"Going down the road" is part of the tradition of Atlantic Canada, but just as strong a tradition is coming back home for Christmas. When writers think of Christmas, home is on their minds, for better and for worse. Many of the stories in Home for Christmas relate to family, absent family or chosen families. A little sorrow, some ambivalence and a lot of joy visit Maritimers and Newfoundlanders at their Christmas tables. Following the success of Gifts to Last: Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland, Goose Lane is proud to present this all-new collection of Christmas stories. Like Gifts to Last, Home for Christmas contains stories by the region's finest writers, ranging from Lucy Maud Montgomery to Lynn Coady to Wayne Johnston. A few stories appear in Home for Christmas for the first time. Others are selected from books, including the funny yet poignant account of Hilda Porter's last Christmas from The Last Tasmanian by Herb Curtis and "Another Christmas," Ann Copeland's beautiful story of Sister Claire Delaney's first Christmas in the convent. Some authors, such as Maureen Hull and Kelly Cooper, are building strong reputations in literary periodicals, while others, including Harry Bruce and Mark Tunney, editor of The New Brunswick Reader, are journalists. In all, over 20 writers join their voices to make Home for Christmas express the wondrous variety of human nature and our longing for connection at Christmastime.

Sabine Campbell co-edited Fiddlehead Gold, an anthology marking the 50th anniversary of Canada’s oldest literary magazine. As managing editor of The Fiddlehead and a member of its editorial staff since 1985, she knows the work of almost every writer in and from the Maritimes and Newfoundland. She also loves Christmas.

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Ray Guy was a Newfoundland journalist and humourist best known for his satirical newspaper and magazine columns. He was born in Come By Chance, Placentia Bay, to George Hynes and Alice Louise Guy, but was raised and schooled in Arnold’s Cove, the community that was to provide fodder for many of his columns. Guy studied journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute. After graduation, he wrote for the St. John’s Evening Telegram 1963–1974, and his columns also appeared in magazines such as Atlantic Insight and the Newfoundland Quarterly. His writings included political satire and humorous essays on life in a Newfoundland outport, and his columns in the Evening Telegram often criticized the policies and ridiculed the excesses of Premier Joseph Smallwood, during a time when political opposition to Smallwood was ineffectual. In 1977, Ray Guy received the Stephen Leacock Award for the collection, That Far Greater Bay. In 1979, Gordon Pinsent created Up at Ours, a half-hour CBC St. John’s television series that starred Mary Walsh as the owner of a boarding house and Ray Guy as the principal boarder. In 1985, Walsh appeared in and directed a stage play written by Guy, Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With, which Walsh directed as a film in 2006, promoted in some markets under the shorter title Young Triffie. Guy also appeared as a commentator on the CBC St. John’s news program Here & Now. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2001. Guy also wrote a monthly column for the Northeast Avalon Times. Other books to Ray Guy’s credit include You May Know Them As Sea Urchins, Ma’am (1975), Outhouses of the East (1978), Beneficial Vapors (1981), An Heroine for Our Time (1983), This Dear and Fine Country (1985), Ray Guy’s Best (1987), and Ray Guy: The Smallwood Years (2008). Ray Guy passed away on May 14, 2013 in St. John’s, NL.

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Ann Copeland, a native of Connecticut, lived in Sackville, New Brunswick, for twenty-five years before moving to Salem, Oregon, in 1996. A popular fiction writing instructor at workshops in Canada, the US, and New Zealand, she is the author of The ABCs of Writing Fiction and six books of stories. The Golden Thread, linked stories about Sister Claire Delaney, was a finalist for a 1990 Governor General's Award; "Another Christmas," first published in the Fiddlehead, is part of Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore, the sequel to The Golden Thread.

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Robert B. Richards is a retired librarian living in Fredericton. He has been a New Brunswicker forever and an on-again off-again contributor of poetry to different periodicals, notably The Fiddlehead and The Cormorant. His poetry chapbook Unfolding Fern was published by Spare Time Editions.

