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 times. For many years I also taught English literature and creative writing at Memorial University. 

Since 2007 I’ve lived and worked in rural Ontario, on the wide fringes of Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, still pursuing my lifelong concerns: how do we make and keep a home? how can we shape our identity and values as individuals and as a culture so as to live in harmony with our natural environment instead of destroying it?

The poems in The Grey Islands and That Night We Were Ravenous and the novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright are good place to start reading what I’ve written about Newfoundland. My newer books include And Yet (poems, 2020) and Forty-one Pages (essays, 2019). Find these and more on my BOOKS page.