Okay. I want you to picture this. A suburban high school in Ottawa, Canada, in the spring of 2012. I was a year away from retiring from teaching English to teenagers, a job which I loved. I was even mourning, a little, the loss of my life in the classroom. Who would I be when I was no longer Ms Burpee? Then I opened Linda Grant’s book The Thoughtful Dresser and began to read. This book, written by a smart, erudite, award-winning writer of literary fiction, purported to explore “why clothes matter.” It was as if Grant was speaking directly to me; her words were a revelation. And I began to imagine how wonderful it would be to find a whole community of intelligent women, who wanted to sip their morning tea (or coffee) and chat about books, and clothes, and travel, and … well… life. Then I finished the book and began to dream about writing a blog that would hopefully facilitate just such a community. A  blog for women who love clothes, but who also love books, who dream of travelling to amazing places, who want to explore their own lives, and their own potential, now that they aren’t twenty, or even forty, anymore, and who maybe even want go fishing once in a while.

And so I decided what I would do when my teaching career ended, when I would no longer be Ms. Burpee to a roomful of teenagers. Turns out it wasn’t the end of a career; it was just the beginning of High Heels in the Wilderness.

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