To start

Through the Elephant Ears

This book is not a memoir. It is a fictional story of Katarina (Kat), as she grows up in rural Cape Breton in the seventies and eighties. Although, I have used pieces of memory as a backdrop to the characters and have described the scenery as accurately as I can remember, it is still nothing more than my imagination at work. If you see yourself in any of the characters then I have succeeded as a writer, because isn’t that why we read in the first place, to relate, to escape, to be carried away by people and places we see in ourselves or in others we admire, love, or even hate?

“The ocean keeps moving,” they said, “and hence the things inside, above and below, keep moving as well.”

“If only the seagulls could talk,” another man said and scratched his salt-encrusted forehead with the edge of his ball cap.

Eventually the searchers, mostly fisherman with their own boats, had to come in; the weather was just not fit to continue and hope faded fast in water as cold as the Atlantic.

-excerpt from Birds