Author Archives: Bruce
The forest and the trees
I hope that fear-driven uncertainty about the future of publishing doesn’t distract us from the simple truth that we are trying to bring our stories to readers.
In a candid conversation last week, a travel writer of considerable talent and experience told me that he may opt out of travel writing in a digital age.
Perhaps this [...]
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“Make me want to go”
Each year I attend an event known as Canada’s Media Marketplace, where those of us who promote Canadian destinations meet with some of the best travel writers in the United States. Because I work with travel writers—and have even been one—I am often asked about the life.
To the uninitiated travel writing seems so simple—writing a [...]
Exposing ourselves through speed dating
I include this tourism column about Canada’s Media Marketplace as further insight into the blog interview with my travel writing friend, Steve Lorton.
First published in The Northern View, April 9, 2008
Well, I’m off to Los Angles with a certain amount of dread. I hate business travel—and, probably for that reason, every trip I take somehow [...]
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Over Prairie Trails
A few years ago it so happened that my work—teaching school—kept me during the week in a small country town in the centre of one of the prairie provinces while my family—wife and little daughter—lived in the southern fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very far from the western shore of a great [...]
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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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Bamboo People
Ten years ago I told the story of Captain Albert Mah and Captain Cedric Mah, Chinese Canadian brothers who had amazing adventures flying the Burma Hump during the Second World War. I know that this is a different world than the one Mitali Perkins visits in Bamboo People. I say this only because my research [...]
The passenger pigeon
“I was born in Manitoba and came to Portage la Prairie about 1853. I was then only about six years old, and as far back as I can remember pigeons were very numerous.
“They passed over every spring, usually during the mornings, in very large flocks, following each other in rapid succession.
“I do not think they [...]
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Plotting along