In 1925, Emily Wadley was born in Markham, Ontario, and raised in Kitchener with her younger brother, Bill. Her widowed mother, a pianist reared them in a stimulating atmosphere of music, wordplay, story and poetry. They moved to Toronto where she attended the University of Toronto. Asked by the National Film Board to take a summer job in Ottawa  she met her first husband, Ernie Reid a film director, now deceased. He went to Nepal and Tibet in 1946-7.

A follow-up to this came in May, 2009 when she and their daughter, Sue Carduelis and son, Norm were invited among other family members of Americans and Canadians who had been to Tibet before 1950 to meet the Dalai Lama in New York City.  He was thrilled with their presentation of superb portraits of Tibetans that Ernie took in his months there.

From the late 1950s, when she was teaching pre-school at the Bloor YMHA in Toronto, Emily wrote  songs and scripts extensively for children’s radio (CBC school broadcasts) and television (Polka Dot Door, TVO). Her 70 children’s songs are collected in “Pink and Blue Hullabaloo” for Casablanca agency.

From magazine OWL’s beginning in 1976 she collaborated with illustrator, Mark Thurman on the “Mighty Mites”, a monthly four-page comic strip on natural history. This culminated in 1991 with two books published by Pembroke Press  “Draw and Write Your Own Picture Book” and “Helping Children Draw and Write Their Own Picture Books”, based on their “Mites” experience with storyboarding as a tool to motivate creative writing.

Beginning in 1967 she took the pseudonym Emily Hearn and as an acquisitions editor for Nelson Canada worked on grade four to six readers with Dr. John McInnes, crossing Canada to find new writers for this educational series, the first to have a high percentage of Canadian content. She began writing children’s  picture books at this time, the first four by Garrard Press for beginning readers. These were followed by three on Franny, a feisty girl in a wheelchair, a book for TVO called “Woosh I Hear a Sound” for toddlers, and “Hattie Pearl Click Click” about a highly imaginative storywriting girl who had trouble reading. In 2007 she and Marywinn Milne edited immigrant children’s letters about their Canadian experience in a book published by Second Story Press called “Our New Home”. In 2008 Hidden Brook Press brought out her “Song of 3 Pirates” for very young children, illustrated by her stepdaughter, Gailon Valleau, based on the colourful names her youngest son, Sam Hayter gave pirates in a song he made up when he was four years old.

In the late 1980’s she worked online with students in elementary grades in Scarborough then served with WiER as its first mentor at this level and with  “Writer’s Connection” in Toronto schools. She visited her students’ classrooms each year, spoke in venues across the country and frequently conducted poetry, music and movement workshops for students and teachers.

In 2004 Pendas Publishers brought out her adult poetry collection “Grass of Green Moment” with photography by Anna Prior. This was followed in 2007 by another  called “They Look Like This to Me” published by Hidden Brook Press.

She remains healthy, lives in downtown Toronto where she and her husband, Doug Valleau read, walk, write and make music, he on recorder and she on piano and, after studying with harpsichordist Colin Tilney,  harpsichord, clavichord and fortepiano. They entertain friends and large family made up of offspring from his four daughters and her own daughter and three sons. It is a rich life!