Volunteer role: Event volunteer

Company name: Juniper Editing & Creative

Website: juniperediting.com

Which famous person (living or dead) do you think (or have you been told) you most resemble?
Pass!

What’s the most important lesson you ever learned?
Life is short but also long; do what you can to get to where you want, but know that you’ll get there either way if you just keep trying.

What or who makes you laugh out loud?
In this order: my husband, cats, cat videos, all happy animals, all happy animal videos.

What is the best book you read in the last year?
Very difficult to answer, but Difficult Women, by Roxane Gay, is one of the most brutally honest and moving collections of short stories I’ve ever read. The way the stories hop from one (extreme) genre to another—from dark, devastating realism to fairy tale and back again—is very artfully done. It’s no easy feat to fit such potentially disparate work into a cohesive whole.

What is your favourite reading: fiction, non-fiction, or poetry?
Fiction.

What are your guilty pleasures?
I’m all for indulgence and a little luxury—a lazy Sunday morning that becomes an all-day read-a-thon, strong coffee, tart pastries, a bottle of good gin, a plentiful fire in the grate on a cold day—though I do my best to avoid guilt in my life at all times. 😉

What is your favourite proofreading mark?
Delete. It’s swirly and feels whimsical to shape.

What is your favourite punctuation mark?
The semicolon. It promises to reveal something to the reader without using superfluous words to do so. I think of it much like a keyhole; what’s on the other side is often very rewarding.

What is your dream vacation destination?
French Polynesia, please.

If you were presented with a book that told the story of your entire life from start to finish, what would you do with it?
Read—and edit—it!

What is your favourite word? Why?
Articulate: it’s a noun, an adjective, and a verb. It’s supremely onomatopoeic (one must be articulate even to say ar-tic-u-late) and is an act and a quality that both people and objects may own.

Who are your favourite poets?
John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton.

What is your favourite place in Canada?
Vancouver Island, my home.

What is the last book you read?
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O’Neill. #ReadtheNorth!

What are your favourite book genres?
Literary fiction and classics.

Which actor would play you in a biopic of your life?
Anyone with a sense of humour, I imagine.

Which band or singer provided the soundtrack to your teen years?
Blink 182.