I've always been a storyteller.
I'm obsessed with the what-ifs and forgotten places. I love a good missing link. Folklore, myths, those lost legends—that's where inspiration strikes. I speculate about the future (and the past). I take those tiny, odd details and explore them, riding the edges of dark and light, of worlds we can't or choose not to see, but feel and experience all of the time.
I’ve spent much of my life digging through the intersections of spirit, science, and society, and draw inspiration from my French and Polish roots.
It all began with The Sibylline Chronicles and, now, Studio Albertine is the home of my work. It explores gaps in time & space through myth, magic, ritual, & memory.
Born in the mist of Niagara Falls, NY, I grew up in Colorado at the base of the Rocky Mountains. After I fell in love with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From The Portuguese, my Grade 10 English teacher suggested I take up writing as a career.
So I did.
I ran copy from the local newsroom to paste-up in the basement to put myself through university. Since then, I’ve written for daily newspapers, magazines, and online publications across North America.
I cut my teeth as a storyteller on the front lines of newspapers across North America. In 1996, I became the youngest recipient of the National (US) Mental Health Association Media Award for a series in which I spent six months detailing the lives of three people with schizophrenia after the state of Illinois shut down state-run facilities. That series also earned The Golden Bell Award for Feature Writing (Illinois) as well as a top prize for feature writing with the Illinois Associated Press Association.
In the years after, I earned numerous Associated Press and Society of Professional Journalists awards for news writing in the United States. My writing has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and online publications across North America.
Journalism was one hard-core training ground, but it ultimately did not suit my sensibilities. An ill-advised stint covering crime for a newspaper in the Pacific Northwest prompted my departure. I left journalism in 1999 to become a different kind of storyteller.
After agreeing to marry a Canadian guy on our second date way back in 2001, I immigrated to Canada.
We built our life in a tiny house on Vancouver Island. There, where rain falls an average of 300 days a year, I found myself a young mother in an isolated town. I longed for ways to create a magical life for my kids, find my voice, and build community.
That first winter, in the midst of my despair, my husband bought me my first professional-grade camera. "Go find the beauty in the gray," he told me. I spent the next years with that camera around my neck. My daughters and I explored the woods and marshes. There, I found my voice through visual storytelling and writing. I connected to it through myths and folk tales, and built my first business.
For six years, I served as the publisher for Our Big Earth Media Co. This family-focused media company created family content and nature experiences for families on Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia. We also hosted a farm-to-table experience. Through that, I worked with farmers, food producers, and ranchers across the Comox Valley to tell their stories.
In 2012, I sold the business in search of adventure. Our wee family spent a year on the road crossing Canada. I documented the journey in a photo essay entitled From The Passenger Side. That year in which we lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia transformed the way told stories. It also sparked another phase of my life.
Since then, I have taken thousands of photographs and release my work which focuses on time and memory through limited edition series.
After returning to Vancouver, I began writing full time and engaging with the local writing community. In 2015, I became a weekly guest on Roundhouse Radio. That incredible community talk radio project has now ended. There, of course, I talked about storytelling.
In 2019, seeing a gap in the local offerings, I established Quill Academy of Creative Writing. Teaching was a natural fit. Since then, my team has worked with hundreds of students to help them discover their writing voice and support their skill development. I learn as much from them as hopefully they do from me. I now teach more than 20 classes every week and love every minute of it.
My debut novel, Woman On The Wall, was published in September, 2022. It was named a finalist for the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society 2023 Book Awards for BC Authors.
In my second half of life, I've re-fallen in love with Barrett-Browning and all forms of poetry. Speculative fiction and exploring the lost stories drive my writing. In 2024, I received the Denis Didierot writer-in-residence fellowship to the Château d’Orquevaux artists’ colony in northeastern France. My poetry appears in the Quill Keepers Press grief anthology, Missing Pieces, Skirting Around Journal as well as on my Substack. I spent 2024 working on folklore retellings. A few that I have completed can be found HERE.
When not writing, I continue my art photography and deep dives into other forms of storytelling through collage and mixed media.
I live, work, and write in Vancouver, Canada—on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples. This includes the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
In the early hours, you’ll find me holed up in my home office—writing or making art, with my nose in a book, and polishing off a pot of coffee in the process! I'm in my 5 a.m. era.
On social media and my Substack, I share updates on travel, research, my latest WIP, and life.
READ MY BOOKRobin's work is hard to resist. She blends historical facts, mysticism, feminine force, and engaging characters to invoke stories that thrill and entertain the reader from start to finish.
