Barry McQuay

A Love Story

A Love Story I fell in love with my husband Barry in part because of one of his favourite books, The Kissing Man, a wise and strange book of Canadian literature in the magic realism tradition. Many of the small, seemingly simple stories in this slim book feature a stranger who perceives the hidden ache …

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The Hill of Summer
ABOUT SMALL, WITH GREAT LOVE I’m sorry to have been irregular here lately. I’ve decided that I need to spend the summer focusing on my memoir about a girl with artist parents growing up in a woods. But I miss writing to you. Already the topics are piling up. I look forward to returning in […]
Biology of an Old Farm
The Biology of an Old Farm When we first met Glenn Wiggins and his wife Carol, Glenn mentioned to Barry that the only thing he regretted about Oakdale, their beloved farm in eastern Ontario, was the lack of vernal pools. (These are typically small, shallow, ephemeral water bodies, which have no permanent inlet or outlet. […]
Memoir
Writing Memoir So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Gaston Bachelard In my last post I wrote about one of my life-changing memories. Today I want to talk about the experience of revisiting memories in writing and to suggest that you might like to do this too. First, […]
Nature Writer
Courtesy of Mel Shaw How I Became a Nature Writer Originally published in A Wing in the Door I grew up surrounded by a small woods and, because of my artist parents’ solitary life, the trees became more my kin than people will ever be. But alas, for all its charm, my woods was threatened […]
Wonderful
Wonderful Recently, in an effort to dodge all my Facebook wannabe suitors I decided to replace my portrait there with a representative image. Rummaging through 20 years of my own pictures, I was arrested by this blurry, long-ago snapshot of Merak, the human-imprinted red-tailed hawk, who flew free at Foley Mountain, but saw me and […]