Charlene Rooke lived in the Edmonton area for 21 years before making tentative forays to Toronto and Calgary. A graduate of the University of Alberta, she began collecting obscure, trivial, and profane Edmonton anecdotes while an editor at the University of Alberta alumni magazine in the 1990s. Her writing has appeared in Realm, Financial Post, and Calgary magazines and she is active in the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association and the Western Magazine Awards. The former editor of enRoute magazine, she is currently editor-in-chief of Western Living magazine in Vancouver.