That creativity was nurtured by the people around us. Our French Canadian grandpa, who we’d visit every summer, would spend hours drawing with us, often sketching the view of Mont Saint-Hilaire from his backyard. Our aunt, a career clown and fitness instructor, always made an appearance during our visits. She brought the same creative spirit, happily painting homemade watercolour books with us for hours.
Looking back, it was the combination of family, imagination, nostalgia, and the absence of expensive toys and endless screen time that shaped Justine’s artistic journey.

That childhood love of drawing eventually led Justine to study art at Sheridan College and OCAD University. Today, Justine exhibits artwork that celebrates the creativity first nurtured around the family kitchen table.

***

Which ’hood are you in?

I work for the downtown BIA that covers Toronto’s Entertainment District and King West Village. This exciting area of the city gets over 19 million visitors annually and is home the City’s major stadiums as well as iconic landmarks like the CN Tower, Roy Thomson Hall, the Princess of Wales Theatre and more.

What do you do?

I’m a multidisciplinary artist specializing in painting, but I like to dabble in a wide variety of mediums. I’m also a musician. I experiment a lot and enjoy the process of making and the discovery that happens when you lead with curiosity. During the week, I work downtown Toronto as an Operations Manager.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I’m working on mostly figurative and portrait paintings that incorporate textiles and embroidery, as well as recording a second album with my band rolemodels. I just got back from New York City, where I got to participate in an experimental art fair called the Work in Progress Festival at the Blanc. Earlier this year, I exhibited for the first time at the Artist Project in Toronto, which was also a great experience. Coming up, I have a solo show in a cafe in Hamilton called SYNONYM in August – so I’ve been creating a lot of work for that specifically.

Where can we find your work?

Instagram | TikTok | Website | Spotify | Linktree

The post “A Day in the Life” with: Visual Artist Justine Eva Smith appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, so named for the fictional village in which most (though, importantly, not all) of its action is situated, its three entries – Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975 Canada/1976 Worldwide) – represent the high watermark of the extraordinary career of Toronto’s own Davies, a work which is both quintessentially Canadian and yet universal.

And please, don’t let its perennial status on high school reading lists fool you, the Deptford Trilogy is a masterpiece, and the work you should be reading this Canada Day.

When people ask about my favourite authors, I typically reply that that’s both an impossible question, but also here’s my holy trinity: Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies, John Irving.

Dickens is, of course, the master of the sentimental novel, an author who paired an earnest love for humanity (especially children) with a social critic’s eye for injustice. Like Zola (who might be my fourth, if pressed to form a quartet), Dickens knew how to tell a story, tell it well, and tell it in a way that also revealed something essential about the human condition, even and especially in the face of the unfair systems that govern our dysfunctional society.

Dickens’s best novels are all, or nearly all, bildungsromans, typically stories of a boy/young man’s journey through adversity (David Copperfield, Great Expectations), though he could also write wonderful, if somewhat idealized, female protagonists, as in Hard Times’s Louisa Gradgrind or Esther Summerson of Bleak House. The worlds of Dickens are elaborate, colourful, lived-in, with memorable casts of characters, even minor ones, that stick with you long after you’ve set those worlds aside.

Writing almost precisely a century later (Davies was born 1913; Dickens 1812), Robertson Davies was not a social critic in the vein of Dickens, but he was, in his own way, a master worldbuilder, his novels similarly populated with extraordinary people (men and women, though, like Dickens, he favoured male protagonists) pushing against the boundaries of their time and place, and evolving in interesting and unexpected ways.

Like Dickens, Davies was also something of a serial storyteller: where Dickens published his stories across months or even years in the pages of magazines or journals, Davies’s novels were nearly all published in trilogy format: in addition to Deptford, there are Salterton, Cornish, and even an unfinished Toronto trilogy (the finale not yet completed at the time of Davies’s death).

Widely and affectionately known as Canada’s Santa Claus, with his great white beard and tall, heavyset figure, Davies was also, as John Irving referred to him, “Canada’s Dickens”.

Which brings us to The Deptford Trilogy, of which Fifth Business remains (arguably to its detriment) the best-known entry, by virtue of its perennial placement on mandatory high school reading lists.

In some ways, it helps to start with what the Deptford Trilogy is not.

