Find out more about my memoir No Letter in Your Pocket
I taught a one-day workshop “Prose on the Road: The Art of Travel Writing” for the Sechelt, BC campus of Capilano University from 2008 to 2010. The course offered engaging hands-on exercises, query tips, and a great bibliography. For more information, see Teaching.
During a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. in the summer of 2009, I visited Chappaquiddick Bridge, the infamous site where Ted Kennedy’s aide, Mary Joe Kopechne, died 40 years earlier. My travel article “Martha’s Vineyard inspires” recounts my trip to this popular location and my doubts regarding the Chappaquiddick Bridge incident (Coast Reporter, Sechelt, BC, July…
Travel is one of my passions. From post-war Nicaragua in 1981 to a year of solo travel in southeast Asia, I’ve relished adventures and encounters on many continents. I’ve squared off with gawkers and hawkers at train stations in India and faced men with knives on a train in Italy. I’ve ridden camels and elephants, suffered a horse…
I was a contributing writer in 2009 for the website The Travel Editor, based in the United Kingdom. Besides international tales, my posted articles, with photos, covered the arts and entertainment scene in Vancouver, BC and on the Sunshine Coast on Canada’s west coast. Unfortunately, the company operating the website has since closed and it is no longer…
Sunshine Coast residents like me love to keep our amazing region a secret, yet it’s hard not to want to share the beauty of its landscapes. I wrote a piece in a travel guide that invites tourists to visit the Sunshine Coast from nearby Vancouver. It’s only a 40-minute ferry ride away from this scenic coastal…
“I’m drifting in the clear shallows of the Squamish River, eyes gaping and ears pricked for signs of avian life. Just 40 miles north of bustling Vancouver, British Columbia, sits one of the top viewing spots for wintering bald eagles. Six of us and a guide float through morning silence in a yellow inflatable, paddles…
“He’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He’s been placed under house arrest in Somalia. He’s crossed the Sahara Desert, circumnavigated the world and retraced the ancient Silk Road from Istanbul to China, all by motorcycle. . .” My feature “A Colossus of Roads” highlights Helge Pedersen’s decade of global motorcycle adventures. It appeared in the spring 2005…
Buses in India filled with chickens and goats and bomb warnings. A brawl in a bus in Kathmandu. Twenty-metre-long “camels”—double-trailer tractor loads—carry public transit riders in Havana, Cuba in the late 1990s. These are some of the first-person and news accounts I wrote in Transit Around the World, published in Coast Mountain BusLink’s Transit Exchange newsletter in April…
My creative nonfiction excerpt “Adrift”, which describes my visit to an exorcism temple in Balaji, India, apppeared in the anthology Chasing Halley’s Comet (Laughing Willow Press, Vancouver, 1995). This was a multi-genre collection of work from the winners of the Federation of BC Writers’ Festival Competition. INDIA: Click here to read an excerpt from “Adrift” in…
While in my twenties, I conducted an oral history study in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia on Canada’s east coast. With fewer than 100 residents, this archetypal fishing village receives tens of thousands of visitors each year. I loved meeting the lobster fishermen, shopkeepers, and community members in this tourist haven. Each views the impact of…