Janet Barkhouse has published stories, poems, non-fiction and children’s literature in journals, anthologies, and books, including two about Sable Island: a children’s “chapter book” (Sable Island – Imagine!) and a collection of poems with photographs by Zoe Lucas (Sable Island Fieldnotes).
Before her connection began with the Sable Island Institute (SII), Janet was Vice-President on the Board of the Friends of the Green Horse Society (FGHS). Her interest in Sable Island dates back to her childhood, thanks to her mother, Joyce Barkhouse, CM, ONS.
Janet first went to Sable Island as Joyce’s proxy. Joyce met Zoe Lucas because of her children’s book, Pit Pony, which had been made into a movie and a television series. Pit Pony told of a Sable Island horse working with a youngster in a Cape Breton mine. The FGHS was inviting people with close connections to Sable Island to fly to Sable as an outreach project. Joyce felt she was too old, and Janet, who wrote the text for Pit Pony: The Picture Book, went in her stead.
Janet was enthralled, and, as an amateur mycophile, went back to Sable Island to help begin a list of the island’s fungi. The study that evolved, “Contributions to the study of higher fungi on Sable Island, Nova Scotia”, by Keith Williams and Zoe Lucas, was published in Proceedings of the Nova Scotia Institute of Science, vol. 50, no. 2 (2021).
A retired educator who wrote and piloted English Language Arts curricula for the Province of Nova Scotia, Janet has for the past four years helped organize the SII’s Sable in Words, a writing contest for youth. She is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.