Tim Rogers’s job as a professor at the University of Calgary was interfering with his writing, so he quit. That was six years ago. Since then, he’s been picking up the pieces of a writerly career that was emerging, albeit in fits and starts, during the few peaceful intervals of his day job.In 1979, as part of a longstanding interest in people’s music, Tim spent a sabbatical in Newfoundland. He took courses in folklore and folk music. When he researched a ballad about the Southern Cross, he found himself drawn into the mystery of that immense tragedy. As the story began to bubble in his unconscious (some might say fester), he wrote several academic articles about the event. But these failed to quell the growing need to tell the human side of this great story.As his academic career progressed, he developed an increasing interest in storytelling. He wrote several major textbooks adopting narrative to teach complex topics like psychological testing and research methodology. This, combined with his fascination with the Southern Cross, led to increasingly frequent trips to Newfoundland where he began to pull together the pieces of The Tragedy of the SS Southern Cross. At the same time he began to work at the difficult job of shucking off forty years of academic writing to enable writing this grand story as a novel.Tim presently lives in Victoria, but retreats to his small farm in the Purcell Mountains as frequently as he can manage. In addition to treasured writing time, flyfishing and legendary campfires, at which songs about cowboys, railways and the Southern Cross come to life, are mainstays of these wilderness retreats which nourish his passion to tell stories of the people.