Monthly Archives: March 2010

Learning from readers

At one time I devoured magazines about writing. They provided something I could find nowhere else. Even today I’ll sometimes buy one, though they tend to lie untouched at the bottom of my reading pile. I think that I’m still drawn to them because of a hunger to return to the basics of writing and [...]
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A gift from W.O. Mitchell

Contemplating the great writer’s death the previous week, Iain Lawrence and I both wrote about W.O. Mitchell in the March 1, 1998, edition of This Week. Iain and I were surprised to learn it, but school visits by Bill Mitchell had been pivotal moments in the writing life for us both. To this day, when [...]
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UFOs from Oak Island

Turning from the subject of UFO origin, we will now indulge in our last item of speculation as a purely intellectual exercise and rephrase the question: Did someone bury something on Oak Island that they did not want anyone to ever recover? as: Does Oak Island represent the hidden and well protected installation of a [...]
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Beneath the northern sea

Becoming friends with John Rawlings made me remember my childhood fascination with life beneath the sea. I tell stories about life at sea, or by the sea. Stories of ships and shipwrecks, lighthouses, sailors, and coastal people who risk their lives at sea. Through these eyes what lay beneath the sea became, in my mind, a [...]
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The Miser’s Ghost

All of you, old and young, know the story I’m about to tell. But the moral of this tale cannot be retold too often. Remember that behind it is the terrible lesson of an avenging God who commands the rich to be charitable. It was New Year’s Eve in the year of Our Lord 1858. It was [...]
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BC Packers

You should have seen us this summer when we were really busy; loads of two hundred thousand pounds a day for ten, twelve days. Then the blood is up, everybody is into it. There was a time when this was the biggest fish freezing operation in the world. There’s a bigger plant in Sweden now, and [...]
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The town constable

When I was a kid the only typewriter in the house was a portable Remington “noiseless parlour model.” It was an ancient black cast thing—each key had to be pushed down about two inches. The typebar hit the worn ribbon with the sound of a steel ball bearing dropped on a wood floor. Anything other [...]
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What, no high tops?

Found in the coz archives: Images from photo shoots during the “Lovestruck Child” sessions at Del Clark’s Studio One. The shoot had to be redone when Kerry Campbell joined the lineup midway through the sessions. This brings back memories of horrifying self-consciousness…
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