I’m a writer, teacher, and editor devoted to bringing the wild, living world into the stories we tell and cultures and communities we create. My writing explores being lost and found in suburban streets, wooded ravines, ancient ruins, office towers, industrial wastelands, abandoned farms and mountain paths. It explores getting undone and remade by conversations with moths, ancestors, rivers, human strangers, trees and stones.
 

My books include the short story collections Uncomfortably Numb and Zero Gravity, which was nominated for several awards and translated, and a newish novel, Night in the World. You can learn more about my work, and find my essays about literature, culture and our relationship to the land through my website, and a series about putting down roots where I now live on my blog.
 

I teach creative writing, including writing from territory and a conscious kinship with the more- than-human world. My approach is informed by years of unpacking traditional education, by a desire for creativity rooted in the rhythms and voices of the Earth, the cycles of time, the mystery of creation and fullness of the human spirit. Among my influences I note especially the elder and writer Deena Metzger, with whom I’ve studied for years, and the visionary Dark Mountain
Project. Currently I teach at the University of Toronto, where I formerly directed the Writing and Rhetoric program, at Dalhousie University, and in community.

I grew up in London, ON, migrated to Vancouver, then settled in Toronto for twenty-five years. In 2014, my husband Kevin Connelly and I began collaborating with friends to create a mutual home on a beautiful old farm in rural Nova Scotia, on the banks of the great Shubenacadie River.
 

We live here today, and cherish the gift of this extraordinary place, the honour of being its
caretakers for awhile, and the opportunity to welcome others here to be moved by this land.

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* * Sharon is excited to offer her first NS based writers workshop, 'Conversing with the Land: A workshop on land-based creativity', hosted on our beautiful property. Check her website for dates and more information. Visit HERE.

 

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