Member Review
We need writers to record, interpret, and forecast our lives. We need writers to provoke us, entertain us, instruct us. And, while we need writers to develop distinctive individual voices, they often need to speak out as a group in any number of forums. The Writers’ Union of Canada has given writers that collective forum.
Member Profile
Charis Cotter
Charis Cotter grew up in a small house in downtown Toronto beside the Necropolis cemetery. She always loved books and reading, and when she was eight her favourite present was a box full of second-hand Bobbsey Twin books her mother found at a thrift store. She trained as an actor in London England, and Toronto, and had a number of interesting jobs along the way, including the role of a murderer on a mystery train across Canada and a very ladylike position handwriting invitations in the Lieutenant Governor’s Suite in Queen’s Park, Toronto. After several years as an actor, Charis moved into publishing, where she worked as a freelance editor and writer.
Her first book, Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919–1939, won the 2005 Toronto Heritage Award. Since then, Charis has written books about kings, queens, child prodigies, famous authors and ghosts. Her spooky gothic novel, The Swallow: A Ghost Story, won the IODE Violet Downey Book Award and the Silver Birch Honour Award, and was a finalist for the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards. The Ferryland Visitor: A Mysterious Tale, with artwork by renowned Newfoundland artist Gerald L. Squires, is based on a true ghost story experienced by Squires and his family when they lived at an abandoned lighthouse in the 1970s.
Charis has worked extensively in schools and libraries across Canada, using drama and storytelling to bring her books to life. Her fascination with ghosts has led her to many far corners of Newfoundland, looking for ghost stories. In 2013 she worked with children at Tricon Elementary in Bay de Verde to create and publish The Ghosts of Baccalieu, a book of local ghost stories collected by the students from their community. In 2017 she published The Ghosts of Southwest Arm, written and illustrated by the students of Southwest Arm Academy in Little’s Heart’s Ease.
A storyteller as well as an actor, she has entertained children and adults from St. John’s NL to Seaside, Florida with her one-woman show of Newfoundland ghost stories, “Haunted Newfoundland: Ghost Stories from the Rock.”
Charis continues to do writing workshops and storytelling at schools, community centres and book festivals. Her next novel, The Painting, will be published by Tundra Books in 2017.
She lives in Newfoundland on a quiet road beside the ocean, in a small house near two old cemeteries.
