Erika Paterson

As a young woman, I was a fisherman on salmon tollers on the West Coast, and then a writer and director in Fringe theatres across Canada. While raising my kids, I went to school and wrote my Phd. thesis, Ordering Chaos, the Canadian Fringe Theatre. And then I became a traveller. I traversed North and Central America by bus and train, and once by motorcycle. I have lived and worked in 6 different countries. In 2005, the University of British Columbia (UBC) hired me to teach in the English department. I also teach for a U.S. program called Semester at Sea. I’ve sailed around the world three times and 900 miles up the Amazon River. To celebrate my 50th year, I walked for 50 days across Northern Spain on an ancient Pilgrimage. Now, I live part of the time on a tiny Caribbean island off the coast of Belize where I run a modest guest house, and the other part of the time I teach courses in Writing and Canadian Studies for the English Dept. at U.B.C. I've just completed my first memoir, The Promise, a memoir of the imagination’, it is the first of a Trilogy. I am looking for a literary agent at the moment.