Denise Roig moved to Montreal from Los Angeles in 1989 when her twelve-year-old daughter, Ariel, convinced her they should run away so Ariel could join the circus. Her daughter went to study with Montreal's Cirque du Soleil and Denise spent the next twenty years as a Montrealer. Roig wrote professionally for twenty years before publishing her first short-story collection. She also taught magazine writing and editing at Concordia University and story-writing for more than a decade in Quebec high schools. She has published three collections of critically acclaimed short stories -- A Quiet Night and a Perfect End, Any Day Now, and Brilliant -- as well as the delectable non-fiction memoir Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School