Blog Archives - Alison Garwood-Jones Alison Garwood-Jones

Upcoming Burlington Library Talk

June 20, 2025

Alison Garwood-Jones will give her talk, "Inking Your Grief," at the Burlington Public Library Central branch

To my Hamilton and Burlington peeps (hey, @hillstrath grads!), mark your calendars:

SATURDAY, JULY 12
2:00-3:30 PM
BURLINGTON CENTRAL LIBRARY – 2331 New St, Burlington, ON L7R 1J4

Come and say hi and please join me for the homecoming edition of my author talk, “INKING YOUR GRIEF.”

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Discover how author and illustrator Alison Garwood-Jones found drawing to be a powerful way to process loss and promote healing. Alison reflects on the grief of orphaned adults through a series of portraits—some grim, some funny, but all relatable—from her new book, I MISS MY MOMMY. Find out how creating art can help keep a loved one close or foster peace and understanding when there’s no love lost.

This is a unique opportunity to connect and reflect on the power of images and of art making to help us sit with emotions we’d rather avoid but can’t stop feeling.

An audience Q&A will follow the talk, and her book will be available for sale and signing.

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My thanks to Emma Burkholder and Parampreet Khanuja for their enthusiastic support. Librarians have wings.

I MISS MY MOMMY is available in paperback at PenJarProductions.com and most libraries across the Golden Horseshoe and the GTA. The Ebook version is available through Indigo.

My printing partner is the one and only Lulu Press

Alison Garwood-Jones will give her talk, "Inking Your Grief," at the Burlington Public Library Central branch

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Adding event host to my skillset

June 18, 2025

Alison Garwood-Jones hosting the 2025 Digital Publishing Awards in Toronto.

As AI scales way up, I’m feeling very team human. If you need a confident, warm stage presence at your next event, let’s talk.

I’m able to lead corporate functions, award ceremonies and community gatherings (in person and online). I’ll adapt my tone to your needs, from formal awards to casual meetups. 🎤

For context: I’m a former beauty editor, with ample media experience, and a current instructor at the University of Toronto (SCS).

I’m in my element leading interesting discussions with large groups.

You can get in touch with me here.

Alison

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Digital Publishing Awards

June 13, 2025

Digital Publishing Awards

That’s a wrap!

Today I hosted the Digital Publishing Awards at Toronto’s historic Arcadian Court. Colin Leslie, Editor in Chief of The Medical Post, did the intros before he passed the baton to me to present the categories and winners.

Congratulations to all of the nominees and medalists. Canadian journalists are meeting this moment in history with bravery and depth.

A special thanks to Barbara Gould, John Wilson and the whole team at the National Media Awards Foundation for inviting me to participate.

Let’s do it again!

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Inking Your Grief

May 23, 2025

Every audience is different.

Some are earnest and quiet. Others are on the edge of their seats and ready to laugh, even at a talk on grief. Especially at a talk on grief.

I appreciate both, and I seem to know how to adjust to serve their needs on that particular day.

Not knowing what I’ll get from an audience is the beauty of public speaking. That and the fact that we all decided to show up for each other.

I’d love to see you (yes YOU!) at my next library talk this coming Wednesday, May 28 at the North York Central Library in Toronto. Curtains up at 6 pm.

I’ll be pulling stories from my book I MISS MY MOMMY, an illustrated novel that’s quickly becoming a companion for readers who find themselves managing grief while they learn how to “do life” without their parents. There will be demos from my sketchbooks (“How did that sketch make it into your book?”)

At my last talk, the librarian at the projector left the room half way through and came back with two boxes of Kleenex.

Like everything in life, none of this was planned.

Photo: Andrea Beranek. She is working on my speaker reel. Thanks, Andrea!

I MISS MY MOMMY is printed and shipped with care by the good folks at Lulu Press, Inc.

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For Mother’s Day

May 6, 2025

When I was fresh out of grad school, I moved to Toronto and got a job in a restaurant.

It was the first of many times in my life when I was faced with figuring out where to place my skills and seeing who would have me.

I found it helpful to talk it out with mothers, starting with my own.

During that time, Hyacinth Grenville, girl mom to Delia, Alisia Dale and Deidre, became one of my phone buddies.

Hyacinth Grenville by Cheryl Reyes

Ostensibly, I would ring up their Brampton home to talk to Alisia Dale, her middle child and a recent law school grad, but it never stopped at, “Hi Mrs. Grenville, is Alisia there?” (Historical fact: that’s how communication worked on communal home phones in the 1990s).

