Knowing by heart |
The title of my book, and this website, comes from Louise Dickinson Rich in her book, The Peninsula (1958). Writing about a remote and rocky point on the Maine coast she said:
"That’s the way I have known it from the first moment when I, a stranger, |
About Jacob Erdman |
Jacob Erdman is a pen-name, borrowed from a great-uncle I knew only from family stories. Something of a raconteur, he had written a column in his local newspaper in Pennsylvania. When I was persuaded to start writing a weekly column in our small town newspaper, I thought the pen name would give me some anonymity. During the more than 30 years of writing the columns, the anonymity disappeared, but the name stuck.
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About Lee & Alice Whitney
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Alice and I met in an English History class as we were both attending Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I was in third year, Alice a freshman. The class, rather oddly for a college class, insisted on alphabetical seating. Alice’s last name also began with W, so there we were in the back row, separated by one other person. Odd but certainly fortuitous.
I graduated in 1957 with a BA in English and spent a year teaching in a boys’ school near Pittsburgh and then returned to Cornell; mostly for Alice, but also to embark on a Masters’ degree. Alice graduated in 1959 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and that fall I got a teaching position at Hampton Institute in south-eastern Virginia. Alice and I were married in November. We were at Hampton through three academic years. It was a fascinating time to be teaching at a Negro college in those early years of the civil rights movement. Having finished my Masters’ degree, I wanted to do further work in Medieval Studies. So in 1962 we moved to Toronto, so I could attend the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (PIMS). By this time a dog and a six-month old daughter came with us. After two years of wonderful education at PIMS, I got a job teaching Anglo Saxon at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. We had no intention of staying on in a big city but this was too good a job to turn down. Initially I loved it, working with keen, incoming freshmen. However, as the years went on, and I finished my PhD (at UofT), there was growing pressure to teach in the Graduate School. A sabbatical leave allowed us to spend a glorious year in England with the family, by now having grown to include three daughters. The return to academia was a difficult one, and as the years went on I knew that I needed to move in a new direction. By the time the next sabbatical rolled around we had set our sights on a new life in rural New Brunswick, and eventually we settled here permanently. In New Brunswick, I was ordained as an Anglican priest and became Priest in Charge of a small parish. I continued teaching part time: Religious Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB; and English as a Second Language for Vietnamese "boat people" and later Dutch, German, and Francophone newcomers to Sussex. Alice taught the conversation classes with me. The family had grown again, with a mixture of “home-made” and adopted kids. Besides being a mother to our children, Alice kept her art alive over those years in numerous sketch books with pencil or pen and ink drawings. A few years after coming to New Brunswick, she became the first Art teacher in the new High School, a role that she enjoyed until her retirement seventeen years later. She also became involved as a founding member of the Sussex Artists’ Co-Op. For 31 years, I wrote a weekly column for the Kings County Record. The articles on the blog are drawn from those columns. Originally called “A Letter from Home”- because I thought of the pieces as an appealing alternative to the letters I should have written (but didn’t) to those of our children by then away at school – the weekly attempt to chronicle the little events that are the heart of ‘daily life’ became, over the years, a series of bench-marks or surveyor’s stakes to record the contours of that life, its dreaming hills and fertile valleys, icy chasms and swift-flowing streams. |
About Hannah Westner
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I am the oldest of the Whitney siblings, so I was 14 years old when Mum and Dad made the move from North Toronto to a farm in New Brunswick that had an outhouse and the only running water was cold, and in the kitchen. It was an adventure - one that changed the shape of all our lives!
I am also one of the children that Dad was writing to when he started writing the "Letter From Home" columns in the Kings County Record all those years ago. I was in my last year at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. I remember we all received a collection of the columns as a Christmas present that year, complete with some of mum's drawings. I still have that collection, in a blue Duotang binder. Over the years the columns became just a part of the background of my life and I only paid attention if mum or dad would read one at a family gathering, or if I happened to pick up the Record. It was always great to get those glimpses of Dad's writing, but now I'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Mum and Dad to give the articles new life on the blog. It means I get to read these columns in more detail, enjoy their lovely writing, chuckle at the animal stories, and wonder at the philosophy behind them. I am enjoying providing tech support, graphic design ideas and editorial assistance to this family project. After 20 years of living in the country outside Petitcodiac, I now live in Fredericton with my husband and a dog. We are blessed to have our two grown boys living nearby. And now my parents living in the "little house" in the backyard. |
