, Galen Rowell and many more.
My first serious interest in photography was spurred by shooting landscapes and urban design / architecture, but in more recent years I have been deepening my engagement with portraiture and event photography.
With the exception of product photography -- where the goal is pleasing, descriptive accuracy -- I consider photography to be an art of revealing relationships: between elements in the frame, between light and shadow, between the image and the viewer.
Life
In my off time, I try to get as far away from computers as possible: I'm an avid outdoorsman who bikes, hikes, hunts, fishes, and canoes.