Laurie Channer has managed to throw off the shackles of a suburban and crowded upbringing to become a writer. A mostly uneventful middle-class upbringing probably led to her fascination with things morbid and disturbing, which informs themes in her writing. Laurie's Saturdays as a child and part-time and summer jobs through high school and university were spent in public libraries. This inspired her ambition to have books on the library shelf with her name on them. She learned to write by voraciously and contrarily reading everything except the classics the librarians recommended. She's still catching up on those. A graduate of York University's film school, where she learned other aspects of storytelling, Laurie considers herself a perpetual student of the media, and a film buff. After two years in Calgary and a year in England, Laurie currently resides in Toronto with the minimum number of cats required to be an author. Her day job is in a non-glamourous end of the Toronto's ever-beleaguered film and television industry, advocating for creative people. Laurie Channer's short stories have won a second prize and an honorable mention in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest and appeared in the Canadian speculative fiction quarterly, On Spec, with solo pieces and in collaboration. Her stories have also been published or reprinted in several anthologies in the company of such luminaries as Bram Stoker, Stephen Leacock, and Anton Chekhov, all of whom she gets billed above in the alphabetical author bios. She has had a regular back-page space in Canadian Screenwriter magazine since 1998.