An Old Man's Winter Night
Ghostly Tales
- Publisher
- Running the Goat, Books & Broadsides
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2022
- Subjects
- Ghost Stories, Paranormal, General
EPUB Accessibility Specification 1.0 AA
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Single logical reading order
Full alternative textual descriptions
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Accessibility summary
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781927917558
- Publish Date
- Apr 2022
- List Price
- $11.99
Library Ordering Options
Description
An Old Man's Winter Night: Ghostly Tales is the newest collection of ghost stories by Tom Dawe, one of Newfoundland and Labrador's most distinguished writers. The stories, all based on ones Dawe himself has collected across the province over the years, include tales of visitations both malevolent and benign.
There are stories of ghostly galleons, of unsettling graves, of strange omens and fetches; an eerie tale of a notoriously haunted house—haunted, or built on a fairy path; and another of a ghostly sled dog that returns to save its master lost in a blizzard.
Targeted to middle readers, the book includes original, deeply atmospheric illustrations by acclaimed artist Veselina Tomova. The images, as powerful as the stories themselves, fuse word and image, hauntingly.
About the authors
Tom Dawe has been a high-school teacher, English professor, visual artist, editor, writer, and poet. He has published seventeen volumes of work, which include poetry, folklore, and children’s literature. His latest works include Where Genesis Begins (Breakwater, 2009), winner of the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, and Moocher in the Lun (Flanker Press, 2010), winner of the 2010 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards–Bruneau Family Children’s/Young Adult Literature Award.In the 1970s, during the “Newfoundland Renaissance,” he was one of the founders of Breakwater Books, a founding editor of TickleAce, and prose editor of the Livyere, a folklore journal. In 2002, Martina Seifert’s comprehensive study, Rewriting Newfoundland Mythology: The Works of Tom Dawe, was published in Germany and in Cambridge, MA.Tom Dawe is the recipient of many awards and honours. In 2007, he was awarded a lifetime membership for the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador and was elected to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour. In 2010, he was named St. John’s Poet Laureate. In 2012, he was named a member to the Order of Canada and also to the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Awards
- Short-listed, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award
Excerpt: An Old Man's Winter Night: Ghostly Tales (by (author) Tom Dawe; illustrated by Veselina Tomova)
And talk started up again of wrecking, people luring ships in on the rocks for plunder. This always disturbed Benjamin’s mother. “I hope people don’t believe that stuff about us,” she’d say. “That’s uncivilized. Nothing short of barbarous.”
Benjamin’s grandmother, recalling when she was a girl, vowed she’d heard plenty of talk about wreckers. She heard a story one time about two fellows, hard tickets, caught trying to lure a schooner in on the rocks during a big nor’easter. “It was said they even tied a storm lantern to the horns of a goat and drove the poor animal to roam the cliffs. No wonder there was so much talk of ghosts. We always had our ears cocked for strange sounds out there in the dark.” Of course, even the hint of a ghost story sent delightful shivers through Benjamin and his friends. Especially on long winter nights around the kitchen stove when people wondered, among other things, about the faceless sailor out there in the grave beyond the tuckamore.