About the Author

For me, writing was always there in the background.

I grew up in a small town in British Columbia, an odd child, taken to doing things like walking to the public library wearing a brown towel on my head, secured by an elastic at the back, to fool people into thinking I had luxurious, long, brown ponytail. I loved writing, and started on a number of novels, abandoning them about three chapters in because these books required information, and I didn’t know anything, and the internet had not been invented yet.

In high school I did write a touching story about a bully who was, on the inside, deeply insecure, and won a Grade 10 Book Prize for it. I was the kind of teenager who actually read the whole leather-bound prize book, even the poems. So, a nerd, I loved sciences too, and people.

I moved to Vancouver to study the science of people. My writing in those days consisted of lab reports, a paper on facial disfigurement, study notes for anatomy exams. I became a physiotherapist.

I loved my physiotherapy work. I met a good guy in a hospital cafeteria, by the name Dvorak, and I married him. We had a few babies, and I kept working a bit, then we had a couple more babies. I wrote epic grocery lists, creative Christmas letters, but, mostly, writing simmered in the back of my mind as I folded laundry. As kid-work waned, the writing itch grew louder, ideas ricocheting about in my brain.

I took a freelance writing course, had a Personal Essay published in the Globe & Mail. I began contributing pieces to a small local publication. The writing itch was expressed in mini-biographies about my grandparents, and with volunteer work, in missives from a seismic upgrade committee, communications from a board.

Still the itch grew.

In spring 2021, during a colliding of crises in my life, I woke at 4 a.m. one morning with the fully formed idea for a book poised, clambering to get out of my head, as though thoughts ping-ponging around in there for decades had undergone nuclear fusion in the night. Writing poured out of me, a blessing in the storm, first thing in the mornings, sitting in the kitchen, living room, or back yard, wearing the same oversized, long, hooded sweater (affectionally dubbed ‘the trauma robe’ by my family) writing for weeks, then months, then three years on end.

Apparently This is what parenting feels like is the result of that outpouring, the scratch of the itch.

I am excited to share this work with you.

Sue Dvorak lives in Vancouver with her husband Marcel, their boxer-rottweiler Winifred, and sparse representation of their six young adult children.