Author Archives: william

About william

Author (fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, children's literature), editor, professor of creative writing. Adult novels: Gentle Sinners, The Girl With The Botticelli Face; Short story collections: Bloodflowers, Red Dust, What Can't Be Changed Shouldn't Be Mourned, God Is Not A Fish Inspector: Children's books: Thor, Winter Rescue, Frances, The Divorced Kid's Club, Garbage Creek. Taught at Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri; University of Victoria, British Columbia. Retired editor of Logberg-Heimskringla, Canada's oldest ethnic newspaper (Icelandic). Interests: all things Icelandic, Icelandic emigration in the 19th Century, New Iceland, Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, other Icelandic settlements. Fiction, poetry, radio drama, stage drama, film, culture, history, education.

Serendipitous Cooking

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I think I love cooking because both my mother and father loved cooking. The sweet and sour pickerel cheeks, the baked whitefish, the pickerel fillets, were all made with love.
My father came in from the lake, cleaned the fish, filleted it, if the pickerel were big enough, cut out the cheeks. The whitefish usually came as a gift from someone fishing further north on Lake Winnipeg. They made the various pickerel dishes together but it was my mother who made the bread stuffing for the whitefish, then baked it.
My parents were adventurous cooks.

Shopping In Reykjavik, 1874

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If your ancestors lived in Reykjavik or, more likely, visited there to trade, who would they have dealt with? Who were the people who decided what they’d be paid for their precious trade goods and what they’d paid for the supplies they needed to survive for a year?

Richard Burton, 1874, gives a good picture of who made up the business establishment.

Since the trading season was the summer when the weather was at its best, the traders would all be in Reykjavik but, not surprisingly, most of them left for Copenhagen as the trading season ended. From RB