It is not, despite the best efforts of your high school English teacher, a hyper-local maple-boned tale about the small lives of small people in a small town (Deptford inspired by Davies’s own hometown of Thamesville, in southwestern Ontario). It is also (despite the previous parenthetical) not an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical account of Davies’s own life, a reductive take which misses the point of this magical realist masterpiece.

What it is, however, is a stunning trilogy of interconnected lives and experiences, each entry wildly different from the others, yet all threaded together with the deft touch of a master storyteller who has clearly studied his Dickens.

The first novel, 1970’s Fifth Business, is easily the most grounded. An epistolary novel, it takes the form of an extended letter from its narrator, Dunstan/Dunstable Ramsay, recounting the events of his life, ranging from a smalltown upbringing to traumatic – and magical realist – experiences in the First World War, through an intriguing detour to Mexico, before finally settling in as history teacher at Colborne College (yet another stand-in, inspired by both Upper Canada College, which Davies attended, and University of Toronto’s Trinity College, where he taught literature for over twenty years).

Beginning, amusingly, with an invented quote which purports to define the titular phrase – “those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement” – Fifth Business is a novel of cause and effect, focussing on the consequences of a single action, an inciting incident which profoundly affects the lives of those involved.

Here, that incident is of a particularly Canadian bent, a missed snowball throw – aimed at Ramsay but instead hitting the young preacher’s wife Mary Dempster, sending her into premature labour. Mary’s premature son, Paul Dempster, will appear as a central figure across the trilogy, while it’s David Staunton, who is the son of the snowball thrower (Percy Boyd Staunton), who takes centre stage in the second, and easily most experimental novel, The Manticore. Sons play a very important role in the Deptford Trilogy.

In Fifth Business, however, it’s the man on the sidelines of those sons’ stories who takes centre stage. Ramsay’s guilt over ducking from that snowball haunts him throughout the novel, even as his experiences in World War I – in the novel’s most memorable scene, an ailing Ramsay is struck by a vision of an amalgam of the Virgin Mary and the pointedly-named Mary Dempster – and, later, with the grown-up snowball-thrower, Percy “Boy” Staunton, convince Ramsay there are strange spiritual forces at work around him.

Narrative detours – studying the saints alongside a brotherhood of Jesuits; befriending a mysterious magician and his androgynous partner in Mexico – which would read as eccentric or contrived in the hands of a lesser writer, only add to the general feeling of instability, of Ramsay’s world being guided by some strange, mystical force.

Inevitably, as in any of the great Dickens novels, these serpentine paths eventually converge, as characters, plotlines, even objects come together, neatly tying together a story which, across its two-hundred-fifty or so pages, constantly and enthusiastically drifts off in unpredictable directions. The finale, which offers significant resolutions even as it ends on a note of ambiguity which tees up the second novel, is a highlight.

Like many a middle entry, follow-up novel The Manticore is darker than the works on either side of it. It’s also the most experimental, spurred on by Davies’s fascination with the works, and psychoanalytical methods, of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

A Jungian novel in the truest sense – it takes place largely within the confines of an extended therapy session – Manticore does not so much as pick up from where Fifth Business left off, as unspool yet another one of its many threads, tying all the way back to that inciting snowball incident. This time, however, the protagonist is David Staunton, son of the original snowball-thrower, who we follow here as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of his own and his father’s lives.

The title, a reference to the chimeric creature with the face of a human, body of a lion, and tail of a scorpion, gives some of an idea of the space Davies is working in. There are ruminations on the collective unconscious, dream-meaning, and shifting identities. Also, several returning characters, including Dunstan Ramsay, the ever-mysterious magician Magnus Eisengrim, and several others with connections to Deptford. Amusingly, one of the unspoken themes of the Deptford Trilogy is that even a forgotten village in rural Ontario can exert a gravitational pull that spans the globe.

While on the one hand the novel does resolve some of the lingering mysteries of its predecessor, The Manticore is just as interested in telling a wholly new story, one in which David Staunton – alcoholic, depressed, scion of a wealthy family – proves to be perhaps even more compelling a protagonist than Ramsay before him. I am no Jungian, so I can’t honestly speak to how effectively this works as an application of the great psychoanalyst’s theories, but I can say that, as a story, it’s a compelling one. By weaving together the dream-world of Jung with the mysticism already present in the previous novel, Davies creates a slightly unsettling, destabilizing world, in which everything, especially memory, is open to interpretation and interrogation.

