Jo Hammond.Born a stone’s throw from the English Channel in Bognor Regis, Jo Hammond’s first job was as a dairy farmer. After studying Music and Science in a Liverpool teacher’s college, she became a secondary and elementary school teacher, also a member of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic choir and Dr. Caleb Jarvis’ Cecilia Chamber Choir. She emigrated to the Sunshine Coast of BC, Canada in 1967 on a 6,000 ton freighter via the Panama Canal. After a further three years of teaching, she married a log salvor and obtained her own log salvage licence. During the following 28 years she worked with and without her husband on the log salvage boat, reared two children (on and off the boat,) sang as a classically-trained soprano, helped to start both a choir and a concert series, volunteered as an ESL teacher. She also wrote press releases and reviews of concerts and recitals for the local newspapers.During the mid nineteen-nineties her husband became an author, and her life changed direction. After learning how to fight computers, she taught herself typing so that she could transcribe his manuscripts. Declaring a truce between the computer and herself, she began to take creative writing classes with Betty Keller.Her first published book is Home Before Dark (pub. Orca 2005) a teen adventure story set in the Gibsons’ area in Howe Sound, BC.After her husband, beachcomber and author Dick Hammond died in 2008, she wrote about her life with him and their children in Edge of the Sound (pub. 2010 by Caitlin Press.) Now married to the architect Charles Paine (retired) who designed Vancouver's Guinness Tower and other high-rise office buildings in Western Canada, she lives with him in the Pender Harbour area of BC.