KEN McGOOGAN

These four seasoned adventurers left Naujaat (Repulse Bay) on March 30, setting out westward in the footsteps of Orcadian explorer John Rae. Two of them have gone down and been forced to evacuate as a result of injuries. Two of them are still beating west, hauling double sleds through blizzards and temperatures falling to 48…

This is how Canadian Geographic previews our forthcoming work . . .  Numerous books have explored the Highland Clearances (the forced mass eviction of tenants from Scotland’s Highlands and western islands, mainly to turn land to sheep pasture), which began around 1760 and lasted a century. Many more have treated the arrival of many of these Highlanders in…

Dundas Harbour in the High Arctic. This magnificent painting, 36 x 48, is now on its way to the Pacific Coast, sold to an individual of taste and refinement who checked out the new website of Sheena Fraser McGoogan . We visited this magical location numerous times while sailing in the Northwest Passage with Adventure…

Bush Runner, a new biography of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, helps kick off a new Canadian history series from Windsor-based publisher Biblioasis. My review in the Globe and Mail begins as follows: Lake Superior had frozen over. Temperatures hovered around 40 degrees below zero. Families slept in huts they dug out of the snow. They counted their…

Twenty years ago, the late Louie Kamookak led the way to ruins of the cairn that John Rae built in 1854. At that site, three of us erected a plaque and toasted Rae and the two men who traveled with him — the Inuk William Ouligbuck Jr. and the Ojibway Thomas Mistegan. Now the Arctic…

As a wordsmith, I never quite believed that old saw about a picture being worth 1,000 words. But here at last I discover a case in point: the cover of my forthcoming book. Over at HarperCollins Canada, Alan Jones is the man who went the extra mile to make this look the way it does.…

Here we see Sheena on the eastern coast of the tiny island of Raasay, which is situated between the Isle of Skye and the Scottish mainland. We were hiking to Hallaig, one of the better-known sites of the Highland Clearances. Hallaig is famous because Sorley MacLean (1911–1996), arguably the greatest poet ever to write in…

So we’re launching a one-week writers’ retreat in the Haliburton Highlands. From Sunday July 7 to Friday July 12, I’ll serve as writer-in-residence at Tamarack Lodge and Art Centre. Tamarack is two and a half hours north of Toronto. Situated on a motor-free lake, the lodge comprises four cottages and a “big house” with a…