Marjorie Simmins

Simmins's 2021 book tells the improbable story of a Standardbred race horse named Somebeachsomewhere that Brent MacGrath, a car salesman from small town Truro, Nova Scotia, bought in 2006 for only $40,000 at a yearling auction in Lexington, Kentucky. MacGrath made the purchase on behalf of Schooner Stables, a syndicate of six Maritimers from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Simmins writes that the sixteen-month-old bay colt would turn out to have a body like a locomotive. "For Schooner Stables, he would be the horse of a lifetime --- and would change the course of Standardbred horse history forever," she writes.

Simmins told an interviewer in 2021 that the six owners were regular people pursuing a hobby. "After the briefest time, they realized they had a genius horse," she added. "Brent McGrath actually quit work and became the full-time trainer during the horse's second year of racing. It was just one bit of magic after another. He broke records every time he went on the track."

Her work has won several awards including gold medals at the National Magazine Awards and the Atlantic Journalism Awards and in 2020, she won the Established Artist Recognition Award from Arts Nova Scotia.

She was married to the Canadian writer Silver Donald Cameron for 22 years until his death in 2020. He is a vivid presence in her memoir writing and many of her essays.

In 2020, Simmins published Memoir: Conversations and Craft, a book that blends information on memoir writing in its various forms, tips for those who wish to tell their own stories and interviews with seven prominent Canadian writers on the art and craft of creating a memoir.

Her 2019 article for Saltscapes on the loving partnership between the musician Matt Minglewood and his wife, Babs, won a Gold medal at the 2020 Atlantic Journalism Awards (AJAs) for arts and entertainment reporting. Her 2011 piece for Progress Magazine on the comedian Shaun Majumder's plan to build a eco-hotel with a five-star restaurant in his tiny hometown of Burlington, Newfoundland, also won a Gold medal at the AJAs.

Somewheresomebeach was almost undefeated, winning 20 of 21 races, earning more than $3.2 million and setting four world records. At the time of his death from cancer in January 2018, the world-champion Hall of Famer had sired Standardbreds who won more than $84.6 million in prizes.

Simmins's second book, Year of the Horse: A Journey of Healing and Adventure, is an autobiographical work that was published in 2016, five years after she suffered disabling injuries in a horseback riding accident that left her temporarily unable to walk. After three years of therapy and recovery, Simmins decides to ride again and to train for competition in a horse show. Her decision coincides with the Chinese Year of the Horse in 2014.

In 2016, Simmins told an interviewer that the book is not just for people who ride horses. "Whether you ride horses or not...this book is intended to give you the best seat in the house, atop one of the world's most elegant and swift creatures."

In 2014, three years after completing her master's thesis, Simmins published Coastal Lives: A Memoir. The book includes essays, many published previously in Canadian magazines and newspapers, and brief stories about personal friendships and family relationships. The book's title refers to writers living on opposite Canadian coasts who meet, fall in love and marry: Simmins herself, who vows never to leave her beloved Pacific coast, and Silver Donald Cameron, "a cussedly stubborn man," whose heart belongs to Cape Breton Island on the stormy North Atlantic.

"In 2009, after being a professional writer for nearly twenty years, I was surprised to find I had not yet published a book of any kind," Simmins writes in her book on memoir writing. That year she enrolled in a master's degree program at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax where she intended to study memoir and use her thesis as the basis for a published book. Memoir made sense, she writes, because of all the letters, journals and essays she had published over the years, all using variations of "my direct-to-the reader voice -- which enabled me to be candid and personal as though talking to a good friend, and yet, conversely, somehow gave me enough artistic distance to craft a story."

In 1991, Simmins began a career as a freelance writer and reporter publishing her work in Canadian newspapers with regular work for the Vancouver Sun as well as magazines including Canadian Living and Fishermen's News based in Seattle, Washington covering commercial and sports fishing on Canada's Pacific coast for six years. She also wrote personal essays such as "Trips From There to Here" about her troubled sister Karin. That essay was published by Saturday Night magazine and won a Gold medal at the 1994 National Magazine Awards.

In 1984, Simmins earned a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. In 2011, she completed a Research Master's Degree in Literacy Education at Mount Saint Vincent University after submitting a thesis on memoir writing as a renegade genre. She holds a Certificate in Adult Education from Dalhousie University.

In 1972, when Simmins was 12, her mother bought a registered half-Arabian pony, the beginning of Simmins's lifelong love of horses and her interest in writing about them. According to Simmins, her mother hoped the big pony would help her 17-year-old sister Karin, who had been diagnosed with drug-induced schizophrenia, to avoid using barbiturates and heroin. Simmins writes that she and her sister became inseparable while training and riding the horse on trails and beaches, taking lessons and entering schooling shows and, as they progressed, registered shows. Karin's mental disorder worsened, she became increasingly violent, and in 1974, she died of a drug overdose at age 20. A grief-stricken Simmins sold the horse.

Marjorie Simmins (born February 17, 1959) is a Canadian writer, journalist and teacher. She is the author of three books of non-fiction that blend personal essays, memoir and journalism to explore themes of love and loss, the lure of the sea and her lifelong passion for horses. A fourth book on memoir writing includes interviews with prominent authors who practise the craft and is intended to serve as a guide for those who wish to tell their own stories.