Hy and I went at it for half an hour before she passed over the receiver to her daughter.

At that time, Hyacinth was working at the head office of a big Canadian grocer while studying for her Ph.D. Her Guyanese take on life’s ups and downs made me laugh out loud and think of my potential in new ways.

Hy was like a cork bouncing on top of the ocean, never letting anything or anyone push her down. She’d had her fair share of adversity, but she didn’t share her wounds (or even her scars) with me. Her humour and spark meant everything. She believed in me and I believed in her.

This Mother’s Day post is for Hyacinth and her daughters. Last Christmas, Alisia’s big sister, Delia (also my friend), let me know how my illustrated book, I MISS MY MOMMY, was helping her deal with missing Hy:

“For me, it helped open the door to the ‘waiting room of grief’ and sit with uncertainty. It’s a nice reminder that we’re not in it alone.”

Delia Grenville on why she found the book, I Miss My Mommy, helpful for understanding her grief.

Delia Grenville on why she found the book, I Miss My Mommy, helpful for understanding her grief.
I MISS MY MOMMY is available at PenJarProductions.com

Make it your source of comfort this Mother’s Day

The stunning portrait of Hyacinth is by Cheryl Reyes – @cheryldelosreyescruzdecisilino

Printed and shipped with care by Lulu.com

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Grief and the Truth About Life

April 19, 2025

Spotlight on I Miss My Mommy: 150 Portraits of Orphaned Adults by Kirkus Reviews

Social media is mostly broken.

But there are sporadic green shoots pushing through the muck that show human progress is possible and necessary.

One of those shoots is our return to acknowledging grief in public.

I’m talking about the hand-in-hand social media meme that announces the passing of a parent, spouse, friend or pet. (I’ve never seen a parent-child hand-holding moment on social; that would just be too painful to share).

For the deaths that feel more in line with the natural cycle of life, we’re letting the world know about our losses.

The grief-related hand-holding meme on social media

To me the hand-holding meme is the modern-day equivalent of wearing black in public.

It’s hard to believe, but even the emotionally-repressed Victorians did grief better than we’ve been doing it these last 75 years.

They wore black for a year to let the wider world know, “I just lost someone I love, so be gentle and pray for me.”

They also held open-casket visitations in their front parlours so friends, neighbours and rambunctious kids could come around and show their support. The dead person downstairs was “in your face” by today’s standards, but cathartic.

Sometime after WWII, we started to offload death and dying to hospitals and the funeral industry, and paved over our ritual of grieving as a community. Grief went underground, with nowhere to go.

Social media, as brutal as it has become, is our chance to publicly ask our colleagues, our boss, and even our enemies for some grace while we figure out how to live with loss.

That’s why I don’t see this meme as performative or TMI, although it is a wakeup call in between all the posts on AI, the latest surefire content marketing tips, and the surplus of politically-motivated cruelty.

I think this is why Kirkus Reviews wrote about my book this week in a roundup of standout indie books that ground universal themes in everyday details. I MISS MY MOMMY shows our myriad responses to grief and commits to telling the truth about life through a series of illustrated portraits.

I Miss My Mommy in Kirkus Reviews magazine

My thanks to Chaya Schechner, President of Kirkus Indie, for understanding what I was trying to do.

Make I MISS MY MOMMY your source of comfort this Mother’s Day.

Shop: PenJarProductions.com

Printed and shipped with care by the good folks at Lulu Press, Inc. – cc Pamela Capraru

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Comfort on Mother’s Day

April 16, 2025

Last year, in the lead up to Mother’s Day I created a grief survey and asked orphaned adults to share what they do on Mother’s Day now that she’s gone. Here’s what you said:

• I avoid church, restaurants and garden centres

• I play her favourite songs

• I hang out with my siblings and trade memories

• I avoid my siblings

• I drink

• I cook her best dishes

• I go for a nice long walk in nature

Then I asked for your best coping mechanisms:

• I work out (it metabolizes grief)

• I journal (to surface good memories and reframe bad ones)

• I talk to someone (a spouse, a friend, a therapist, my dog)

• I go back to bed

Several pointed to our culture’s recent spiritual reframing of grief as a form of unexpressed love. Thank you, Andrew Garfield and Marisa Renée Lee, author of Grief Is Love for helping to change the angle of our lens on loss.

