User Profile

Born in Salisbury during the war and raised by foster parents, good, kind people whom I still love dearly. My first years saw bombed-out buildings and starvation rations. But I was loved and everyone else put up with it. That made it possible. Perhaps that's where my attitude toward life got its start: If the bomb didn't kill you, what's the problem? And if it did, you really don't have a problem. Either way, there's no problem.

My aunt brought me to Canada when I was a little girl of 8, underweight and thin, with big eyes and long braids and distinctly British clothes. I hated Canada. The problem was simply that I missed everyone and everything that had been part of my life until then. I think that is part of the immigrant experience.

I did the rest of my growing up in London, Ontario. At twenty, I got on a train and came west the week after the Good Friday earthquake devastated Anchorage, Alaska. British Columbia has remained my home ever since, even when I wasn't in it.

Over the course of the years, I have done various things, most of them fairly well. I have been a ship's cook and only female on board a tiny buoy tender in the McKenzie Delta (around the corner from Tuktoyaktuk on the ice road). I taught grade 5, got a university degree at a bad time (don't most people find that?) I met my wonderful husband late in life, not until I was thirty-five. He passed away too soon and I have been on my own ever since. But I have many, many kind friends.

I was a shipyard labourer for a year –– drove a mean forklift! I was an oiler –– that's the fellow that works under the supervision of an engineer in an engine room of a ship. I went to the Canadian Coast Guard College when I was 39. It was a live-in college and the course was three years. As a ship's engineer, I sailed on an icebreaker to the eastern Arctic; after that I was assigned to buoytenders on the west coast. That meant that we sailed the famous Inside Passage that has some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world. I have sailed right round North America, including the Panama Canal and the Northwest Passaage. After my husband passed away and I was alone again, I found the work depressing, reminding me as it did of that wonderful man.

I have kept body and soul together by tutoring and giving evening classes on how to write fiction. I taught myself how to write, after which I wrote a book on it, answering those questions that I myself had at the beginning. Publishers have told me that they like it but that i am an unkonwn and just as soon as I have a name, to get in touch with them again.

And that's it. That's all you're ever going to see about me. Everything else is none of anyone else's business.

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	pavya@livejournal.com
	obafgkmrns2003

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