B. Lorraine Smith
Teenage angst meets Wanderlust
In highschool my grade 10 math exam was featured in a school board study on “girls and math” because after I completed 25% of it (for a mark of about the same), I flipped it over and composed a free verse poem connecting the act of counting sticks and stones to nuclear physics, declaring the logic of math officially busted. I regret this incident as I now quite like a good batch of data and time alone with a spreadsheet, but it was the Cold War after all.
Highschool in Toronto was punctuated by two foreign exchanges — one in a small village in Germany’s Sauerland, the other in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, the year of Brazil’s first democratic election (which preceded the first round of impeachment proceedings; I coincidentally also caught the second round of impeachment proceedings on a work trip in the 2010’s…).
These journeys fueled my endless curiosity and set me on a path of dropping into completely different worlds and writing as a way of making sense of what I saw.