I write poetry and short prose for readers who are looking to be surprised, devastated, delighted, re-educated, re-membered or re-invented. At their best the poems offer a unique perspective on the daily lives of ordinary people—transforming those moments and those people into unrecognizable phantasmagoria. Or sometimes the poems are breathtakingly simple. My mother tongue is back concession, southwestern Ontario English with undercurrents of creek, gully and swamp. In my later years I have discovered the journals of Gilbert White, believed by many to be the first ecologist. Although he’s been dead over 240 years, he and I tramp around some of the most disturbed lands of the 20th century together nearly every day. What I learn from Gilbert is patience. And the enormous pleasure to be had by careful attention to the smallest of details.

In the last hundred days I have filled more than one notebook with “morning pages” which are born of a free write exercise that I kick off by choosing a random book of poetry off my shelf, and opening it. Then I close my eyes and point to a line of text. Those words often give me the same satisfactory result as when I adjust the choke on my lawn mower before I pull the cord. Pushing lawn mowers and writing are serious endeavours and can make you sweat, but morning pages are written for the fun of it. The poem I’m working on today is about my disillusionment with doves, and I’m also buffing and polishing up a series of poems about the end of the world. Who isn’t? Those poems will be included in a fourth collection of poems, and then there’s this manuscript of something—poems and memoir, travelogue, creative nonfiction—whatever it turns out to be— about my friend and mentor, Gilbert White.

Having participated in countless poetry workshops over the years, I have developed a good eye and ear for what works in a poem. I’ve taken full advantage of the Ontario Arts Council grants for writing so I can advise on that process. Also, having had many poems published here in Canada and some in the UK, and with three books under my belt, I know something about how to get yourself noticed by the small press. Still working on Penguin/Random House.