Editing, ghostwriting, and manuscript reviewing.
Pep talks are heartfelt and free of charge.
I am a Halifax-based editor and author working in children's and adult fiction and non-fiction books. With two decades in the publishing industry, I am passionate about making text of all kinds excellent.
I work with emerging writers just finding their voices, as well as award-winning and bestselling authors honing theirs to perfection. I welcome the opportunity to help you shape and polish your ideas.
“Penelope is a consummate editor.”
— George elliott clarke
I’m the senior editor at the small yet mighty Uphill Books. I also work with authors preparing to submit their work or to self-publish, as well as publishers including Acorn Press, Fernwood Publishing, and Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press (where I spent a happy decade as an in-house editor specializing in children's books).
My ghostwriting projects range from children's picture books to adult non-fiction books. My copywriting is mainly for existing clients now, although I do sometimes take on new work if I’m well aligned with it.
“Penelope comes along and sweeps away all the unnecessary flotsam and jetsam.”
—Lesley Crewe
I also write books under my own name! My first picture book, Wild Trails to the Sea, is forthcoming in April 2024 with Nimbus Publishing. Exquisitely illustrated by Elena Skoreyko Wagner, it’s about a family adventuring and exploring the coast. (It’s also about how excruciating the passage of time is, and climate change, and grief and love and the desperate hope parents hold for their kids, but I promise no one under the age of at least twenty will know that).
Stephanie Domet and I wrote the latest installment in the Amazing Atlantic Canadians series for middle-grade readers, Amazing Atlantic Canadian Women (Nimbus, November 2021). It was such a delight to learn about 74 incredible women from our region. Highly recommended by CM and Atlantic Books: “An important and impactful read…Books like this keep me hopeful for what the literary world will look like in the future.”
I wrote the middle-grade novel Papergirl, about the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, with Melinda McCracken in a unique process described here (Fernwood, May 2019).
“She is everything I need to get to the end, to do it well, and to want to do it again.”
—Kate Inglis
I judged the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for four years, which was an immense honour—not just because it confirmed that my sense of humour is exquisite.
I am a musician and gardener and the parent of two half-grown children who prefer not to be called feral anymore, though it still seems pretty accurate to me. As a family we hike, swim in the ocean, and, of course, read book upon book.