I once took part in an exercise at an education workshop to demonstrate right brain/left brain function and its implications for teaching and learning. Most, if not all in the class found they were right or left. I was "and."

As early as five I knew what I wanted to be: a pianist — a "right brainer." But the other side — the left, language side — fought for primacy, from high school Quill and Quire days to the time when it claimed my full attention upon our family's move to Toronto in 1968. There I studied creative writing at York University; at Queens University in Kingston, in an intensive workshop with novelist Janette Turner Hospital; and with Governor Generals' Award novelist Helen Weinzweig, who became a mentor. At the same time, I began teaching kindergarten (the start, after all, of the early childhood language education process); then English as a Second Language.

Now here's where the "and," as in "right and left brain," became significant. In my early years, I'd earned a B.S.Music Supervision from Temple University, Philadelphia; studied under scholarship with concert artist Maryan Filar, protégé of Walter Gieseking; completed a M.Music in Performance and Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, under pianist Menahem Pressler of the renowned Beaux Arts trio; and spent a number of years performing and teaching, levels from elementary through high school, conservatory, and university.

Mastering techniques, the tools, of writing requires a lengthy learning curve, skills best acquired when young. Happily, I discovered that all I'd learned from my music training was transferrable to my new career (at the age of fifty!): awareness of rhythm, phrasing, mood, tone, sound, form and structure — all, elements of music, equally applicable to writing. Today, music informs the whole of my work, its content and style.

As important as technique, is a context for applying it. Form and content. It may be that it is beneficial to acquire the former when young, but no doubt it will take a number of years before a writer will have anything to say. Our life experiences inform our writing. As important as technique, is a context for applying it. Form and content. It may be that it is beneficial to acquire the former when young, but no doubt it will take a number of years before a writer will have anything to say. Our life experiences inform our writing.

I think the large number of characters who people my books and stories — provide a context — is a natural outcome of having grown up in a small town neighborhood, surrounded by a close-knit family of nine maternal aunts, uncles, their spouses and many many cousins, and a c—ontinuous flow of magicians, acrobats, comedians, tap dancers and pit musicians who played the movie-vaudeville house where my father worked as a projectionist/spotlight operator. My first book, Slowly I Turn, a bildungsroman, and the second, a romantic comedy, Moon Over Mandalay, both number a cast of characters worthy of a Russian novel.

It was the early years spent in Bloomington as a student at the university and teaching in rural southern Indiana that provided, decades later, the characters, plot and setting for Moon Over Mandalay (BuskerBooks, Toronto, 2008).

My first short story, Dear Doctor was published in 1994 by Fireweed, followed by stories in Dandelion, Parchment and The Fiddlehead in Canada; Sistersong, Jewish Currents and The Louisville Review in the U.S. Aspects of Nature (The Louisville Review) placed as a finalist in The Writers' Union of Canada 1994 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. The Day of the Gorgon (Jewish Currents) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Currently, a number of stories are "making the rounds," and a third novel is gestating.