Finally I asked, if you could tell your mother one last thing what would it be?

• “I’m doing okay.”

• “I miss you terribly.”

• “Come back.”

• “You made me who I am.”

• “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I took all of these emotions and put them in my new illustrated novel about grief called, I MISS MY MOMMY.

It shows a series of 150 portraits of orphaned adults, most of them Gen X’ers, trying to figure out how to “do life” without their folks.

I wanted to show what grief looks like day-to-day and how we learn to live with it, even thrive, in moments of hope and renewed energy. The result is grim, funny, relatable, and hopeful.

I Miss My Mommy in Kirkus Reviews magazine

These are “stories we need,” said Kirkus Reviews in a Spotlight of the book published yesterday in their April 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews Magazine. Thank you, Kirkus Media.

Make I MISS MY MOMMY your source of comfort this Mother’s Day.

SHOP: PenJarProductions

Printed and shipped with care by Lulu Press, Inc.

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U of T SCS Career Expo

April 15, 2025

Today I stopped by the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies’ inaugural Career Expo & Networking Event. From 10-3, the room at Hart House was packed with people looking to connect with top employers, explore new career paths and gain valuable industry insights.

Given the laptop life I lead, it was a chance for me to say hi in person to my colleague, Juan Mavo-Navarro and my course teammates, Lee Gowan, Valeria Gomez and the ever delightful Madhuker Akula, M.Ed., M.Sc. who took my pic!

I left the event full of energy and inspiration. ✨💡👩🏻‍💻

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Saskatchewan Librairies

April 8, 2025

I Miss My Mommy by Alison Garwood-Jones is now in Libraries across Canada

Do you have a rapacious view of success? This story will slow you down.

I MISS MY MOMMY is now available in libraries across the province of Saskatchewan through Saskatchewan.Overdrive.com

Since January, I’ve been rising with the sun and pitching one collections librarian at a time to carry my book.

Yes, I have a map with pins marking Victoria, Halifax and the towns and communities in between.

When you’re an indie author, the road to discovery is a steeper climb. And, in Saskatchewan’s case, a horizon seemingly out of reach.

But I believe in the Law of the Harvest. Don’t all Canadians? Especially those who sign books out of small library branches across the heartland.

You reap what you sow. Plant the seeds, give them sunshine and snow, and see what happens. I don’t wait around. I chop the wood, carry the water, and take the gaping silences in my stride. Patience, persistence, and hope are my companions.

That’s why I appreciate the posy of spring flowers Saskatchewan just sent me.

Indie publishing doesn’t let you have a rapacious view of success (“Waddya mean my book isn’t on the moon, yet? Who’s in charge of distribution?”) It slows you down and makes you appreciate every. single. thing.

I MISS MY MOMMY is an illustrated novel about grief aimed mostly at Gen X’ers who are learning to “do life” without their parents. The book has earned high praise from Publishers Weekly as well as a Kirkus Star and a spot on the Best Books of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews.

Consider this: I MISS MY MOMMY makes a unique Mother’s Day gift for the orphaned adult in your life. Maybe it’s you. The book is available in paperback and eBook at Pen Jar Productions. It’s also available for free in libraries across Saskatchewan, Vancouver, Toronto, Burlington and Grimsby, with more to come.

Printed and shipped with care by Lulu Press, Inc. – Pamela Capraru

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Bologna Book Fair

April 1, 2025

The road show continues. After hitting the London Book Fair two weeks ago with Lulu Press, this week, my friends at Foreword Reviews are showcasing I MISS MY MOMMY in Italy at the Bologna Books Plus Fair/Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

This is one the premier events in the global publishing industry, bringing together publishers, illustrators, authors, agents, translators, and foreign rights specialists under one roof. The goal is to showcase exceptional indie titles, connect with industry leaders, and highlight the best in indie and children’s publishing.

Foreword Reviews is at the heart of the action, providing a platform for independent authors and publishers to network and engage with potential international partners. A special thank you to Stacy Price, Kathy Young and Josie Robinson.

I MISS MY MOMMY is an illustrated book about grief that makes a poignant companion for orphaned adults on Mother’s Day, and any day you may be missing (or processing) your deceased parents.

My book is printed and shipped by Lulu Press.

Publishers Weekly reviews I Miss My Mommy: 150 Portraits of Orphaned Adults