About Me

Sad to say, I’m a tick magnet. You heard me right, a tick magnet. Not a chick magnet—never have been, never will be (with the exception of my wife April’s attraction to me in a moment of weakness more than four decades ago).

I live near Dunnville, Ontario, Canada on a hobby farm that contains innumerable ticks, and these little parasites love to hitch a ride on me. Once aboard, they crawl around until they find a spot—if I’m not quick enough—to bury their heads in my skin and suck my blood. Little blighters!

Then again, with April I live a lovely life on these 13.79 acres of Haldimand County clay. We have our dogs Henry (a sketchy Great Pyrenees) and Teddy (Bernese Mountain Dog), though there are no mountains in sight (RIP Stanley); and we have our cats Lucy, Dash, and Bear (RIP Ruby). Outside we have our horses and our free-run egg-laying hens. We try to share the place as best we can with the wild creatures. The sky is filled with acrobatic barn swallows. Raccoons and possums occasionally take up residence in the barn. One morning I startled a coyote asleep in the hay. Imagine my surprise when it popped up its head. I think it was surprised too because it leapt up, flipped around, and made its getaway out the back door.

In addition to all these animals, I have three sons, one daughter, one son-in-law, one daughter-in-law (and another well on the way to becoming one). April and I have survived raising our children by having enormous time gaps between them, though this survival tactic has meant we’ve been raising children for our whole married life. What were we thinking? The nest ha empty!

When I’m not at home caring for animals and children, I spend my time as an English professor at Redeemer University in Hamilton, Ontario. My ivory tower is located in office 239A of the Academic Building. Occasionally, I venture out of my tower to teach writing and literature courses.

I’m qualified to teach these courses because a long time ago in a land far, far away (Halifax, Nova Scotia), I earned my doctorate from Dalhousie University by writing a dissertation on the Canadian poet Al Purdy. Before that, I got an M.A. and Honours B.A. in English from Western University, before they changed the name from the University of Western Ontario. (Why did they change the name?) For more than thirty years, I’ve done scholarly research on Canadian literature. As a reader, my first love is authors such as Alice Munro, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, and Alistair MacLeod. With some great co-authors, I’ve also written about writing and how to do it better—developing writing handbooks for students from middle school to college and university, as well as for workplace professionals.

As a writer, though, my first love now is being creative—writing poetry, which I’ve published in journals, and writing fiction—including Moonshine Promises—stories about Evan and Mae Mulder, tales largely in the comic mode, with a dash of domestic drama thrown in. I started writing these stories in December 2016. My wife got tired of my saying repeatedly that I wished I could find some time to write fiction, so she told me to write a story for her as a Christmas present. Given my Dutch heritage, I jumped at the chance to save money on gifts and started writing. Every holiday, birthday, and anniversary became an excuse to write another story and exercise frugality at the same time. Eventually, I didn’t need excuses to do either.