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This page features Canadian Business Women, striving to make lasting contributions in their industries and communities. Though they reside in an array of Provinces, have different educational backgrounds and diverse career goals, they all share a commitment to making a difference in the lives of others. Editor Rona Maynard: Embracing Pain and Living her life 
From her large corner office on the eighth floor of a sprawling, ultra-modern office / retail complex in Toronto’s downtown core, here, the label of underachiever looks patently absurd. She oversees an editorial staff of twenty-four people who produce, each month, the largest-circulation women’s magazine in Canada.
Raised in an über-achieving household, Rona and younger sister Joyce were both precocious writers, winning prizes and publishing in national magazines while still in high school. Their Canadian-born mother, Fredelle, had a Ph.D. from Radcliffe – this in the 1950s! – and wrote books later in life. Father Max was an English professor who had once been an apprentice of Emily Carr; his landscape paintings can still be found in Canadian art galleries. “My parents were creative and formidable people,” Maynard says. Formidable, too, at keeping painful secrets like alcoholism. Maynard now believes her father’s alcoholism was a form of self-medication; his primary problem, she’s quite sure, was a lifelong undiagnosed depression.
The depression was never so severe that life could not carry on around it. At seventeen, Maynard left home for university; a year later she moved to Toronto; on her twenty-first birthday, she married; and at twenty-two she became a mother.
When her son Ben was three, Maynard took a full-time editing job, the start of a lifelong career in magazines but keeping her depression hidden would leave her physically depleted.
One day she picked up the phone, called a women’s clinic, asked to see a therapist because she wanted her life back. ”The therapy, the exercise, the long process of making for herself “a life worth living” has imbued in Maynard a new sense of her place in the world. And this is what pleases her most. Today, Rona is not remotely interested in the anger of her past. She’s been healthy for more than fifteen years. “Depression is exceedingly boring,” she declares. “You have to find a way to deal with it, and that’s what’s interesting.”
So she talks. And she writes, hoping others will see in her story the possibilities that exist within their own. To have your business profiled, please contact us at talyn (at) letitshine (dot) ca
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