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Life
1933- ; b. in the “Bone”, Oldpark Road, Belfast; moved with family to Ardglen/Glenard Housing Estate, Ardoyne; ed. Everton Public Elementary School, leaving to work in the shipyard at 14; apprenticed as woodworker; took evening classes and passed TCD Matriculation, 1954; studied at Magee University College, Derry, and grad. BA [Respondentes], TCD, 1958; ord. Presbyterian minister, 1960; emig. to Canada, also 1960; grad. MA from McGill University, Montreal “‘Life is a Wake’: A Study of Themes in the Fiction of James Joyce”); left ministry thereafter; proceeded to teach philosophy and literature at college level in British Columbia; retired in 1997; issued Between the Mountains and the Gantries (2006), a memoir of Belfast life in 19 short stories, set between 1939 to 1951, chiefly in the war and post-war period, which became a non-fiction finalist for Glen Dimplex/Irish Writers’ Association New Writers’ Award, 2007; lives in Burnaby, British Columbia, with his Derry-born wife.
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Works
Memoir [stories], Between the Mountains and the Gantries (Belfast: Appletree Press 2006), 217pp.
Reviews, review of Brian Campbell, ‘Will’s Words of Wisdom’, in The Irish News (Sat. 21 Oct. 2006); review of Laurence White, ‘A Tale of War and Peace’, in Belfast Telegraph (9 Nov. 2006); Wilson John Haire, ’A Lost Belfast World’, in Church and State (Winter 2007).
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Notes
Between the Mountains and the Gantries (2006): The book is a collection of nineteen autobiographical short stories, with a Preface, set in Belfast between the years 1939 to 1951. The collection constitutes a memoir of a working-class childhood in north Belfast, of the years of WW II, the Blitz and evacuation, and of youth in immediate post-war years. The latter four stories in the book are set in the shipyard of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, and include a narrative based on the author’s experience of the tragic Juan Peron gangway disaster.’ [Author’s communication.]
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