Writing With a Broken Tusk
Writing With a Broken Tusk began in 2006 as a blog about overlapping geographies, personal and real-world, and writing books for children. Since March 2024, Jen Breach (writer, VCFA graduate, and former student) has helped me curate and manage guest posts and Process Talk pieces on this blog.
The blog name refers to the mythical pact between the poet Vyaasa and the Hindu elephant headed god Ganesha who was his scribe during the composition of the epic narrative, the Mahabharata. It also refers to my second published book, edited by the generous and brilliant Diantha Thorpe of Linnet Books/The Shoe String Press, published in 1996, acquired and republished by August House, now part of Reading Is Fundamental, and still miraculously in print.
Posts on this site reflect personal opinion and commentary protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Intersecting Lives in a Larger Cause in Evan Griffith’s Wild at Heart
You know I’m mildly obsessed with storylines in which two lives intersect: Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary. There’s something deeply human about such stories of people finding their way in the world, sometimes against great odds, driven by powerful passions or convictions.
Evan Griffith’s tenderly written dual biography, Wild at Heart: The Story of Olaus and Mardy Murie, Defenders of Nature begins in his subjects’ respective childhoods: