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I Confess
I confess: I’ve never read anything by J.D. Salinger. It’s true. Maybe it’s because the famous American writer is not held in such great awe and regard in Canada. We have plenty of exceptional authors of our own, and during my high school years, it was never part of any curriculum I encountered. I did,… Read more
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The Winter of Discontent
Are you ready? The Winter of Discontent, Book 6 of The Ravenstones series, is coming out on August 15th, as usual on Amazon. “And after summer evermore succeeds Barren winter, with its wrathful nipping cold” – William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, Act 2 Winter of Discontent follows upon Death and Life, which was published… Read more
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One Tricky Spider – Anansi
Readers will have figured out by now that I have soft spot for anthropomorphic animals. (And if this news comes as a surprise, you’ve come to the wrong blog site!) One of the first such characters I came across in my childhood was Anansi the spider. I can’t recall exactly how old I was when… Read more
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North of 60
I have written before about the genesis of my writing career (post my public service career, that is), specifically why I employ the fantasy genre (July 29 and Aug 12, 2020), why I use animals to tell a story, why I anthropomorphize them (Aug 26 and Sept 9, 2020) and what’s important to me in… Read more
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The Civil Servant
“If all that has of late been said against the Civil Service be true, it must be in a parlous state. We hardly know which have treated it worst, its friends or its enemies; that is, if we may venture to consider that it has friends. Its enemies are numerous enough. We meet them in… Read more
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Swift (as in the bird)
On July 29, 2020, a story appeared in the New York Times (NYT) entitled “The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down”, written by Helen Macdonald. Ms. Macdonald is a naturalist, historian, Research Scholar at Cambridge University, writer, illustrator and narrator of BBC radio documentaries and contributing writer for the NYT Sunday Magazine (in… Read more
