I was born in Toronto in the late 1940s and grew up on the northern fringe of the city in a rural area that was undergoing rapid urbanization. My experience of a rural homeplace swallowed by a city has influenced my way of seeing the world and underlies the concerns that run through all my writing: the relationship between human culture and the natural world, the interface between human technologies and wilderness, and the various ways in which different people have conceived of their identity – their role, their responsibilities – in relation to the living things and elements in their environment. In 1975, after several years of travelling, I settled in Newfoundland, drawn to its fresh, untamed natural setting (ocean, mountains, rivers!) and its passionate traditional culture. I published my first five books of poems and my first novel there; all those books reflect my exploration of Newfoundland’s landscape and history and its people’s own struggle with outside pressures and changing