I was born as Leslie Joyce Hall in 1948 in Elrose, Saskatchewan, a small town on the prairies where my father was the local doctor. My brother, Jeff, was two years older than I. Our family’s friends were all farmers. As soon as I can remember anything, it was of the smell of dust in the air and everyone looking at the sky because their future and their wealth depended on the weather.

I knew my father was a hero by the way people spoke to him and the way he would leave at night to save people.

When I was four years old, we moved to Toronto in order for my father to pursue his medical career as a resident in "Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat". He was one of the early practitioners to experiment and develop the art of removing cataracts to prevent blindness.
Photo: Darin Dueck

He practised on small rabbits kept in cages in the basement of the hospital where he worked and where we sometimes visited him. He was never home and everyone in the family was lonely. There was something wrong with the neighbor’s son. My father made an early diagnosis of polio; the boy didn’t become crippled. He diagnosed my grandmother as having a rare nerve disease. She did become crippled.

When we were about to leave Toronto to go back to Saskatchewan, my sister Janet was born.

My father set up his medical practice in Saskatoon. Six months later he died from a massive heart attack. Within a year my mother fell in love with Ross Pinder, whose family had been tragically killed in a car accident.

They married. A new life began. Three more children were born.


I was twelve years old when I found a teacher who encouraged me to write. I would hide away in a room in the basement where the off-season clothes were kept. It was a room lined with cedar. There I wrote poems, diaries, short stories, trying to find a voice for all that I felt. Walls became doors; doors became windows. I had found a way through the looking glass. At sixteen I took a road trip with my grandmother to Vancouver. I had not known there could be a place where geographical beauty was intense rather than expansive; clear rather than forbidding. I resolved that I would get back there to live. After receiving my Bachelor of Arts in English in 1968 (graduating from the University of Saskatchewan and Dalhouse University in Halifax, N.S.), I entered a Masters Program in English at the University of British Columbia. However, instead of going to classes, I fell in love with a woman who was a poet. My sexual orientation was thrilling and terrifying. I couldn’t tell my family, nor rely on my father for financial support any longer. I needed a job. Although I was intent on becoming a full time writer, I found work in the case report section of the Vancouver police department. At that time the police would phone in their criminal investigation reports from their beats all around town, but mainly on skid road. These reports went to the Prosecutors Office for assessment. I became fascinated with the law. I once took a report from a stakeout of a house where there was alleged to be a meeting of radical “women’s-libbers".

I followed the law into the courts and became a court reporter in the criminal division. I was caught. Stuart Rush, one of the best and most principled criminal lawyers I watched, encouraged me to go to law school. There I met Louise Mandell and we became fast friends. I graduated in 1976. I was the first woman litigator at Ladner Downs, a large Vancouver law firm, but found acceptance there difficult. When the firm had its monthly meeting at the Vancouver Club, which did not admit women and required them to use the servants’ entrance, I walked through the front door and into trouble.


I left the firm in 1978 and, with Louise Mandell, started working for the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs as in-house legal counsel under the direction of Grand Chief George Manuel. At that time aboriginal title was the "right which dare not speak its name". We started to say its name. We defended the courageous natives exercising their rights in the face of threats and great danger, challenging the ignorant power of the state and the police.

In 1982 we formed our own firm, Mandell Pinder and Ostrove (later Mandell Pinder) working exclusively for native people taking aboriginal rights and title cases through all levels of court. We argued many cases before the Supreme Court of Canada. During 28 years as a litigator, I continued to write and submit stories for publication. In 1986 Under the House was published in Canada by Talonbooks. It was then picked up by Bloomsbury Publishing in the U.K., and Random House in the U.S. Faber and Faber published the softcover edition in 1989. It was reissued as a Random House Vintage. My second novel, On Double Tracks was published in Canada in 1990 by Lester and Orpen Dennys, and in the U.S. by Random House. It was nominated for a Governor-General’s Award, the highest literary award in Canada.

But I was buckling under the weight of trying to juggle being a lawyer and being a writer. The law was winning out. So in 2005 I decided to devote myself to writing full-time. I have published short stories, poetry, a libretto for an opera and many essays. I am completing my third and fourth novels. In 2007 a collection of my selected writings was published in the U.S. I am a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

I live part time in urban Vancouver and on a remote island in B.C.


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