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…

OK, this is huge. The fabulous Nicola Sturgeon turned up in Toronto to open a new Scottish government office in Canada. She is setting it up to encourage investment and tourism, and quite rightly, too. This morning the First Minister of Scotland turned up to open the Toronto Stock Exchange. You can see her doing…

The latest issue of Canada’s History finds me reviewing Disappointment River by American writer Brian Castner. The subtitle is Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage and the publisher McClelland & Stewart.  The clouds over the mountains to the west of the Mackenzie River looked like “three enormous flying saucers descending on us.” They “were layered,…