Keepsake Gallery
Features quotes from select samples of my writing. Current keepsakes come from my 2018 works.
Read More Keepsake GalleryTag: nonfiction
Book Review: Marq de Villiers’ Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (2003)
Water is a book about our global freshwater supply and its quality. It’s a policy-relevant and science-rich book but is neither a policy book nor an academic book. Like its subject matter, this book is meant for everyone. Author Mark de Villiers writes: “Water is not ‘ours’ or ‘theirs,’ but the planet’s. We use water, and […]
Read More Book Review: Marq de Villiers’ Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (2003)Book Review: David Macfarlane’s The Danger Tree (2014)
The Danger Tree artfully combines family memoir and historical nonfiction. Just as author, David Macfarlane, introduces readers to his maternal family, the Goodyears of Newfoundland, he establishes the major events of the early twentieth century. The event Macfarlane most prominently features is the First World War. For the Goodyears, WWI means “three dead sons paraded […]
Read More Book Review: David Macfarlane’s The Danger Tree (2014)Dory Stories
My father told me about the one-room variety school he and my uncles attended in Little Bay East, Newfoundland. The community didn’t have an adequate number of students to accommodate separate classes. So, the school children up to grade five shared their own classroom, while the preteens and teens from grade six onwards shared their […]
Read More Dory StoriesIF POP COULD READ THIS NOW: LITERACY LESSONS FOR NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
The spring 2018 issue of Maisonneuve magazine includes my story called “Letters from Pop.” In this reported feature, I explore a legacy of low adult literacy in my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL). There, people traditionally learned their skills on the land and the sea more so than in the formal classroom. For […]
Read More IF POP COULD READ THIS NOW: LITERACY LESSONS FOR NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADORRecounting a Shipwreck No one Survived to Tell
Six men boarded the 72-foot fishing vessel the Andrea Gail intended for a late season fishing trip that would end catastrophically. In late October 1991, aware that a storm was brewing, the captain and crew decided to take their swordfish catch and head home from the Grand Banks to Gloucester, Massachusetts. The mother of all […]
Read More Recounting a Shipwreck No one Survived to TellBook Review: Alan Doyle’s Where I Belong (2014) & A Newfoundlander in Canada (2017)
How would you like to take a cross-Canada tour on a band van with running commentary from a prominent Newfoundlander? I promise it will be a laugh-out-loud journey not to mention an entirely unique way to discover (or rediscover) this country. Last month I had the chance to meet musician, actor and author Alan Doyle […]
Read More Book Review: Alan Doyle’s Where I Belong (2014) & A Newfoundlander in Canada (2017)