Writer

A lifelong bookworm, Heather Taves became interested in writing during her Doctor of Musical Arts studies in piano performance in New York. Performance students were expected to play concerts rather than writing a dissertation, but they did have to produce two essays. Heather went down the rabbit hole, discovering nonfiction writing while soaring over word-limit expectations. She wrote an essay documenting the forgotten history of women as interpreters of Beethoven sonatas, and a satirical, ground-breaking essay titled, “Murder in the Pathétique: A Tale of Gender in Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 13.”

Just as she was finishing her doctorate in 1992, she won a tenure-track fulltime position in Canada as a piano professor. Although her essays had helped her to win it, the demands of piano concertizing, teaching, and parenting took her away from writing for the next 23 years.

The essays were finally pulled from their floppy disk resting place when Heather took a sabbatical to go back to school in 2014. After 400 pages of writing under instructor Karen Connelly, she obtained her Graduate Certificate in Creative Nonfiction from Humber College, Toronto in 2016.

She began to integrate readings of her essays with performances of her music, while continuing to study writing with Diane Schoemperlen. She produced another 400 pages of writing, revised her doctoral essays, and envisioned a future book.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Heather left her teaching position in Ontario to return to Prince Edward Island where she was raised. Now re-established as an Islander, she reaches audiences directly through her playing and writing.