Employing a sort of leaping or mosaic structure and incorporating e-mails re penis-enlargement, questionable limericks, jokes, graffiti and a photo of a "penis latte," along with personal anecdotes and probes of books and films, Deep Too is a book of non-fiction stories. It is a funny and sometimes biting book about the phenomenon of male strut and competition. Thinking with feeling, the author posits an expansive masculinity that rises above stereotype, traditional roles and the either/or choices they so often involve.

Stan Dragland was born and brought up in Alberta. He was educated at The University of Alberta and Queen's University. He has taught at the University of Alberta, at The Grammar School, Sudbury, Suffolk, England, in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario in London, and in the Banff Centre Writing Studio. He now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland. He was founding editor of Brick, a journal of reviews and founder of Brick Books, a poetry publishing house, which he still serves as publisher and editor. Between 1993 and 1996 he was poetry editor for McClelland and Stewart. He has published three previous books of fiction: Peckertracks, a Chronicle (shortlisted for the 1978 Books in Canada First Novel Prize), Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages, and (for children) Simon Jesse's Journey. He has edited collections of essays on Duncan Campbell Scott and James Reaney. Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, a 'critical collage,' has been followed by two other books of criticism, The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9, which won the 1995 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism. 12 Bars, a prose blues, was co-winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award in 2003, the same year Apocrypha: Further Journeys appeared in NeWest Press's Writer-as-Critic series. Apocrypha was winner of the Rogers Cable Non-Fiction Award in 2005. In April 2004 the stage adaptation of HalldÛr Laxness's The Atom Station, co-written with Agnes Walsh, was performed at the LSPU Hall in St. John's. His most recent book is Stormy Weather: Foursomes, prose poetry from Pedlar Press, was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award in 2007. He is editor of the recently-released Hard-Headed and Big-Hearted: Writing Newfoundland, a collection of essays by Newfoundland historian Stuart Pierson.

Stan Dragland's profile page

In Deep Too, Stan Dragland takes a long, hard look at the penis joke. To the work of illuminating pain, he puts his enormous heart and brilliant mind, his ever-ready wit, and a lambent prose that truly glows from within. – Marina Endicott, author of The Little Shadows

on Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages Those familiar with Stan Dragland’s work recognize an author who works in protean literary forms. . . . in this new book stan dragland reveals a different side of growing up. Journeys Through Bookland is about how we educate ourselves and the influences that guide us – fairy tales, individual teachers, family life, dreams and nightmares. stan dragland is at his most moving in this book. he makes fiction out of all these sources, so that by the end an individual and a true voice emerge. – Michael Ondaatje

on Stormy Weather: Foursomes This book is like a fine old song that overflows with tenderness and hardwon wisdom. A true and perfect companion for every weather. – Elizabeth Hay

on The Drowned Lands Dragland has Cormac McCarthy’s gentle humour and affinity for magnificent landscapes, and, like Virginia Woolf, an ability to pierce the most intimate thoughts of his characters. Here is emotion as fast-flickering and dazzling as sunlight on water. The Drowned Lands is a deeply affecting story, beautifully told. – Lisa Moore