The best conclusions are those which both offer readers some form of closure, while still leaving their worlds intact, characters left to live and breathe throughout the unseen days and weeks and years to follow.

Davies’s World of Wonders is not a perfect finale, but it does a wonderful job of tying together the many disparate threads of a trilogy which begins with a small-town accident and explodes out into a whole universe of magic, religion, wars, corruption, violence.

Here, in World of Wonders, Davies gives us what we’ve longed for all along without really knowing it: the story of Magnus Eisengrim, the mysterious magician who’s floated his way through the previous two novels.

Because World is a book of revelation, it’s very difficult to discuss it here without giving away some of its most poignant secrets. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that Eisengrim (explicitly a pseudonym from the first) is someone who’s hovered in the margins of the entire trilogy, dating right back to that initial snowball fight. He’s a Deptfordian – because of course he is – and a deep admirer of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the magician who inspired Harry Houdini, that master of illusion and reinvented identity. (Incidentally, this makes Eisengrim an indirect literary predecessor to Michael Chabon’s Sammy Clay. I have no evidence, but I’d like to think Chabon was inspired by World of Wonders while writing his masterpiece, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.)

Eisengrim is also, like Dunstan Ramsay and David Staunton before him, an instrument through which Davies contemplates something of what it means to be human – and, in particular, what it means to build human connections. Eisengrim may be an illusionist extraordinaire, with endless pseudonyms and half-truths for backstory, but he’s also a man with a very specific origin, one which keys into and, eventually, offers an alternative perspective to the moments, characters, revelations of the preceding novels. It’s no small act of literary bravery to use your third novel to retroactively interrogate the things which your readers have come to accept and rely upon, but Davies pulls this off with aplomb.

It’s impossible to discuss Davies without also talking about John Irving. If Dickens and Davies are the Father and the Holy Spirit (I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which), then Irving is the Son.

The Academy Award-winning author of The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp, Irving was born and raised in Exeter, New Hampshire, and situates many of his novels in that New England milieu. An oft-overlooked aspect of Irving’s story, however, is his deep and abiding love for Canada, where he now resides, and how Robertson Davies brought him here.

As Irving is fond to relate, he instantly fell in love with Davies after encouraging his works as a young man. Then, after Davies wrote a laudatory review of Irving’s fifth’s novel, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), Irving reached out, the two quickly becoming fond pen pals before Irving, on a whim, journeyed up to Toronto for the sole purpose of meeting his literary hero.

Soon enough, a strong and abiding friendship developed, the writers bonding over their shared admiration of Dickens. By 1987, Davies would appear as one of the readers at Irving’s wedding (to Canadian literary agent Janet Turnbull); in 1995, Irving spoke at Davies’s funeral. In 2015, after years of shuttling back and forth between his beloved New England and Toronto, Irving finally took up permanent residence here, becoming a Canadian citizen in 2019. In a 2022 interview, Irving said, “The first Canadian to open my eyes was Robertson Davies.”

While Irving has countless fans, it’s doubtful how many are aware of Irving’s Canadian connection, and, in particular, the fact that Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany – as it happens, this critic’s favourite Irving – is an explicit homage to Davies. To be even more precise, it is a pastiche of the Deptford Trilogy.

The parallels are impossible to ignore.

Owen Meany’s narrator is a teacher at a private school in Toronto; he’s spent his life as fifth business to the titular Owen Meany, a preternaturally small child who, like Paul Dempster, was born premature under unusual circumstances. Owen Meany has less magic than the Davies trilogy, though it does have a healthy religious streak, particularly in its treatment of the strangely angelic Owen and the Mary-like figure of Owen’s mother, who insists that Owen’s was a virgin birth. Owen Meany even has an inciting childhood incident – here, an errant foul ball which kills a young mother – which Irving liberally borrowed from the ill-fated Deptford snowball.

