MARJORIE SIMMINS

Writer, Editor, Teacher


http://www.writers.ns.ca/Writers/S/simminsmarjorie.html

Marjorie Simmins’ writing includes reportage, articles, memoirs, and evocative personal essays. Her articles range from book and restaurant reviews to profiles of Nova Scotia’s sizzling musicians, writers and artists. Her essays – on such subjects as family, animals, coastal perspectives and aspects of marine life and work - have appeared in numerous provincial and national magazines, including Atlantic Progress, Canadian Inflight, East Coast Living, Canadian Living and Saltscapes.

She has also published in such leading newspapers as the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun and National Post, and her essays have been reprinted in several anthologies. “Trips from There to Here,” a memoir published in Saturday Night magazine, won a Gold Medal at the 1994 National Magazine Awards. The essay has now been reprinted three times, in two different American college anthologies. The most recent reprint was 2007.

During the 1990s, Marjorie Simmins taught creative writing to The Writers Discovery Group, a seniors group who produced an anthology of their writing each year. As their instructor, she worked with their individual writings, and then edited the anthology.

At that time, Marjorie Simmins' freelance writing work focussed on the commercial and sport fisheries of Canada’s west coast. These articles occasioned travel around British Columbia, as well as to the North Pole and the Aleutian Islands. She worked as the BC correspondent for the trade newspaper Fishermen’s News in Seattle, WA, and served as copy-editor for Vancouver's Westcoast Publications Ltd and BC Sport Fishing magazine. She also did editorial work for book publishers such as the University of British Columbia Press, and for the Government of British Columbia, specifically on the Gove Inquiry into Child Services.

Marjorie Simmins has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, and a Certificate in Adult Education from Dalhousie University. She currently teaches memoir writing in Halifax and elsewhere in Nova Scotia. She is a member of Writers Federation of Nova Scotia and has been a resident of Nova Scotia since 1997.