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 newsroom of my hometown daily newspaper to paste-up on the swing shift 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.
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, 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 me suffering a rather serious bout of depression, 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 media company created 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.
After returning to B.C. and settling in 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.
When I'm not teaching, you’ll find me up at the crack of dawn, holed up in my studio, writing or making art, and polishing off a pot of coffee in the process!
Some of my recent and upcoming work includes:
When not writing, I take deep dives into other forms of storytelling through photography, collage, and mixed media.
I love collaborating with other artists. In 2025, artist Kelly Isaak and I were chosen for the juried narrative art show Ghost Stories YYC. As an artist/author team, we'll create a cohesive narrative art piece for the show, which opens in October 2025 in Calgary, Alberta.
I have found myself lucky to have earned recognition for my work as an artist in residence in France.
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. My husband, daughters, and sphynx cat Hypatia tolerate me most of the time.
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.
