B. Lorraine Smith
Teenage angst meets Wanderlust
In highschool her grade 10 math exam was featured in a school board study on “girls and math” because after she completed 25% of it (for a mark of about the same), she 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. She since regrets this incident as she now quite likes 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 Catholic 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; she coincidentally also caught the second round of impeachment proceedings on a work trip in the 2000’s…).
These journeys fueled her endless curiosity and set her on a path of dropping into completely different worlds and writing as a way of making sense of what she saw.