Mavis Andrews photo credit

I’m an Orthodox Christian and a young adult writer. I love my faith, my family and my writing, not necessarily in that order.

I was born and raised in Toronto, where I discovered books early - I remember my folks reading to me, and beginning to devour them myself as soon as I learned the alphabet. By  the middle of Grade one, I was already partway through the Grade Three reader (it was a lot more interesting than the Grade One reader, and I still remember some of the stories) and by Grade Three there was no stopping me - even being held up for ridicule by the teacher because I didn’t hear her calling on me for an answer to a question didn’t stop me.

My other passion was animals - we had dogs, first a border collie named Nemo, who herded my brother and me until she died of old age when I was twelve. Then we got a cat named Tommy.  He didn’t stay with us long, he felt we weren’t quite the family for him. Once he’d found another home, we spent a summer with a raccoon - Raffles, which was an entire story in itself. After that our cat Smokey joined us and he lived with us, as Dad’s cat, until his death in the late 1970s. Echo and Toby, two purebred Golden Lab Retrievers joined the family in about 1972, and gave us a lot of years of love and companionship and laughter. They also knew their place. Smokey was boss and he never let them forget it.  By the time Echo and Toby had gone, I was in Victoria, and Mum and Dad adopted two feral cats - Frick and Frack, whom my husband and I inherited on my parents deaths, in 1986 and 1987.

I moved to Victoria, BC in 1979, to attend university. While I’d been a Christian before I moved, my faith really started to deepen and grow out on the west coast, due in large part to an active group of Christians on my residence floor. I graduated with a degree in psychology and then got married, and started writing for publication soon after that. I didn’t break into print until 1990. For ten years I published in small, local magazines, and had one short children's story accepted - David’s Gargoyles. In 2003, we became Orthodox Christian when All Saints of Alaska mission opened, and in 2004, I had Keeper of the Light accepted for publication by Conciliar Press.

Part of the reason for the delay in book publishing was raising ten rats, seven cats and two kids (the kids arrived after the rats and cats.) The rats long since have gone to wherever it is good lab rats go, and all seven of the original cats have also gone to their reward. We’re now held hostage by Minou and Gidget - cats who belonged to my brother-in-law and now live with us. Gidget is a black and white blob who lives in front of the hot air vents, and Minou likes to sleep 22 hours a day. The other two hours he's either eating or practicing for the feline Indy 500. We also have a lovebird, who's favourite activities are perching on people's shoulders, attacking anything that looks like another bird (and for him, that's a very wide description - it can include cats, hands, arms, cheeks and eyebrows) and talking to the wild birds in the backyard.

The kids are almost grown - my daughter is out on her own and working, son is just graduated high school and working. I write, edit, coach writers and am active in church and work part time as a front desk clerk at a small hotel in town. The other half of the comedy team, my husband, works part-time as a systems analyst for the provincial government, in their land titles office.

I still enjoy reading as much as I did in Grade Three - although not too many people hold me up for ridicule when I get lost in a book these days. I also enjoy playing Myst-type games on the computer, and Pharoah-type games, board games, walking, the concept of gardening (and one of these years I really am going to get out there and rebuild it), and socializing with my friends and family. I bird watch on a relaxed scale - I have the books, but am not obsessive about recording the ones I see, enjoy the wild life around us - deer, raccoons, squirrels, snakes and the occasional party, but mostly I’m very boring and quiet. If they ever made a movie of my life, they could sell it as an insomniac cure. Enjoy the books and the columns, don’t worry about the author - she’s really not as interesting as the stuff she writes about!