In nature's infinite book of secrecy, a little can I read.

-- Shakespeare

How did a retired biology professor come to be writing short plays and stories? I have no idea. I have always enjoyed creative writing but the demands of a career and the stuff of life tended to get in the way. Now that I am retired, I have time for self-indulgence.

I am supposed to say that I won a short story contest when I was twelve and published my first work when I was seventeen. All great writers seem to be prodigies. In fact I don't care for contests (there can be many good stories, but only one "winner") and I have never published anything except research papers and a couple of newspaper articles. Hey, Emily Dickenson never published anything either.

Along with my five siblings, I was raised on a small farm in deep southern Ontario, a few kilometres north of Lake Erie. Since leaving home I have lived in Guelph (hated it), Toronto (actually Pickering, but close enough), Calgary (mountains!), Vancouver (nice city), Quebec City (where I learned French) and finally rural Nova Scotia, where I have been for the past thirty years. I also spent two months of a sabbatical in Toulouse, France, long enough to become entranced by that old city. Now we live in the wilds of Nova Scotia, among the black flies and the spruce trees and a garden full of stones. I have a very patient wife, an aquarium full of tropical fish, birds at the feeders (hummingbirds in summer, blue jays and grosbeaks in winter), too many deer in the back acre and a stray cat who drops by now and again to beg a meal. Also porcupines. Not a bad life, all in all.

---

  Not Shangra-La, but not Mordor either.

---

Awards and Honours

(Watch this Space)

---

Home