Kettil led a contingent of six longboats past a place called Abbéville. The river further upstream continued to be slow moving allowing the longboats easier passage down the River Samara. Kettil knew that this river, despite its calm waters had a turbulent history, a place where cultures clashed and many died in ferocious combat. The old tales told of the Ambiani as warriors just as fierce as the Picti across the sea he had just traversed. The river valley was rich…
In the two hundred years since Alba and Gyr journeyed to the sacred stone, fewer and fewer young couples made the journey from scattered villages. The Church wisely folded local folklore into their attempts to convert the pagans who held fast to the old ways. In Inverugie, the village where Alba and Gyr returned and raised a family, had become prosperous enough that it allowed the Church to accumulate a small fortune in treasures. The priest had been joined by a…
Alba walked beside Gyr as they crossed the field headed towards the sacred stone. Her grandmother talked about a goddess and a god who appeared at the stone thirty springs ago. Alba wondered if she would get to see a god and goddess like her grandmother. She wanted to have blessings for fertility and have many children with Gyr. They had walked for two days from their tiny village to the east along the River Ugie, not far from the…
I am finally getting serious about a historical fiction that looks at how my family came to be in this modern world. The earliest known Longpré was mentioned in an obscure work where a Guillaume Longpré was supposedly in a minor supporting role at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Of course, the family didn’t begin then. He had parents, grandparents and the roots go far, far back in time. For this story, I am starting in the middle of…
There is no doubt about it. It is getting harder to focus on a task and finish it. There have been changes made to this site and there are more changes to come. I know that you, as a reader here, deserve to have this site fully functional with a full listing of my books and even options to buy via major online outlets. But getting older somehow enabled my attention-deficit to have freer rein. I just turned seventy-seven. I…
A moment along the Mekong River in Laos They say the Mekong is a river only in the way a body is a body. Those who live along its banks step toward the water with a quietness that borders on reverence, as though approaching an elder who has seen too much to be impressed by human urgency. The young man who came each morning did not bow, but he paused. That small hesitation was his offering. His name was Somchai,…
This story must be told, not because it is ancient, though it is, and not because it is sacred, though it might be, but because it speaks to something that has always lived quietly inside the human heart. Long before the first cities rose, before the first names were spoken, before the first grief carved its hollow into the chest of the world, there was a tree that grew in the space between what is seen and what is felt….
A Decision Has To Be Made It was small, barely a curve in the coastline, where the water held a stillness that did not belong to weather, I saw three small boats. The sun hesitated to show its face and though a rain threatened, the world stilled. Even the wind seemed to hesitate before crossing the inlet. The palms leaned inward, as if listening. And three boats tied loosely together, floated with the quiet assurance of things that had been…
A Mythic Tale They say that before humans learned to speak, the world was already full of stories which moved through the land like wind through tall grass, unseen and unheard. Yet, the unspoken words were never lost. Some stories settled in stones. Some curled into the bellies of rivers. And one, the oldest story of them all, rooted itself in a tree that grew where the forest opened into a quiet bowl of the Earth. No one knew when…
It has been a busy month since my last post. The biggest news is that I have submitted my latest novel-in-progress to Thistledown Press located in Saskatoon in hopes they will pick it up for publication via the traditional route. Like the Saskatchewan Awards submission, it will be months before I hear anything from them – if they respond. If not accepted, I will go back to self-publishing. The novel is written. I am going through it for the third…