Janet Barbara Webster

I was born in England and came to Canada as a young teacher. I lived in Lytton, B.C., a small First Nations village, which I loved – precisely because it was a world apart from Manchester, the city of my youth. I moved around a fair bit in Canada, spending a fantastic two years on Baffin Island in the Eastern Arctic in the early seventies. After a spell at the University of British Columbia – well, long enough to get a doctorate in Educational Psychology – I taught at several universities. Eventually, the call of the North won out and I have made my home in the Yukon since 1989.

I live on Lake Laberge, immortalized in the poem ‘The Cremation of Sam MaGee by Robert Service. I don’t know if it was the magic and mystery of the Yukon or Lake Laberge in particular but it was here that I started writing seriously – and travelling seriously. I spend my summers writing in my log home on the shore of this beautiful lake and my winters traveling in Asia and Africa. (Photography competes with writing for my time.)

I write short stories for adults and am currently in the process of finalizing my first volume of short stories tentatively entitled ‘Dislocations’. I also write about the places I travel to; you can read my travel writing and see my photographs at www.silvernomad.ca. I am working on a memoir of my time at Lake Laberge, which is fifty kilometres north of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory. I bought an old log cabin with no services and over two summers transformed it into a home I can live in year round.

I’ve always done a of of ‘academic’ writing – papers for journals etc. – and recently completed a book on Autism Spectrum Disorders aimed at helping teachers of young children work effectively with children on the spectrum.

I surprised myself a couple of summers ago when I found myself writing stories for children. The only one I’ve published so far was based on a couple of trips I made to the Fort Selkirk historical site on the Yukon River. ‘Adventure in Fort Selkirk’ is exactly the kind of book I would have enjoyed reading as a child. I hope children enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. In a way, writing stories for children is a form of homecoming. I taught in schools in England and Canada for ten years before I started on my academic career. I read to my class every day for at least fifteen minutes, longer on a Friday afternoon. I can still feel the peace and silence that descended and held the children and me in a cocoon of shared enjoyment and suspense. What would happen next? For of course, I always stopped reading at a point in the story that would have the children gasping for more.