Out West is available from Rock’s Mills Press, Amazon,

Barnes&Noble, and !ndigo

The Story

In June, 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, two part-time railway workers, twenty-three year old Cyril Passfield, and his friend, Charlie Thompson, decide to leave their home town, St. Thomas, Ontario. They go ‘on the hobo’, joining the great army of the unemployed who are riding the trains back and forth across Canada. As they travel West, they hope to get work in the harvest, or maybe hop a freighter in Vancouver and see the world. The novel is based on Cyril Passfield’s diary of the summer of 1932.

The Making of Out West

This journal records my reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form.

Planning Out West

During the writing of the novel, I kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook – now in print form – reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form.

The Project

Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the twenty-first installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which I am exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download.