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Biography: Maureen Hull was born and raised on Cape Breton Island. She studied at nscad, Dalhousie University and the Pictou Fisheries School. She has worked at the costume department of Neptune Theatre and as a lobster fisher. She lives on Pictou Island in the Northumberland Strait. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently Christmas Family Treasures. Her short story collection, Righteous Living, was short-listed for the Danuta Gleed Award, and several of her stories have been read on CBC Radio.

Maureen Hull's profile page

Born in Toronto in 1938, David Helwig attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first stories were published in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer while he was still an undergraduate. He then went on to teach at Queen's University. He worked in summer stock with the Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, rubbing elbows with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs and Timothy Findley.

While at Queen's University, Helwig did some informal teaching in Collins Bay Penitentiary and subsequently wrote A Book About Billie with a former inmate.

Helwig has also served as literary manager of CBC Television Drama, working under John Hirsch, supervising the work of story editors and the department's relations with writers.

In 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer. He has done a wide range of writing -- fiction, poetry, essays -- authoring more than twenty books. Helwig is also the founder and long-time editor of the Best Canadian Stories annual. In 2009 he was named as a member of the Order of Canada.

David Helwig lives in the village of Eldon on Prince Edward Island, where he is the third Poet Laureate. He indulges his passion for vocal music by singing with choirs in Montreal, Kingston, and Charlottetown. He has appeared as bass soloist in Handel's Messiah, Bach's St Matthew Passion and Mozart's Requiem.

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Kelly Cooper grew up in the tiny farming community of Senlac, Saskatchewan, where she vaccinated, branded, and ear-tagged cattle, sorted calves on foot and on horseback, drove cattle to pasture on horseback, and drove a tractor and a three-ton truck. A graduate of the University of Saskatchewan, Cooper taught high school English and later moved to Belleisle Creek, New Brunswick, with her husband, where until recently, she worked as an art teacher. The only girl among siblings and cousins, she routinely did "men's work," and now works with her husband on their dairy farm. Cooper's stories have been published the Fiddlehead, Room of One's Own, Descant, Grain, Prairie Fire, the Malahat Review, and the Windsor Review. They have been featured in anthologies such as Coming Attractions '02, Water Studies, and Home for Christmas. "River Judith" won the Fiddlehead Fiction Prize, and an early version of Eyehill won the prestigious David Adams Literary Award. Eyehill is her long-awaited first book.

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Anne Simpson's profile page

Sue Sinclair grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland. Her extraordinary poetic powers were first recognized when she won two creative writing awards at University of New Brunswick: the Walker Prize and the Angela Ludvine Memorial Prize. Her first poetry collection, Secrets of Weather & Hope, was a finalist for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award, and her second, Mortal Arguments, was a finalist for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her work appears frequently in magazines such as The Fiddlehead, Canadian Literature, Grain, The New Quarterly, and The Malahat Review, and in anthologies such as Coastlines and Breathing Fire II.

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Susan Haley’s first two novels, A Nest of Singing Birds and Getting Married in Buffalo Jump, were made into movies for CBC-TV. Most recently she has published The Complaints Department (2000), Maggie's Family (2002) and The Murder of Medicine Bear (2003). Haley lived in Fort Norman, Northwest Territories, for 15 years where she ran a charter airline with her partner. Haley now lives in Black River, Nova Scotia.

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Mark Tunney is the editor of The New Brunswick Reader. Born in Toronto, he has lived in New Brunswick since 1982. Although he has been a journalist for many years, this is the first time his work has appeared in a book.

Mary Tunney's profile page

Born and raised in Toronto, Harry Bruce has deep family and literary roots in Nova Scotia. Author of over twenty books and countless columns and articles in every major Canadian periodical, he was, successively, managing editor of Saturday Night, editor of The Canadian and columnist for The Star Weekly. He moved to Halifax as founding editor of Atlantic Insight, winner of the Outstanding Achievement Award of the National Magazine Awards Foundation. Respected worldwide as a writer, journalist and educator, in 2011 Harry Bruce received Atlantic Journalism's Lifetime Achievement Award. His book Lifeline earned the first Evelyn Richardson Memorial Literary Award for Non-Fiction. He continues to live in Halifax with his wife Penny, to whom he credits much of his success.

