M.E. Pilkey (Peggy)

Welcome to my website! I hope you’ve been as delighted with Beatrix Potter’s stories and illustrations over the years as I’ve been since I was a child.

Born in British Columbia and raised in Ontario and Japan, I’m a Nova Scotian by ancestry and choice. Thanks to Twitter, I was forced to sum up my interests in a limited number of words, and so I described myself as a writer, gardener, reader, amateur photographer, adult Third Culture Kid, former volunteer teacher with Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO) and former library employee. (Did I use the word limited back there somewhere? Oh well…) My choice of reading is driven by curiosity about a wide range of subjects, and often involves researching specific topics related to a current writing project.

Growing up in Japan between the ages of eight and eighteen meant that by the time my family returned to Canada, I’d spent my formative years–half my life–immersed in a second culture. This is why, like many others who share a similar background, I occasionally self-identify as an adult “third culture kid” (TCK) or adult “cross-cultural-kid” (CCK.) For my take on what these sociological terms have meant to me personally, click here or on the TCK menu tab above. Years ago, a Google search for “third culture kid” yielded very few results; today, the same search provided me with millions of hits. It’s no wonder many TCKs of all ages hope to meet fictional characters who reflect their unique experiences in the books they read, for they share the same longing to be understood as children and young adults from other diverse backgrounds.

After teaching myself how to create a website with WordPress.com, the blog prompts and photo challenges posted by its team–like training wheels on a bicycle–encouraged me to move forward with my writing practice. If you have time, I hope you will surf my website and sample a few of my archived posts. If you share my interests and like what you see, a “like” or a comment would be a wonderful way to let me know!

Although authors–both past and present–are quoted frequently for the insights they’ve provided on the craft of writing, I selected the following advice for its simple statement of fact. In 1775 Boswell noted that “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading…” Had he been alive today, he might have added, “and performing research on the Internet”. I hope you’ll take the time to check out my other page tabs in the Menu above. Thanks for visiting!