Richard Cumyn

The Tinsmith, Tim Bowling’s fourth novel, is a provocative, ambitious, exciting story. It opens on September 17, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland: 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished that day, the bloodiest in American history. Anson Baird, a young Union surgeon pushed to the point of exhaustion, treats casualties in…

Family is all we know of infinity, the insolence of fate. We are born to strangers we must learn to love, in a town or country we would not have chosen, into a tribe that defines and restricts our growth. We spend a lifetime overcoming the givens, only to turn back from the distant vantage point of fifty years when the parents are…

In 1981, after 20 years of teaching high school in Nanaimo, Jack Hodgins quit to spend more time writing. In 1984 I was on a similar path, starting my first year as an English teacher in rural Ontario. I lasted seven years. A few of my colleagues had two decades or more under their belts, an achievement of note given that the clientele never ages and pressure on the classroom teacher mounts daily from every…