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Bernice Morgan (b. 1935), a life-long Newfoundlaner, lives in St. John's. Her stories have been published widely in literary journals, and in 1996, she was named Newfoundland Artist of the Year for her writing. Her novel Waiting for Time (Breakwater, 1994) won the Thomas Raddall Award for Fiction, and Random Passage (Breakwater, 1992) has been developed as a TV series. "Poems in a Cold Climate," which first appeared in The Fiddlehead, is from her collection, The Topography of Love (Breakwater, 2000).

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As a high-school student, Brian Bartlett was invited to join the Ice House Gang, so-called because they met in the University of New Brunswick's historic Ice House every Tuesday night to read their poetry and hone their talents. Amazed and delighted by Bartlett's gift for words, Robert Gibbs, Bill Bauer, Kent Thompson, and Alden Nowlan inspired him to become the accomplished artist he is today. He published his chapbook Finches for the Wake when he was only 18 years old. The next year, Brother's Insomnia was published as a New Brunswick Chapbook. Since this apprenticeship period, Bartlett has published six highly acclaimed collections: Cattail Week, Planet Harbor, Underwater Carpentry, Granite Erratics, The Afterlife of Trees, and Wanting the Day. His poetry has won Two Malahat Review Long Poem prizes, a fellowship to the Hawthornden Castle International Writers' Retreat in Scotland, and first prize in the 2000 Petra Kenney poetry awards. A talented writer of prose, Bartlett's essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in Books in Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Brick, as well as Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology. A native of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Bartlett spent 15 years in Montreal, studying at McGill and teaching at Concordia. Today, he teaches creative writing and literature at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

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Syr Ruus was born in Tallinn, Estonia, during the Second World War. As a small child, she escaped with her mother to Germany and subsequently immigrated to the United States where she earned an MA in English, an MS in Education, and taught briefly in the English Department of Illinois State University. She moved to Nova Scotia in 1968 where she worked as an elementary school teacher while raising her three children before devoting herself full-time to writing. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals. Her 2006 novel, Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, won the Writer's Federation of N.S. H. R. (Bill) Percy Prize. Since then, she published three books of fiction inspired by the South Shore of Nova Scotia: Devil's Hump (2013), The Story of Gar (2014), shortlisted for the Ken Klonsky Novella Award, and In Pleasantry (2016). Her novella, Walls of the Cave, is forthcoming in 2019.

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Herb Curtis (b. 1949) has lived all his life in New Brunswick; he moves between Fredericton and the Miramichi, where he guides visiting salmon fishermen. His masterpiece, The Brennan Siding Trilogy (Goose Lane, 1997), is a compilation of his first three novels, The Americans Are Coming (1989, 1999), The Last Tasmanian (1991, 2001) and The Lone Angler (1993). A different version of "The Party" appears in The Last Tasmanian.

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Lynn Coady is a novelist and essayist whose fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel, Strange Heaven, was published and subsequently nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction when she was twenty-eight. Her short story collection Hellgoing won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award, for which her novel The Antagonist was also nominated in 2011. Her books have been published in the UK, US, Holland, France, and Germany. Coady has been a journalist, magazine editor, and advice columnist, and is currently writing for television. She divides her time between Edmonton and Toronto. Follow her on Twitter @Lynn_Coady.

