My Immigrant Story!

Meet Barbara Dixon: Barbara is a regular contributor to The Glen Echo, so we are already familiar with her excellent writing skills, but I wanted to know where her desire to write comes from. Born during WW2 in an occupied Poland, Barbara is the last of her family alive. The need to document her family history may come from the lack of documents which many of us take for granted. When she and her mother arrived in Canada in 1956, she had no birth certificate or other papers to prove who she was. All the records of her family were destroyed in the bombing of her hometown. The ticket from the ship on which she arrived became her proof of her right to be in Canada and ultimately led to her being granted citizenship. From that unfathomable beginning, Barb went on to become a Director of Software Quality Assurance for Dow Jones Markets Toronto. She is the last of her family now and wants to document, not only her extraordinary story, but that of her family. For her, this has translated into a series of short stories. Short story writing is a genre and requires different skills from novel writing. Canada is famous for our short story writers, with Alice Monroe winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2013 for her short stories.Given her interesting life, she will have an endless supply of material for short stories. How she ends up packaging and sharing them, may be a story in itself. I look forward to hearing more from her interesting life. The Blackout of 2003 described in this book is an event about which many people have their own stories. Her description of climbing down 34 floors to the ground is very gripping.