A Real Farm Girl

by Susan Ioannou, James Rozak (Illustrator)

In A Real Farm Girl, Susan Ioannou tells the story of a young city girl's adventures while visiting her grandmother's farm in the 1940s. Mary wants to prove that she can handle farm chores. She helps her Uncle Louis collect eggs from the chicken coop, milk the cows, and feed the pigs. The chores are not as easy as she thought. She gets pecked by the chickens, is chased by a bull, and has a manure mishap. But she doesn't give up, determined to become a real farm girl.

A Real Farm Girl can be read as a continuing story, or in single episodes. Each chapter is long enough to share out loud, and short enough for an eager young reader to tackle alone.

123 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Born in Toronto, Susan Ioannou holds an Honours B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. For many years she worked with Cross-Canada Writers' Quarterly/Magazine as Associate Editor and Columnist.

Susan has given numerous presentations to writers' groups, as well as workshops for the Toronto Board of Education, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. To consolidate her activities as teacher, editor, and writer, she founded Wordwrights Canada, through which until 2017 she also offered the online writer's course Lessons in Writing the Poem. After publication of Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth, later republished as Poems on Geology, Metals, Minerals, and Mining, her interest in Canada's mineral industry earned her the name The Mining Poet.

Some of her poems have been set to music by a Canadian and a Norwegian composer, as well as translated into Hindi and Dutch.

Her current professional memberships include The League of Canadian Poets and The Writers' Union of Canada. A widow, she is mother to a daughter and a son.