Professional bio:

Kirsten’s first book, Lost in Moscow, is published by Turnstone. She has finished (but is still fine-tuning) two more humorous adventure travel books. She writes a travel column and edits Leap Local’s News for Travellers. Her travel writing has been published in newspapers and travel magazines around the world.
She was the Artistic Director of The Red Barn Theatre, Canada’s oldest professional summer theatre. Her play, Second Night Syndrome was worked at Theatre Aquarius (Canada) and it premiered at the Corbett Theatre in the UK. Her second play, Meet the teacher Creature was workshopped and received its first public reading at Lighthouse Festival Theatre (Canada) and a second public reading at Curio Theatre, in Philadelphia (USA).

She received her BA in Acting from Dalhousie University and completed the post-graduate programme at East 15 Acting School in London, England. Kirsten has taught 3rd year BA and post-grad acting at the University of East London (E-15 campus, now University of Essex).


Full Exposure (the other bio):

It has all been one big accident, I’m a writer by accident, a photographer by accident — wait, it started before that because right at the beginning I was a big accident.

My mom was in high school when she became pregnant with me. I was doubly disappointing for my unsuspecting teen parents because they didn’t actually even ‘do it’. I was a virgin birth — don’t get too excited — my bio dad’s sperm was fully involved. Those sperm were athletic champions and experts in orienteering. They managed to make their own way from the outside to the inside.

I started travelling before I was born when my pregnant mother boarded an airplane in Toronto and gave birth to me in Shaftesbury, Dorset, where (according to my grandma) I was supposed to be adopted by an English doctor and his wife. I enjoy fantasizing about who that Kirsten would have been — she’d have a posh accent and would have riding tack in the boot of her car. But my mother was coerced into keeping me when my Auntie Pie didn’t whisk me out the back door and instead suggested my mother hold me. Mom couldn’t let go, so, I have a Canadian accent and kayak paddles in the trunk of my car.

In 1977, when I was eleven, my grandma was attending communist propaganda meetings at the USSR Association in Toronto. One evening she entered my name in a raffle. The winning children would be sent to the Soviet Union for the summer and the USSR was picking up the tab. This is the only raffle I’ve ever won in my life. My mom and my non-bio-dad (don’t want to imagine my life without him) gleefully bundled me off with my point-and-shoot camera that came with our subscription to TIME, a travel diary, and a whopping fifty dollars for the whole summer. Just a few days into my trip — I was utterly lost in Moscow. Good thing my bio-dad’s sperm had a better sense of direction.

Back in Canada I wrote a speech that I had to deliver to the Canada USSR Association but I wasn’t allowed to say anything bad about the USSR in it, which was very challenging. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I announced this at school and was told nobody could do that, that it was impossible. So I went into the theatre instead and worked as a professional actor, a director, and then an artistic director (the person who runs a theatre).

I was teaching acting at university in the UK and on spring break flew back home to Canada to renew my passport. I had all my legal documents (British birth certificate, passport, adoption papers due to non-bio-dad, Birth Abroad Certificate, wallet, etc) in the glove box of my car. I decided on my way to the passport office that my vehicle needed an oil change. My car was stolen from the mechanic’s service bay with my identity. I couldn’t go back to England and lost my great job.

I didn’t know what to do with myself so I asked my mother if she had my diary and scrapbook of photos from my summer in the USSR. I started to write about my trip and when I reached page-fifty I realized I had a book, and then my career changed. I became the author I dreamed of being when I was a child.