Irving is, today, the better-known author. An award-winner (though, somewhat surprisingly, he’s never won the Pulitzer – I had to triple-check), his works have sold in the millions, with film adaptations which themselves have earned millions at the box office. Ever since he became a Canadian citizen, he easily ranks among the most beloved Canadian literary figures, sitting comfortably alongside Davies, Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, and Leonard Cohen.

Irving is also, at eighty years old, the proud torchbearer for what’s arguably an unfashionable literary tradition: tales of humanity, of our capacity for compassion and for love, in the mode of Davies and, before that, Dickens.

Irving tells a wonderful story, about Davies’s guest-starring appearance at Irving’s wedding:

“My two sons from my first marriage, Colin and Brendan, were the best men. They had not met Rob before the wedding, and Brendan – he was 17 at the time – didn’t see Professor Davies, in his magnificent white beard, approach the pulpit. Brendan looked up and, suddenly, there was this big man with a big beard and a bigger voice. Colin, who was 22, told me that Brendan looked as if he’d seen a ghost. But Brendan, who was not overly familiar with churches of any kind, had had a different thought.

Brendan was quite certain that Professor Davies was God.”

If Davies was a god, then he was a benevolent one, creating, in his fictional worlds, a space to explore what it means to be human, to wrestle with one’s faith, to decide how to define, and redefine, oneself as circumstances require.

The Deptford Trilogy, his masterpiece, is the great Canadian literary trilogy, one which we happily celebrate this day of national pride.

***

The Deptford Trilogy is published today through Penguin Random House Canada, and can be found at The Scribe, BMV, or whatever independent bookstore you frequent.

The post Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy Remains the Essential CanLit Classic appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

To live a day in the life of Jerome is to encounter the many lives he has already lived. As a trained anthropologist, he conducted fieldwork in Kenya. As an unconventionally trained actor, he has performed in some unconventional venues, from a downtown park (The Christie Pits Riot) to an 1822 heritage house (HogTown).

Threaded throughout these pursuits is a fascination with people and their stories. Jerome’s novels blend compelling characters with big ideas, and he is particularly drawn to stories about ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances and the choices they make when confronted with uncertainty, injustice, or transformation. Jerome is the author of two award-winning books: The Perpetual Now, a science fiction novel exploring what it means to be human, and Day of Epiphany, inspired by a horrific and often overlooked chapter in Canadian history.

What Jerome’s impressive curriculum vitae doesn’t talk about are his two children, five stepchildren, and two grandchildren, and the enormous place they take up in his life. If Jerome had his way, he would end every day surrounded by his people.

-Written by Josh Mogyoros

***

Which ‘hood are you in?

I live up in York Region, but I’m in the Roncy neighbourhood often enough to consider it a second home.

What do you do?

I’m a novelist, actor, graphic designer, and educator. Mostly, I write. My stories tend to be atmospheric and character-driven and deal with issues of moral complexity, personal resilience, loss and redemption.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently about halfway through what is becoming an ambitious, high-concept sci-fi novel that takes a new perspective on timelines and the multiverse. It’s pretty trippy stuff, but as always it’s grounded in the fragility, complexity and tenacity that characterizes the human condition.

Where can we find your work?

The easiest thing is to visit my website, but you can also find it online through Indigo and Amazon.

The post “A Day in the Life” with: Author Jerome J Bourgault appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Fast forward to today, and the delightful – and delightfully controversial – Guardian poll of great novels has recently arrived, (quite correctly) crowning George Eliot’s monumental Middlemarch the best of an extraordinary literary tradition. Far from challenging that result, I thought it might be fun to publish my own, unsanctioned ballot, yet again offering my paltry contribution to a never-ending debate.

This list was, of course, impossible to put together, and I already regret everything. (A Toronto list with no Robertson Davies on it? For shame!)

That said, it was a joy to compile, the exercise itself a lovely excuse to revisit familiar literary territory, reminding myself why I fell in love with these works in the first place.

Here, then, totally subjective and in no way definitive, are your Toronto Guardian greatest novels of all time.

1. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871)

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”

For the uninitiated, it can be difficult to understand why this, a late-nineteenth-century novel about the comings and goings in a small English town, merits such adoration. But for those who have encountered it – including, evidently, the bulk of The Guardian’s voters – there’s no denying the strength of its prose, the richness of its characters, and the keen psychological perception of its author, Mary Ann Evans (writing pseudonymously, at a time when female writers were just on the verge of being taken seriously).

