This collection of moving poetry puts into words the heartbreak and triumphs of looking after ailing parents.

What Really Happened is This is a poetry memoir that focuses on the ten-year journey of an adult "only child" as her beloved parents face declining health and death. The wry, poignant, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking, poems chronicle the poet's struggle to find balance in her life, as she juggles the needs of her family with her own work and creative life. The poems touch on the universal in specific experiences, as the poet faces the death of each parent, and realizes she is now next in line.

Biography: Dianne Hicks Morrow is an award-winning poet and a non-fiction writer who has called PEI home for over forty years. Her collection What Really Happened is This: A Poetry Memoir (Acorn Press 2011), won the 2012 PEI Book Award for Poetry. Long Reach Home (Acorn Press, 2002) contains poems that won a Milton Acorn Poetry Award and an Atlantic Writing Competition Poetry Award. Her non-fiction Kindred Spirits: Relationships that Spark the Soul (Acorn Press, 2005) includes interviews with PEI's new premier Wade MacLauchlan and his kindred-spirit partner Duncan McIntosh, as well as interviews with over twenty other Atlantic Canadians who talk about about the kindred spirits in their lives.

Dianne has enjoyed giving readings and workshops across Canada, as well as in Mexico and Australia. She teaches two popular courses, Writing from Life and Anyone Can Write a Poem, at PEI Seniors College. She received the Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts on Prince Edward Island in 2008, and was appointed PEI Poet Laureate in 2013.

Dianne Hicks Morrow's profile page