Leah Baric is originally from Vancouver, B.C. and trained as a professional actor. She is a graduate of Studio 58 and has attended the Banff Centre for Theatre Arts and Trent University for Creative Writing. She is currently a certified copywriter for Pineridge Broadcasting. She is, and always will be a Black Dawg at heart.

Margaret Slavin Dyment grew up around here. Her collection of short fiction is Drawing the Spaces (Orca). Her poetry turns up in chapbooks, litmags and anthologies. Margaret founded the Victoria School of Writing and was a writer in residence in Trent in 2000-2001. She spent 2004 through 2006 on a Greyhound bus, chasing her second collection of fiction, also some bus poems.

Doug Hagan was educated as a mouse physiologist. He was pretty sure job interviewers misunderstood this when they sent him to Sioux Lookout to work with moose. He spent the next 37 years working with just about every kind of animal in Ontario - except mice. He is now retired, living on Chemong Lake, and occasionally yielding to an urge to record his experiences in a somewhat fictional way.

Marilyn Kerr has been a writing group junkie since her retirement, happy to tell many stories from a long life of teaching and travelling. Elaborating gossip and retrieving memories fuel her whimsical short pieces. Her Irish heritage gives her that 'gift of gab' which easily translates into writing. Sometimes when she reads her stories aloud, laughter overcomes the words and she has to stop to catch up with herself.

Tom Muskett studied journalism at Ryerson, worked for years in consumer and trade magazines, agency and corporate PR, marketing communications, freelance writing and real estate sales. He thinks that all the forms of communication he can think of amount to storytelling, and that all good storytelling is good reporting.

Nan Peacocke was born in Guyana, and grew up in Trinidad, Venezuela, Jamaica and St Vincent and the Grenadines. She is also Canadian now and moves between Peterborough and the Caribbean.

Krys Perron is a novice to writing if not to life. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland to Polish parents, she immigrated to Canada in 1949. She has lived in cities, towns and villages from Nova Scotia to Northern Manitoba, but mainly in Northwestern Ontario. Story telling was and is an important past-time of her family. She is both excited about and leery of reading in public for the first time.