Join us Tuesday, September 24 at 7:00 pm Pacific for a Regional Spotlight featuring the Van Island Sluggers with host Meaghan Hackinen and readers Denelda Bendsen, Phyllis Chubb, D.D. Gillespie, Sandra A. Hunter, and Nicole Stillwater. Register here (bcwriters.ca/events-for-writers) and a link will be sent to you. When it's time for the event, click on the link to join the live Zoom event. We look forward to seeing you there!
Digital Doors Open at 6:55 pm!
*This event will be recorded.
Denelda Bendsen: Another former high school teacher, Denelda has been writing since she gave up competitive athletics in 2019.
She’s a member of Sooke Writer’s Collective, WIP (Writer’s in Progress), and the FBCW.
She writes about time.
Her latest series, KINDRED CHRONICLES, combines time travel and romance. The protagonists are strong women who rescue ancestors from peril.
Book 5, Kindred Blade, launched August 2024, features a rescue from the throes of the French Revolution.
Book 6, Kindred Legacy, wraps up the series. It comes out in 2025 and explains how these remarkable women gained their powers as we jump back to the days of the Vikings.
Follow her at www.denelda.com.
Born and raised in British Columbia, Phyllis Chubb now lives in Courtenay. She’s an eternal student of September, the month to start another semester, and it’s her favourite time of year.
She studies both the conventional and the not-so-conventional, creating a rich life. Retirement has provided her the chance to write novels. She says, “Little did I know how much there was to learn. This eye-opening fact gives meaning to my daily life.”
Dianne Gillespie, a retired high school teacher, lives on the West Coast on Vancouver Island. After over thirty years teaching in B. C., Dianne spent four years teaching English in northeastern China. Her passions are writing, reading, cooking, gardening and armchair politics. She also tutors on-line, teaching high school English and social studies.
Her first published book, Living Apart Together: A New Possibility for Loving Couples (2013), which she wrote with Linda Breault, is available on Kindle through Amazon. This anthology collected stories of folks who had tried living apart together in a committed relationship.
Dianne is currently working on the final book in a series about the missing and murdered women and girls of Western Canada.
The Lost Women Series (available from Amazon in Paperback and on Kindle) includes Wildwoods Child (2016) and Road to Ruin, (2020) Deadly Dark Dance (2022), East Side Easy (expected release date later in 2024), is set in the Downtown East Side neighbourhood of Vancouver. Nora continues to work undercover to target the abuse of the sex trade workers in an area where, as the 1980s unfold, more and more women go missing.
Her website: diannegillespie.com
Sandra A. Hunter has always lived at the edges of ocean and forest in the Pacific Northwest, so it came naturally to have a sentient forest as a major character in her Elanraighseries (YA/Adult High Fantasy) beginning with The Guardian Forest (published 2019) and its sequel A Scourge of Shadows (coming 2024).
Similarly, the Dragon Heir series, beginning with Daughter of Earth & Fire, The Fledgling (published 2020) takes place in the mountains and river valleys of the Pacific Northwest. Spinetingler’s and On Spechave published her short stories. Her poetry appears in Gaslight, Lynx, Women & Recovery and Polar Starlight.
Sandra’s a member of SF Canada, and WIP (a Vancouver Island writers’ group). She lives in Parksville, BC, is a “fair weather” kayaker, and a lousy gardener with a ready sense of humour (a good thing, when you’re a writer). Sandra enjoys time spent on her patio, laptop at hand, with a view of either ocean or coastal mountains—and being spirited away by her characters.
Nicole Stillwater: Twenty-five years ago, a summer job writing short stories about treasure hunting planted the seed. Now, I hunt for nuggets of truth to spin into fiction.
I have a lot of questions and I’m often not satisfied with the answers, or I just want to know more. That’s why I write Women’s Fiction and Prehistoric Fantasy. Some people just want an escape, a distraction, but I want to immerse you in a new-to-you experience that tickles the synapses; take you some place where you have the time to take a look around, notice things, ask questions and take nothing for granted.
At home on Vancouver Island, I live with my partner, two outdoor kids, and two dogs, exploring nature’s wonderland from sea to summit, and back again, on a path that rarely takes me where I expected to go.
Meaghan Hackinen (FBCW host): is a bike-obsessed bookworm on a lifelong hunt for exceptional cycling routes, both on and off the pavement. Her cross-continental bike race memoir,Shifting Gears, was released by NeWest Press in 2023. Meaghan is the 2024 women’s winner of the Tour Divide, a self-supported 4,400-kilometre mountain bike race down the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. Read her reflective essay on The Radavist.
