Dawn & Michael, married June 14, 1969
Nicholas & Dawn, Pushthrough 1973
Dawn & Michael Doyle, Kuwait, 2004
Dawn & Gracie, Pangnirtung, Nunavut, 2017
Dawn, Nicholas & Colleen, Pushthrough, 1974
Dawn & Gracie, Nova Scotia, 2024
DAWN IS AN AUTHOR, A RUN-AWAY ADVENTURER, AND A RETIRED TEACHER
Travel is great, but she admits there's nothing like moving into another culture and living as the locals do.
Since 1972, when her story of Newfoundland began, Dawn has lived in Mexico, the Middle East and Canada's Arctic. In each place where she lived, she kept diaries and journals, and wrote newsletters home.
Retirement, after a thirty-year career of international teaching, finally afforded her the time to read through this accumulation of memories. That’s when she noticed a theme, a similar thread that ran through each of her journeys: the motif of escape and redemption. Each adventure began with the need to flee some trauma she was not ready to face. And each journey ended with a discovery.
These records are now the meat and bones of Dawn’s
Journey Trilogy:
From Sea to Sand to Snow
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FROM SEA…
Dawn’s first run-away adventure began fifty years ago when she was a sixteen-year old girl living a life of comfort in Ontario. After her father had an affair, and her mother told her “you can’t trust men”, in rebellion, she got pregnant, married, and ran away with her artist husband and young son to Pushthrough, an isolated, abandoned outport on the Forgotten Coast of Newfoundland. A memoir full of adventure, rescue and redemption, this story is based on her diaries written over fifty years ago. She plans to publish the manuscript in the summer of 2025, under her maiden name, Dawn E Neill, and the title of:
RESCUED:
A Young Mother’s Memoir of Survival on Newfoundland’s Forgotten Coast
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Mexico became her next port in a storm. After multiple, emotional separations from her husband, the father of her three children, Dawn moved on to an affair with an alcoholic. Despite the bankruptcy that soon followed with bouts of depression, she spent ten year pursuing a teaching career as a single parent. Three teachers’ strikes later, she quit her teaching job in a small Ontario town and headed to Tampico to run wild with the locals - all while juggling a low-paying teaching job in an international school, and supporting her university/college bound children.
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TO SAND…
Living on the edge of near-poverty, Dawn left Mexico and fled all the way to the Middle East where she secured a high-paying teaching job at an Islamic, all-girls school in Kuwait for five years. Her hair dyed orange with henna, she attracted the attention of a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Marine Corps. A charmer who failed to hide his addiction to gambling, she married him anyway, against the will of her family and morals, and changed her name to Dawn Doyle. This story is now a manuscript called:
COVER UP:
A Western Woman’s Journey into the Middle East
and is her next project for publishing. You can find snippets of the narrative under Excerpts.
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TO SNOW…
Five years and a baptism-into-Christianity later, she fled the desert of sand and beelined it to the snowy Arctic where she knew her husband, who hated the cold, would not follow her. After another failed relationship, Dawn finally found the courage to make it on her own, without being married. She taught and lived in five different hamlets, immersed in the Inuit culture for seven years. This story is now a manuscript called:
EXPOSURE:
A Southern Woman’s Journey into the Arctic
and is next in line to prepare for publishing. Passages of her tale can be found under Excerpts.
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TO SERENITY…
As a post script, she now spends time with Walter Beck, a lovely man who got down on his knees one day and asked her: “will you go steady with me now?”, after waiting patiently for thirty years. She said “yes”. They live happily together by the shores of Lake Simcoe in Ontario. He even encourages her to travel.