The relatively small world of Middlemarch, a fictional town in the English Midlands, is merely the blank canvas onto which Eliot pours her greatest ideas and evergreen insights into the human condition, including the dangers of misguided love (poor Tertius Lydgate), the banality of ego (the name Casaubon now literary shorthand for a certain brand of pomposity), and the agonizing, beautiful possibilities of – and arguments for – human connection.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Eliot’s writing, however, is what’s not on the page – the unspoken thoughts, the barely-concealed truths, just barely perceptible between the lines.

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)

“The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”

The most recent entry on this list is the clear standout of twentieth-century fiction, and the one work, to paraphrase Pulitzer prize-winning author William Kennedy, which should be required reading alongside the biblical Genesis.

Here, in Solitude, in its fictional town of Macondo, Márquez acts as both creator and destroyer, bestowing the gift of life – and such beautiful, colourful life it is – with one hand while taking it away – not for nothing does the novel begin with a firing squad – with the other.

Each reader will have their favourite aspect of Solitude, whether it’s the extraordinary life of Mauricio Babilonia, who is forever followed by yellow butterflies, or the harrowing account of the (real-life) Chiquita banana massacre, or any one of the countless stories that play out across the ever-expanding Buendía family tree. All of which are, of course, infused with Márquez’s trademark magical realism and profound humanism.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Márquez name-checked his “master, Faulkner” (who, not-so-coincidentally, also appears on this list), and it’s easy to understand why.

3. The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann, 1924)

“Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness.”

A society in decay, a class of insular, comfort-seeking bourgeoisie too blind to see it, and a great war on the horizon. Der Zauberberg’s (accidental?) timelessness means it could have been written any time from the late nineteenth century to today, over a century later – though one assumes that a modern version would reimagine its Swiss sanatorium as a quote-unquote “wellness retreat”.

Superficially a fantasy or even Twilight Zone-esque sci-fi story – how else to explain the inexplicable inability of its characters to depart the mountaintop sanatorium – it’s fundamentally a philosophical text, its archetypal characters – the overly romantic young protagonist Hans Castorp, the nihilistic Leo Naphta, the wonderfully realized humanist Lodovico Settembrini – all based on people Mann knew and admired, or disagreed with (or both).

Most of all, however, Mountain is a weird text, suffused with the unexplained, the off-kilter, the perverse.

4. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880)

“It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept.”

You could pick a half-dozen Dostoevskys for this list, though it’s Karamazov, somewhat unusually for an author’s final work, which represents the master at his absolute best. A sprawling meditation on some very nineteenth-century themes – in particular, the relationship between a society and its gods – it’s also a brutal family saga, a bitter satire, and a surprisingly compelling murder mystery (and, eventually, courtroom drama). A stubbornly decomposing monk, a passionate love affair, and an alcohol-fuelled bender are only some of the novel’s many highlights.

5. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)

“Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

Hardy’s protofeminist masterpiece has a double possessive in its title – the “d’” simply means “of the” in French – for good reason.

While it takes a while for that reason to become apparent, its story of the Durbeyfields and d’Urbervilles, and of the relationship between the titular Tess and her “cousin” Alec, is at once heart-rending and infuriating. By the end, it’s impossible not to embrace the same righteous anger with which Hardy, seething with frustration at the compromised morals of the Victorian era, wrote this work.

6. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850)

“Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.”

Unabashedly sentimental, righteously polemical about social ills as only Dickens can be, Copperfield is the one work which hews closest to Dickens’s own life, though to mistake it for autobiography would undermine the sheer inventiveness of its world and, just as importantly, its characters. Wilkins Micawber may be literature’s most affable spendthrift, but Uriah Heep is easily its most insidious villain. Very ‘umble, indeed.

7. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929)

“Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars.”

Its reputation for inaccessibility is both accurate and beside the point. Yes, large swaths of Fury (its title, incidentally, a reference to one of the great moments in Shakespeare) are largely impenetrable when you first encounter them. But, for those with the patience and the wherewithal to persist, what appears at first ambiguous and opaque soon reveals itself to be something both sacred and profane.

