Anna Pottier

Anna Pottier (1959- ) is an Acadian from Belleville, Nova Scotia. She attended Dalhousie University in Halifax. In 1981, poet Irving Layton gave a reading there. They met briefly, exchanged two letters and one phone call before Pottier visited Layton in Niagara-on-the-Lake. She moved in with him in November, 1982. Despite the forty-eight year age difference, they made it work, separating some fourteen years later when time took its toll.

Good As Gone: My Life is Irving Layton records the exhilarating, sometimes harrowing, often hilarious experience of living with Canada's best-known poet.

From her website www.annapottier.com : "...Words came first, then photography with my Polaroid camera at age 7. Painting came later. Giving shape to thought, colour to emotion, can be done with words, paint, or whatever medium one chooses. Words and color seem to have chosen me. I've been catching the light ever since. That's all I do. Catch whatever stops me in my tracks, frame it in words or colors, and throw it back. The reflected energy will, I hope, give pleasure and keep pulsing, long after my "me" becomes a distant memory."