Deb Loughead, a Toronto author, poet and workshop leader, started writing as soon as she learned how to read. She has published more than 40 books for children and young adults. In 1977 she completed her B.A. in English at U of T, then worked as a copy editor until she decided to stay home to raise her three sons, and try to squeeze in a little creative writing on the side.
From 1980 – 1995 she was an associate editor for Spires Magazine in Etobicoke, Ontario, writing short stories, poetry, puzzles and articles for the children’s pages. And once upon a time when her sons were in elementary school, she wrote and directed children’s plays for the drama club. During the 1990s before her first book of poems, All I Need and Other Poems for Kids, was published in 1998, she worked as a storyteller, visiting schools around the Toronto area with her Circletime Tales presentations.
Having written extensively for the educational market over the years, her rhyming stories and plays, as well as middle grade novels, are used in classrooms across North America, as well as the UK and Australia. Many of Deb’s novels written for a European book club, have been translated into seven languages.
Deb has conducted workshops, and held readings and presentations for children and adults at schools, festival and conferences across the country, such as the Montreal Young Authors Conference, the Labrador Creative Arts Festival, Sudbury’s Rainbow Schools Authors Week, Eastern Townships Language Arts Festival, the POW Poetry Festival in Coburg, the Eden Mills Writers Festival, the Young Adult Stratford Writers Festival and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. She has also taught creative writing classes for adults in Toronto. Her award-winning adult fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of Canadian publications. Deb is a Past President of CANSCAIP, the Canadian Society for Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers.
Deb can be contacted at: deb.loughead@gmail.com
Take two teenage girls, Tara and Sophie, who live near each other in the same area of the city, but inhabit completely different worlds. Add one mysterious and mesmerizing lost-and-found moonstone ring, that may or may not possess mystical properties. And one unsuspecting guy named Silas who, just by chance, happens to be caught up in the converging circumstances of both the girls.
Various school friends and frenemies orbit Tara and Sophie’s lives to help complicate matters even more. Added to the mix are several different sets of moms and dads, and other caregivers whose behavior is causing unprecedented upheaval in the lives of their children at this precise moment in time. As the girls continue to cross paths inadvertently, slowly closing in on one another’s social circles, they each contend with their own seemingly unique versions of complicated family frustrations. And their changing fortunes may or may not be related to the moonstone ring. Along the way, each girl is caught up in a school project which helps each one to perceive her disheartening circumstances in a completely different light.
Maybe everything that’s happening right now is a life-altering wakeup-call. Maybe there’s another way, a better way, to react to changing situations in your life. Maybe everything isn’t as complicated as it always seems when you pause for just a moment to take a look at the bigger picture. And maybe every family is more alike than anyone could ever imagine, and new friendships can begin to bloom in the most peculiar ways.
The combination of family, friends, and strange coincidences is sure to stir up any number of misunderstandings and mixed messages—which all adds up to Happenstance.