Audrey Grescoe was renowned for her capacious mental dictionary and editing skills | Canada Voices

Audrey Louise Grescoe: Journalist. Author. Editor. Mother. Born Dec. 22, 1939, in Hamilton; died Jan. 28, 2026, in Vancouver, of pneumonia; aged 86.

Audrey Louise Patterson was born in Canada’s foundry, Hamilton, into a Scots-Irish family that put a premium on quiet fortitude and in which displays of emotion were discouraged. Her father, John Gracey Patterson, treated his eldest daughter like a comrade, taking her to hockey games, boxing matches and poker games, until she enrolled in McMaster University, a decision that led him to stop talking to her for an entire year.

Audrey might have stayed in Hamilton to raise a family, as her younger sister Karen would do, if it weren’t for a fateful encounter. One day after work at the Hamilton Spectator, where she’d taken a summer job, she went out for a drink with Paul Grescoe, a self-confident young reporter from Manitoba.

Paul was Audrey’s ticket out of Steel Town. They were married in 1963 and shortly thereafter boarded a freighter bound for England. When their Fleet Street dreams failed to pan out, they returned to Canada. Their son Taras was born in Toronto in 1966, followed two years later by their daughter Lara, in Vancouver, where Paul had been dispatched to set up a Canadian Press bureau, and where the family moved into a postwar fixer-upper house near the University of British Columbia.

Audrey thrived in 1970s, hippy-tinged Vancouver. Though the climate played hell with her allergies, she loved being able to garden year-round, engaging in spirited battle with the banana slugs that besieged her zucchinis and rhubarb. Raising kids and canning vegetables, though, wasn’t enough for her. With Paul, Malcolm Parry and lawyer Ronald Stern, she co-founded Vancouver, a monthly city magazine.

Against their kids’ objections, they moved the family across the Rockies for a year, to oversee the launch of two new city magazines in Calgary and Edmonton. On their return to Vancouver, Audrey settled into the role of senior editor at Western Living Magazine, which, along with editors Carolann Rule and Andrew Scott, she made into a leading venue for original writing, art and photography in western Canada.

Audrey possessed a dry sense of humour, innate style and grace, sparkling intelligence and a command of English grammar and usage that would make her a respected editor and mentor. Her colleague Maja Grip, who worked with her at Vancouver and Calgary Magazines, was at once terrified by her command of grammar, but also hooked by her love of wordplay. (Maja remembers Audrey describing her husband Paul as a “fubsy callipygian quidnunc.”)

After Taras and Lara left home, the couple moved to Bowen Island. There, Audrey pursued a career as an editor-and-writer-for-hire. With Paul, she researched and co-authored Fragments of Paradise, a book about the islands of coastal British Columbia, as well as The Book of Letters, The Book of War Letters and The Book of Love Letters, a trio of well-reviewed collections of Canadian correspondence published by McClelland & Stewart.

Audrey often worked in tandem with the prolific Paul, but she was very much the author of her own life. Her children remember her lighting off to research an article on Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic, and tramping the coastline of Normandy and Brittany (a solo trek that made her husband sick with worry). She was particularly proud of her own non-fiction book, Giants, about Douglas firs, red cedars, and the other great trees of her adopted biome. Her best-loved work, though, might well be Where in the World is Desmond? and Victor and the Dream Boat, two in a series of children’s books she painstakingly crafted for her grandsons.

Audrey had trouble adapting to life without Paul. They were born within a fortnight of one another and their collaboration, professional and romantic, lasted over 60 years. In that time, the couple came to lean on each other, like a pair of intertwined trees in the island forest where they made their home. When Paul was toppled by a stroke in 2023, Audrey struggled to remain upright on her own. She left Bowen to return to Vancouver to be near her daughter Lara and her son-in-law Justin, and died holding her son Taras’s hand.

Whenever someone was flummoxed by a word Audrey pulled out of her capacious mental dictionary, she’d tell them: “Look it up!” It was a lesson in self-improvement her kids took to heart. Decades later, we’re still taking the time to look things up, and get things right.

Taras Grescoe is Audrey Grescoe’s son.

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