Walt Wingfield jumped off the corporate ladder of his Bay Street investment company to embrace the simple life on a hundred-acre farm in the sand hills of Persephone Township. In a series of letters to the editor of the local newspaper, Walt describes his struggle to make ends meet and gain acceptance in a community that distrusts anyone from the big city. His Letters from Wingfield Farm chronicles the modest successes and spectacular defeats of his first three seasons on the farm.
Wingfield's Hope finds Walt in his fourth season, now married to Maggie, the girl next door, and balancing the expenses of the farm with a part-time job at his old firm in the city, and a baby on the way. He should be happy, but Persephone Township faces an uncertain future. The voices of the old rural community are slipping away. Can they be preserved or will they be lost forever? Can the community move forward or will they always be paralyzed by feuds and rivalries?
In creating Persephone Township, Dan Needles has brought to life a marvellous rural community, populated by eccentric philosophers, wily survivors, rascals, cranks, and modest heroes. Walt Wingfield's brave attempt to embrace a less complicated world constitutes the signal triumph of a clear-eyed spirit over human frailty and natural adversity. ?Dan needles stands squarely in the tradition of other comic chronicles of the human condition such as T.C. Haliburton and Mark Twain?Persephone Township may not be on the map, but it is nonetheless in the Canadian Psyche.? “The Globe and Mail

DAN NEEDLES is the creator of the popular Wingfield Farm plays, full-length stage comedies that have filled theatres across Canada and the United States for more than 3,000 performances since 1984. Wingfield’s Inferno, the sixth in the series of plays starring Rod Beattie, opens at the Stratford Festival in 2005. A 21-part CBC television series, based on the first four plays, aired in 2001. In 2003, With Axe & Flask, a history of fictional Persephone Township, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for humour. A regular columnist for Harrowsmith-Country Life and Country Guide, Dan Needles lives with his wife, Heath, and their four children on a small farm near Collingwood, Ontario.

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