Between 1869 and the early 1930s more than 100,000 children were rounded up from the streets of Britain to be used as labourers in Canadian homes; often little more than slaves. Today there are two million or more descendants of what were derisively known in Canada as 'home children'. Writer and journalist, Sean Arthur Joyce was shocked to learn in middle age that he was one of those descendants. These child immigrants had no choice: they could live in abject poverty on the streets of Britain, or be shipped to a strange country, never to see one's home or family again. The lives of Canadian child immigrants were rife with suffering: for the boys, back-breaking labour from dawn 'til dusk on a farm. The girls were earmarked for domestic service, mostly in isolated farm households, that left them vulnerable to sexual abuse due to their isolation. While some children would be welcomed into loving homes, others were exploited as cheap labour, little different than pack animals and many did not live to be adults. Laying the Children's Ghosts to Rest is a captivating blend of memoir and history and offers the reader a personal, and highly readable narrative on the subject of Western Canada's 'home children'. With painstaking research and an ability to bring personal details to life, Joyce imbues the stories of 'home children' with a sense of redemption and human dignity.

Sean Arthur Joyce, better known in the Kootenays as Art Joyce, has published two books of regional history and in 2014 published Laying the Children's Ghosts to Rest: Canada's Home Children in the West (Hagios Press) on the little-known historical phenomenon of the 100,000 poor children exported from the UK to work as indentured child labourers on Canadian farms.

Joyce's poems and essays on poetics have appeared in Canadian, American and British literary journals. In 2016 his poetics thesis, A New Romanticism for the 21st Century, appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Canadian Poetry from the University of Western Ontario. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, both Canadian and international, most recently in the Corbel Stone Press Contemporary Poetry series (UK 2017), Nanaimo Public Library anthology and Fire & Sky, a fundraiser for victims of the Ft. McMurray, Alberta firestorm of 2016.

New Orphic Publishers of Nelson, BC Canada has published three collections of his poetry, The Charlatans of Paradise, Star Seeds, and The Price of Transcendence, the latter edited by renowned Canadian poet Tom Wayman, who calls it "a first class collection." bill bissett reviewed Charlatans with one word: "excellent."

In 2016 he produced his second poetry video, Dead Crow: Prologue, with music soundtrack composed by Noel Fudge and video production by Isaac Carter of ICandy Films. A live version of the performance toured the Kootenays in Fall 2016.

Joyce's first novel, Mountain Blues, is due out in May 2018 from NeWest Press.

Sean Arthur Joyce's profile page

"This is a crucial story from our collective past that needs to be told about the often tragic lives of the all but forgotten "home children". " Gary Geddes