When Charis was a child growing up in downtown Toronto, she wanted to work in a library because she thought that would be a job where she could sit around reading books all day.

The Parliament Street library was her favourite place, not only because of all the wonderful books, but because the librarian organized plays for the local children to act in. Charis loved acting almost as much as reading, and soon was writing her own plays and producing them at camp and at school.

Books, Books and More Books

Her family lived in a small house that was overflowing with children, dogs, cats, grandmothers and parents. Charis liked making up stories in her head and daydreaming. She would crawl into a cupboard in the basement and sit among blankets and winter coats, eating crackers and reading her Bobbsey Twins books. She also had a stash of Trixie Belden books and lots of fairy tales. When Charis was nine she discovered J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, and it became her favourite book for life.

Acting
After university, where she studied English (and read a lot more books), Charis trained as an actor in Toronto and England. Her favourite role was playing a murderer on a transcontinental mystery train with Dick Francis. To earn a living in between acting jobs, Charis worked in a variety of places including a bookstore, a film company, a vegetarian restaurant, a flea market and a kindergarten. In her most ladylike job she wrote invitations by hand for the
Ontario Lieutenant Governor’s office.
When Charis had her daughter, Zoe, she changed careers and started doing freelance editing and writing. This gave her the opportunity to read lots more books on fascinating subjects: astronomy, canoes, gardening, cooking, human evolution and Toronto’s history.

Time Travel!

Once she started writing about history, Charis made a remarkable discovery: time travel is possible! Reading and writing about history and looking at lots of pictures did the trick. Her first trip to the past was to Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s. She wrote Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919–1939. It won the Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence in 2005.
Charis and Zoe both love reading about kings and queens, and that’s how Charis came up with the idea for her next time-travel adventure. She decided to go to five different times and places to see what it was like to be a young ruler. Then she wrote Kids Who Rule: The Remarkable Lives of Five Child Monarchs.

Charis zoomed through time from Ancient Egypt (King Tut), to France and Scotland in the 1500s (Mary Queen of Scots), to Sweden in the 1600s (Queen Christina), to China in the early 1900s (Emperor Puyi) and finally to Tibet in mid-1900s (the Dalai Lama). Along the way she learned fascinating details about how these children lived and ruled.

Next she decided to find out what life was like for exceptional kids who developed astonishing abilities while they were still children. She started in Boston in the 1700s, visiting Phillis Wheatley, a slave poet, then she skipped through a few centuries and back and forth across the globe to meet some child musicians, an acrobat/clown, a magician, a painter and a math genius. Wonder Kids: The Remarkable Lives of Nine Child Prodigies will be published in spring, 2008

Life in Toronto


When she’s not hurtling through time and space, Charis lives in a house in downtown Toronto in the winter and a small cottage in Newfoundland in the summer. In her spare time she likes to daydream, play mind-reading games with her cat and have costume parties.

Newfoundland
When Charis was heading off to London, England to theatre school in 1976, four of her very best friends packed up and moved to Newfoundland. Charis knew there must be something pretty special there.

In 1980 she finally made her first trip to the Rock. She was struck with the big, big open spaces, the ocean, the people, and the late nights around the kitchen table telling stories and laughing. 
Over the years, Charis kept going back to Newfoundland. When her daughter Zoe was born she brought her along and soon Zoe loved it as much as Charis did. They always broke their hearts when they had to return to Toronto after their holidays.

In 2007 Charis bought a little cottage at the end of a road overlooking the ocean. Her first summer there was better than she had imagined: she made lots of new friends and had long dreamy walks along the shore. To her surprise she found it even harder to leave after eight weeks than it was after two. She is planning to spend her summers there from now on, working on her books.

Parties

If you’ve seen one of Charis’s presentations, you’ll know that she still loves playing dress-up and pretending, even though she is a grown-up. She and Zoe have had some wonderful parties over the years.
  Because they both love ghosts, Halloween is just about their favourite holiday, and they always have a party. They decorate the house with scary spiderwebs, candles and grinning skulls, and make up a wild ghost story for the party-goers to participate in. One year dead bodies suddenly appeared on a bed in an empty room; later strange knocking sounds came from inside closets but the doors wouldn’t open. And then there was the Doll Murder Mystery: kids came into a room where a group of dolls were having a tea-party but one was lying dead: murdered by a rival. The kids had to figure out “who dunnit.”

 
Dress Up

Zoe’s birthdays have offered many opportunities to don long dresses and swan about historic houses. When Zoe turned eleven, they took a group of girls in ballgowns to the Royal Ontario Museum and swirled around the ancient statues and gemstones. The next year they went to Campbell House, a museum where they learned to dance English country dances like the ones in the Jane Austen movies. The following birthday a group of teenagers dressed up as their favourite Oscar Wilde characters and toured Spadina House and then came home to an English tea.