Site Content

I was born in the wagon of a travelling show … erm … no, actually, that was someone else. I was born in a hospital in Sudbury, a nickel mining town, in the middle of autumn, in the middle of Ontario, in the middle of Canada. My family was middle class. There was nothing that suggested I might become anything as exotic as a writer.

I, on the other hand, believed I was born to do just that. At eight, I was struck dumb on reading a poem by Shakespeare. At ten I wrote my first poem, entered a poetry contest at Princess Anne Public School in Windsor, where we had moved, and won Honourable Mention:

     Raggedy Anne

     Raggedy Anne, my friend’s rag doll,

     Cannot stand up, at all, at all.

     She squiggles and squirms and writhes all around.

     If I help her stand up, she just falls down.

My path as a writer was set.

I made it through high school largely unscathed. At seventeen, I enrolled at Dalhousie U. in Halifax, where I studied theatre, music, and English literature. I was the first person in my family to attend university. Like most privileged kids, I had no idea what privilege was. For the record, however, I paid my own tuition with wages from summer jobs and working in bookstores during the school year.

On completing my degree, I moved to Toronto. Through a chance encounter, I met a modeling talent scout. My photographs were sent to an agency in Italy (My Models Milan) and I was asked to join their ranks. I accepted the invitation. It was fun, but not real life. When I returned to Canada, I had the material for my first novel (A Cage of Bones), set in the underbelly of the fashion industry.

While working as an editor at Xtra! Magazine in the early 90s, I founded The Church-Wellesley Review, Canada’s first LGBTQ+ journal of creative writing, with introductions by Timothy Findley, Jane Rule, and Shyam Selvadurai, among others. Many of the contributors went on to become successful writers as well.

In the mid-90s, I directed Toronto Truck Theatre’s production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap for three of its record-breaking twenty-seven-year run. During my time there the show received its highest critical appraisals, including a strong thumbs-up from the much feared stage critic, Richard Ouzounian. (Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf? Me? No way!)

I also had my own theatre company, Best Boys Productions. Our first full-length production was Zebra, winner of the Right to Privacy Award, about the gay-bashing murder of Toronto librarian Kenneth Zeller. This was followed by Blessed, an acclaimed dramedy featuring a Vanna White-like TV celebrity, by Dawn Rae Downton, and finally The Michael Ridler Project, a multi-media play about artist Michal Ridler, who died of AIDS in 1989.

Our first fringe festival show was the comedy Driving to Tatamagouche, starring The Outrageous Rusty Ryan of Great Imposters fame, about a drag queen giving make-up tips before attending a wedding in small-town Nova Scotia. Archival video footage of the show was eventually paired with interview footage of Rusty Ryan to make the documentary Driving with Rusty. Additional interview dates were planned, but Rusty died unexpectedly — ironically while on-stage in a small town in Nova Scotia.

Our other fringe festival shows were Five Easy Pieces, a sex-education spoof, and Wendy Falling, another comedy, about a woman who falls from an airplane for a very long time while reminiscing about her life. The latter starred actor/writer Ron Kennell in a bravura performance.

Around this time, I took my farewell to the theatre world. I wrote one final play, The Visitations of Captain John, a drama about the collapse of the Newfoundland fishing industry. It was workshopped at the Canadian Stage with Gordon Pinsent in the title role.

In the late 90s, I returned to school to study Television Arts at Ryerson U. I wrote briefly for the CBC (a Carole Pope special) and got hired as a segment producer at HGTV and the Food Network. A film production grant enabled me to make my first film, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, which premiered at the prestigious Directors View Film Festival in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 2002. It went on to win Honourable Mention, Best Canadian Director and Best Use of Music awards in subsequent festivals.

I never lost sight of writing, however. My second book was a comic mystery, and the first of the Bradford Fairfax series. The P-Town Murders came about as the result of a trip to Provincetown, Mass. As I walked around the town, I kept thinking that the locals seemed like characters out of a book — so I put them in one. It was published by Haworth Press in the US and by Cormorant Books in Canada.

Three additional volumes followed: Death in Key West, Vanished in Vallarta, and Bon Ton Roulet. By chance, Bon Ton Roulet was published in 2017, the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Orleans, where it is set. To my great surprise, I received an invitation to read alongside Mitchell Landrieu, the city’s mayor, at historic Jackson Square. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and writer Walter Isaacson were in the audience. The event was made even more memorable when we were interrupted by a Black Lives Matter protest.

In 2009, I composed a suite of songs based on flower lyrics by poets Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, among others, for the acclaimed Filipina-Canadian soprano, Lilac Caña. We performed them at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto. It was only after the show that I told Lilac I had never performed before such a large crowd (capacity 868) before. Apart from a few heart palpitations, I made it through. The songs were also recorded in-studio. We have since performed them and other songs in Toronto and Montreal, mostly to smaller audiences.

My third book, The Honey Locust, is a literary novel about a war correspondent, set during the war in the Former Yugoslavia. Dedicated to my family and friends, it received a ReLit Award nomination, an award that favours independent publishers, which made it all the more meaningful to me.

In 2012, Dundurn Press published Lake On The Mountain, the first Dan Sharp mystery. The book won a Lambda Award in 2013. Six more Dan Sharp titles followed, along with two more “Lammie” nominations. The first two volumes were turned into audio books. Mass market paperbacks followed. The final volume in the series, Lion’s Head Revisited, was released in February 2020.

Taking time off from the series, I wrote Endgame, a rewrite of Agatha Christie’s famed And Then There Were None. I reset the story in modern times on an island off the coast of Seattle, where a planned reunion of a disreputable punk rock band goes awry. It turned out to be Dundurn’s bestselling e-book in the US in 2016.

My first poetry collection, In the Museum of Leonardo da Vinci, came out in 2014. It was dedicated to my father, who learned he was sick early in the year. Although its official publication came after his death, he held a copy of the publisher’s test run in his hands on the last day he was conscious. It received a ReLit Award nomination for poetry.

With COVID, I turned to making videos, featuring my own songs. Don’t You Think I Know won a special juried award and two additional prizes in 2021. The follow-up, Gone Again, won the coveted Luis Buñuel Award, and two other prizes.

2022 saw the publication of my second book of poetry, Threads. During a lull in the COVID lockdowns I went on tour to promote it with writer Felice Picano, one of the founders of the Lavender Quill along with Edmund White and Andrew Holleran. The tour included readings in Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, and a final blockbuster stop in Montreal.

My seventeenth book, The Sulphur Springs Cure, was published by Cormorant Books in March of 2024. It received a coveted rave review (“…an extremely satisfying reading experience”) in the Toronto Star. This summer will see me participating in the MOTIVE Festival at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. With luck, and a lot of hard work, there will be more successes to look forward to. I’ll keep you posted.