Lynn Wyvill’s childhood on the Armstrong family farm near Markdale, Grey County, Ontario, grounded her for living in many places across Canada. A teacher by training, she describes herself as ‘a student of students’ who ‘always felt a special rapport with those families who arrived in Canada as refugees.’
After she retired, her poetry and short essays began appearing in regional publications such as Destinations & Discoveries, Mosaic, The Markdale Standard, The Sun Times [Owen Sound] and The Leaf. Winning inclusion in The V Book [The Ginger Press] and Brush Strokes [Tom Thomson Art Gallery/The Ginger Press] brought recognition of her talent by a wider audience. In 2009, she published a chapbook, Wild Clematis.
A Firm Foundation: four short stories chronicling the past of Annesley United Church, A Mother’s Letters: the correspondence of Agnes Annis to Mary Annis Armstrong, and A Single Memory, a winner in the Alzheimer Society Writing Contest, celebrate the heritage of the Annis/Armstrong line. Building on this heritage, her imaginative interpretation mentored by Sarah Sheard of the Humber College School of Writing, Lynn gives us her first book of creative non-fiction, Agnes Annis: Mother and Missionary.
Lynn and her husband, Ron, live now in Grey Highlands, tending a windy hilltop garden, and visited often by their daughters and grandchildren.