Diane & Pat
According to children’s literature expert, Bob Barton, Diane Dawber is one of Ontario’s best kept secrets. When he does a workshop with 100 poetry books available, a Dawber collection or two always end up in the top 4 choices because the teachers find the poems so approachable. Diane has been writing since childhood and was published, at 17, in Chatelaine magazine. Her first book for younger readers was published in 1987 when she was well into a 25-year stint as a teacher at all levels. Her career was slowed by severe illness in the early 1990s but her sense of fun and poetry have never left. Oatmeal Mittens, My Underwear’s Inside Out, How Do You Wrestle a Goldfish?, and My Cake’s On Fire! have all been anthologized in many texts and collections, the most recent being Scholastic’s new package, Moving Up with Literacy. Diane has done thousands of poetry and writing workshops, in schools and libraries, which reliably build a sense of community and a joy in poetry. Her Kingston open-mike project, Poetry & Company, has been injecting the same spirit into the community since 2005. She has also conducted research, for 12 years, in a ground-breaking support group, Health Pursuits, for those with chronic illnesses, the first shown by a study, to actually help people improve.
Pat Wilkinson started out her artistic career as a film animator at Crawley Films. She has freelanced in many ways and started illustrating Diane’s work in 1987 with that first collection for younger people, Oatmeal Mittens, in a playful and light-hearted style. Since then she has illustrated each book, including the best-selling, My Underwear’s Inside Out. Now she has outdone herself in the hilarious snow flea circus in Looking For Snow Fleas. Pat has put her sense of fun into a line of cards entitled, appropriately, Love Pats.