about me

I was looking for something that interested me enough from scratch to want to write about it. Found a great subject in a 17th century political and religious radical, discovered on the local history shelves while looking for something else.

The central 'plot-lines' shaping this Englishman's eventful life in America revolve around clashes with well recorded and in some cases revered historical figures, people whose own records are the accepted primary sources for academic researchers. (These were the people responsible for the founding of Harvard.) Yet after months of digging, my subject's own versions of key events leapt out as the more compelling - particularly his contradictory but verifiably accurate chronology, and other details born out by the actual colony records. This man was stitched up, and subsequently confined to history's cranks' corner. Now there's a story. I went back to university and did the academic spade work.

Beneath Such A Green Tree is based on the life of Samuel Gorton, a narrative driven by Gorton's own point of view and drawing on the actual writings not only of my subject, but also his many and more sympathetically recorded antagonists. I made the dialogue up, of course, but much of it is based on the record.

Replete with its own factual story arc, is the end result a novel pretending to be a history book, or a history book pretending to be a novel? History, like literature, is a matter of interpretation.

Along the way we encounter political chicanery, jiggery pokery with the historical record, religious hypocrisy, love, lust, judicial murder, massacre and monstrous births - and it's all true; well, most of it.

I'm not seeking extra reading myself, there's not enough time as it is, but if your offering makes me turn the page...... If I feel qualified to comment, I will.

favourite books

Twain, Tolkein, R.L. Stevenson, - for reading to my kids when they were little.
Poe, M.R. James, Robert Tressel, Orwell, Philip Hamilton, Kesey, Donlevy, Ballard, Grass, Kotzwinkle, Morrison - 'Beloved' was the most remarkable book I read as an academic requirement.

my websites