Fretwell was born in NYC in 1944 and became a Canadian citizen in 1970. Dancing on a Pin was longlisted for the League of Canadian Poet's Lowther Prize and was part of the International Festival of Authors Battle of the Bards. Class Acts was a notable poetry book of 2013 on Kerry Clare's online blog. Angelic Scintillations riffs off Silex Scintillans poetry by her ancestor Henry Vaughan, a Welsh mystic poet. Fretwell's poems have appeared in over 60 journals including international journals: Scintilla, Bogg, Prism, and Rampike and in over 70 anthologies, including: Close to the Heart, Poets Who Came to Canada during the Vietnam Era, Poets in Response to Peril. Her poems Quartzite Dialogues were set to music by Michael Horwood and performed thrice at The Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound and once at the Takefu Music Centre in Tokyo. Her art resides in Canada, USA, Denmark and Japan. She won First Prize Watercolour in Artfocus Group Show, Toronto, 2001. Fretwell is a widow living with her Maine Coon Cat Henry in St. Catharines as of April 2023.