Something About Me

My name is Marie-Claude, not Marie-Claire (the better-known magazine).

I was born in France, so close to Switzerland that Geneva is home too. I also lived there for a few years. That’s where I fly to when I visit my family, from Vancouver where I live with my husband. As a teenager, my dream was to travel, intrigued by the people who worked in Geneva’s international organizations, some wearing their traditional clothes at work and on the streets. One should be careful about what one wishes for: I did get to travel a lot, including living in four countries. My then-little niece even thought I lived in an airplane; after all, I always came out of and returned to the airport.

I studied English in England, then German in Germany. I tried to learn Swiss-German, but I barely understood it better than I barely ever spoke it. Learning Spanish became useful when I lived there part of the time. My tongue of choice for writing is English. Writing in a second language perhaps helped me establish my ‘writing voice,’ but there is no such thing as total bilingualism. This might be why I consider myself a slow writer.

I have always enjoyed writing, perhaps because I read a lot as a child. Attending university as an adult, in California, where we lived for seventeen years, revived that passion. After a BA in International Studies (emphasis: International Law), I enrolled in a two-year online course at the London School of Journalism. From one tutorial book to another and learning how to write travel stories, I began a collection of nonfiction short stories, some are still in the works. Then, halfway through writing a novel, something happened, and I devoted my time to a memoir, Biography of a Friendship.