The best of the Yoknapatawpha cycle, Fury‘s dysfunctional family saga contains some of the most memorable, and memorably drawn, characters in the canon, including the frustrated Benjy, the tragic Caddy, and not one but two ill-fated Quentin Compsons (one of whom would go on to narrate another Faulkner masterpiece, Absalom! Absalom!).

8. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)

“Without understanding what she wanted, he had a foreboding of something terrible.”

Madame Bovary is so sick and so twisted that it’s both incredibly easy and perversely difficult to recommend. A masterpiece of despair, of malignancy, and of hypocrisy (the saga of Hippolyte’s foot is truly horrifying), it’s an endlessly enjoyable read, as likely to make you flush with anger as gasp in revulsion. As an indictment of bourgeois life – and more generally, of the lies we, as humans, love to tell ourselves – it is unparalleled.

I choose to believe that the widely attributed Flaubert quote, “Bovary, c’est moi”, is apocryphal, since god knows why anyone, let alone poor Emma Bovary’s creator, would wish to identify with her.

9. Germinal (Emile Zola, 1885)

“Over the open plain, beneath a starless sky as dark and thick as ink, a man walked alone along the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, a straight paved road ten kilometres in length, intersecting the beetroot-fields.”

A searing indictment of inequality by yet another master of humanist literature, Germinal is a harsh, blazingly angry depiction of the horrors of nineteenth-century coal mining, though the conditions it describes could easily apply to far too many places today.

Protagonist Étienne Lantier, an author-surrogate if there ever was one, arrives in northern French mining town Montsou in search of employment, only to encounter a society mired in despair, where everyone from the youngest child to the eldest grandfather must descend into the mines to eke out a (miserable, sick) existence. A rousing shot across the bow of the corporate class, it should be required reading for every young person with a conscience – and by all of us in the 99%.

10. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

“This was a demoniac laugh – low, suppressed, and deep – uttered, as it seemed, at the very keyhole of my chamber door.”

I went back and forth on a few different Brontës for this final entry, but ultimately the romantic, eerie, and deliciously unpredictable Jane Eyre won out.

From a literary perspective, Eyre is brilliantly written, representing an important step in the development of modern fiction due, in no small part, to Brontë’s unusually penetrating insights into human behaviour. And as a mystery with a tinge of the supernatural, it is altogether spine-chilling, a non-horror novel with hair-raising horror elements.

Whenever I’m trying to bring new readers into the fold, I’ll often start with this – followed by Daphne du Maurier’s brilliant Eyre-alike Rebecca.

***
For more classic recommendations, check out our 2022 exploration of the greatest films of all time, or our picks for the best reads for the impending apocalypse.

The post Middlemarch and Beyond: The Greatest Novels of All Time appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

What makes her different isn’t just what she’s achieved, it’s how she carries it.

She’s a luxury real estate broker and a very successful and well-regarded custom home builder based in Toronto, known for creating high-end homes that are as functional as they are beautiful. But none of it came easy, and none of it was guaranteed.

Rose leads with instinct and intensity.

She will walk a construction site in the morning, negotiate deals in the afternoon, and sit down at night to write the kind of truth most people avoid. Her book INDESTRUCTIBLE isn’t just a title; it’s a mindset she has had to live, especially when life forced her to slow down and face
things most people never see coming.

She’s not interested in playing a role or fitting a mould. She builds, she writes, and she shows up fully, whether it’s for her clients or her family.

Rose doesn’t separate business and life. She’s proof that both can exist in the same breath and still be powerful.

***

Which ’hood are you in?

The Kingsway in South Etobicoke. It’s home, and it’s also where I’ve built a lot of my business and relationships.

What do you do?

I’m a luxury real estate broker, custom home builder, and author. I build and sell high-end homes, but I also write about the parts of life people usually keep hidden.

What are you currently working on?

Growing my real estate and construction businesses while writing my next book. UNMASKED – Bracing for Impact. It goes deeper into what success really costs, and what it takes to keep going when life doesn’t go as planned.

Where can we find your work?

Instagram and LinkedIn. My book Indestructible is available online on Amazon. You can also follow me on Instagram.

The post “A Day in the Life” with: Writer Rose Barroso appeared first on Toronto Guardian.