When I was in my early 20s, I rented a room in a sprawling mansion-turned-rooming-house that was in a beautiful part of Vancouver, Canada. Lots of tall, old trees lined the sidewalks. The area had a luxuriant park-like atmosphere…

To shed some light on this question, let me offer the story of my good friend, Claire Duchesneau, a hearing-impaired singer. When she was a young woman, Claire was able to hear normally. She played the guitar. She wrote and sang songs…

An experienced singer walks onto the stage with the strong desire to elicit emotion from their audience. The best singers have an arsenal of techniques at their command. It is their job, in part, to make us feel something beyond our daily…

Many, perhaps most of us, are moved to sing. I know this from my numerous years of giving concerts. Often, I hear from audience members that they had “always wanted to sing.” “I don’t have a good voice, but I really…

When I was a young girl, still in the single digits of life, I dreamed of walking onto the stage alone to sing for an audience. In my imagination, I grudgingly allowed for there also to be a pianist onstage with me. As a very shy person whose musical vision…

Some years ago, when my mother flew alone across Canada to visit with me, I was desperate to find a way to rekindle our former deep emotional connection. Since she had remarried several years earlier, I felt that I had lost some of our precious bond…

remember standing backstage when I was quite young, waiting to be called onstage for my first performance in a song festival. I may have been 12 or 13 years old. I was about to sing a song I loved from the musical The King and I, titled, “I Whistle a Happy Tune…

The abbreviated answer to the above question is that most of us are already deeply involved with at least some aspects of AI, from our smartphones, security cameras and the heated seats of our cars, to the questions you ask of Siri or Alexa…

Have you ever taken a holiday with close girlfriends? I’ve read and heard stories about these kinds of shared-dream holidays that have gone spectacularly wrong. Disagreements emerged at every turn: where and what to eat…

When I was in my early 30s, I lived in a two-story house nestled in the forest high up in the Green mountains of Vermont. We were far from the madding crowd for months at a time. It was from that perspective on one cold, sunny morning that I was looking…