I come from New Brunswick, Canada, where I return to twice a year. I lived in Poland for three years, initially as a teacher of English language in the seaside town of Sopot, followed by two years in the public relations department at the Foreign Investment Agency in Warsaw. This was in the early nineties so I was witness to Poland’s transformation away from communism towards capitalism. After that I went England where I completed my MA in Studies in Fiction at the University of East Anglia. There I met my husband and stayed, working at Community Music East for seven years, while he finished his doctorate. The next stop was Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, for my husband’s post-doc. This is where our daughter was born. After a year we moved to Kitchener-Waterloo, where I joined The New Quarterly as a fiction editor for two years, before becoming editor in 2011, and creative director of the newly established Wild Writers Literary Festival later that year. I have worked as part of the Wild Writers Literary Festival mentorship program, the French River Creative Writing Retreat and the Writers Union of Canada Mentorship Microgrant Program.

 My writing has often occurred around the edges—of jobs, of moves, of helping to raise our daughter—and in 2018 my novel The Deserters, about the aftermath of war, was published by Vehicule Press. It was shortlisted for the ReLit Award. 

As Little As Nothing (ECW Press, 2022) takes place in the UK in the year before World War II, and explores early feminism, through women who take up flying and reproductive rights. My creative nonfiction book Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in the Year of No Travel will be published by ECW Press in 2024.

Synopsis

Off the Track

Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory.

Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits.

Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.