I am a retired Canadian educator and mental health counsellor. Since my retirement I have immersed myself in various writing projects as well as travel around the world with my wife of more than 50 years. I am a father to three adult children and a grandfather to seven grandsons and one granddaughter.
I live on the Canadian prairies in a small prairie town, the site of my last position as a school principal. I now have a small publishing business called Retired Eagle Books. Why “Retired Eagle?” The school uses the Eagles for their team names. I retired from the school as one of the eagles. I refereed football games in my final years.
My distant aboriginal roots are best described as Ojihawk, a blend of both Ojibwa [Anishinaabe] and Mohawk [Haudenosaunee]. My European roots are French, Scottish, Irish, Spanish, and English with most of that rooted in the Celtic world.
My identity as a writer began in the late sixties while I was a teenager in Ottawa, Canada. Like so many teenagers, I wrote poetry, a few songs, and essays which could only be labelled as “resistance” writing. I found an outlet in a youth journal called, Left-Centre where I began to publish some of my writing.
In the early seventies, I turned to writing editorials for a small prairie newspaper, while still writing poetry and a few attempts at crafting stories, none of which survived.
Then in 1976, I was given a commission to write up a social history for the Métis community of Ile-a-la-Crosse. The book was called Sakitawak. The book is available from the Ile-a-la-Crosse town office, or it can be read online, the link seen above. The book is found in numerous colleges and universities, and has been used in Métis education courses.
With retirement from education, I have made writing my profession [my wife calls it my hobby – LOL!]. I have written various books and booklets, chapbooks of poetry, a three-book series that is autobiographical, a Jungian psychology novel series, short stories, and a number of stand-alone books: fiction and non-fiction..
I write with a strong focus on the psychological condition. I was influenced by the Russian novelists – Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Thrown into the foundational mix is a collection of existentialists and dead philosophers, and Buddhism. My work is either non-fiction or realistic fiction. Jungian psychology, Buddhism, and philosophy weigh in to add substance to the scenes and the characters found within my writing. If anything, my work speaks to the human condition of life in the twenty-first century.