“But I think I have told you a love story. Is there any other word for it? 'Sense of place' doesn’t seem to quite cut it for Tack’s Beach and me. I hope that in my flick around Tack’s Beach harbour in the 1950s, I have shed a bit of light upon where we hail from, we Newfoundlanders and Labradorians of the outports—some of us resettled, all of us clinging to every morsel of this place, Newfoundland and Labrador.”?xml:namespace prefix="o" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Out from the Harbour is a long-awaited treat for readers young and old. It is Rex Brown’s whimsical, sentimental, and at times outright funny memoir about growing up in Tack’s Beach, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador. This memoir captures with fine detail and wry wit a lifestyle of days gone by in a small outport community. Fishing, boat building, farming, shopkeeping, and a myriad of other professions in the culture of self-sufficiency, as well as the simpler delights youngsters found for entertainment in those days, are the stuff of Rex Brown’s hometown recollections.

Rex Brown is the organizer of the March Hare, the longest-running literary festival in Newfoundland and Labrador. This “celebration of words and music” was founded by Al Pittman, Rex Brown, and George Daniels.

Rex Brown grew up in Tack’s Beach, Placentia Bay, completing grade nine in 1961. He travelled to St. John’s for high school and university but returned home each summer until resettlement in 1967. He earned his keep teaching high school, retiring in 1999.The new millennium sees him about Corner Brook golfing, hanging out with the grandchildren, reading about Newfoundland and Labrador, and organizing the March Hare “celebration of words and music.” His wife, Elaine, keeps him afloat.

Rex Brown's profile page

Stan Dragland was born and brought up in Alberta. He was educated at The University of Alberta and Queen's University. He has taught at the University of Alberta, at The Grammar School, Sudbury, Suffolk, England, in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario in London, and in the Banff Centre Writing Studio. He now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland. He was founding editor of Brick, a journal of reviews and founder of Brick Books, a poetry publishing house, which he still serves as publisher and editor. Between 1993 and 1996 he was poetry editor for McClelland and Stewart. He has published three previous books of fiction: Peckertracks, a Chronicle (shortlisted for the 1978 Books in Canada First Novel Prize), Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages, and (for children) Simon Jesse's Journey. He has edited collections of essays on Duncan Campbell Scott and James Reaney. Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, a 'critical collage,' has been followed by two other books of criticism, The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9, which won the 1995 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism. 12 Bars, a prose blues, was co-winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award in 2003, the same year Apocrypha: Further Journeys appeared in NeWest Press's Writer-as-Critic series. Apocrypha was winner of the Rogers Cable Non-Fiction Award in 2005. In April 2004 the stage adaptation of HalldÛr Laxness's The Atom Station, co-written with Agnes Walsh, was performed at the LSPU Hall in St. John's. His most recent book is Stormy Weather: Foursomes, prose poetry from Pedlar Press, was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award in 2007. He is editor of the recently-released Hard-Headed and Big-Hearted: Writing Newfoundland, a collection of essays by Newfoundland historian Stuart Pierson.

Stan Dragland's profile page