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Edward “Ted” Russell was born in Coley’s Point, Conception Bay, in 1904. At sixteen, he undertook his first teaching assignment at Pass Island. For the next twenty-three years, he worked in outport communities as a teacher and later a magistrate. In 1943 he moved to St. John’s to accept the position of Director of Co-operatives for the Commission of Government.After a brief stint in politics (a member of the first Smallwood cabinet), Ted returned to teaching. But he also found a new opportunity to give expression to the more creative side of his nature. In 1953 he was offered a spot on CBC Radio’s Fishermen’s Broadcast as Uncle Mose. The highly successful “The Chronicles of Uncle Mose” continued until 1962. During this period Ted also wrote several radio plays, all of which were broadcast by CBC. The last years of his working life were spent on the faculty of Memorial University (English department) from which he retired in 1973. He died four years later.Ted married Dora Oake (of Change Islands) in 1934. They had five children: Rhona, Elizabeth “Betty,” June, Margaret “Peggy,” and Kelly.

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Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in 1874. After the death of her mother in 1876, Montgomery was raised by her maternal grandparents in the nearby community of Cavendish. She received a teaching certificate in 1894, and studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1895. After a brief career as a teacher at various island schools, she moved back to Cavendish in 1898. In 1911, she married the Reverend Ewan Macdonald and moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, where Macdonald was minister in the Presbyterian Church. A prolific writer, she published a number of short stories, poems, and novels, but is best known for Anne of Green Gables and its sequels: Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and Rilla Of Ingleside. Montgomery died in Toronto in 1942 and was buried in her beloved Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

Lucy Maud Montgomery's profile page

Ephie Carrier is retired and lives at Dumfries, New Brunswick. Born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, he has lived in many parts of Canada and travelled all over the world. For the past several years he has been writing and telling stories for Storyfest New Brunswick. He is co-author with Jan Andrews of a children's book, Harvest (1999). His story "Just Pick Up the Sticks" appeared in Echoes (Maine).

Ephie Carrier's profile page

Jess Bond was born and raised in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. A graduate of the University of New Brunswick and Fredericton Teachers’ College, she taught elementary school in Fredericton for several years and then moved to Scarborough, Ontario, where she taught for twenty years. Now retired, she lives near Belleville, Ontario.

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Patrick O'Flaherty, who lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, has written four works of fiction, the most recent of which is the novel Benny's Island. His latest books is Old Newfoundland: A History to 1843 (1999).

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David Weale is a folk historian and a popular storyteller and stage performer. He has written thirteen books, four of which are for children. David co-created and wrote The True Meaning of Crumbfest, an animated Christmas special for children, seen in more than twenty-five countries around the world, as well as Eckhart, an animated TV series for children. He is the father of five children and presently lives with his dog, Breaker, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

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Robert Gibbs was born in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1930. He joined the Bliss Carman Society at the University of New Brunswick in the late 1940s where he was mentored by Don Gammon, Elizabeth Brewster, Fred Cogswell, and Alfred Bailey, the founder of The Fiddlehead magazine. Gibbs's poetry started to appear in this publication in 1949.

In his more than twenty-five years of teaching at UNB, Gibbs taught general undergraduate and Canadian literature courses and was the director of UNB's creative writing graduate program. He served as both editor and poetry editor of The Fiddlehead. Upon his retirement from UNB in 1989, he was named Professor Emeritus.

Gibbs was the keynote speaker at the first Alden Nowlan Literary Festival, and the Festival two years later paid tribute to Gibbs. His body of work was further recognized in 1998 with New Brunswick's Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-Language Literary Arts. He has been involved with the Maritime Writers' Workshop since its inception and continues to live and write in Fredericton.

Robert Gibbs' profile page

Paul Bowdring is the author of three previous novels, including the critically acclaimed The Night Season and, most recently, The Strangers’ Gallery, which won the 2013 BMO Winterset Award, the 2014 Writers’Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Fiction Award, and was nominated for the 2014 ReLit Award and the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was shortlisted for the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts Council BMO Artist of the Year award for 2014. He lives in St. John’s.

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Clarissa Hurley, a writer and actor, lives in Fredericton. Her story “Women and Linen Look Best in the Dark” won first prize for short fiction in the 1998 New Brunswick Writers’ Federation Competition.

Clarissa Hurley's profile page

John Steffler (1947) grew up near Thornhill, ON. In 1975, he began teaching at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook, NL. His novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright won the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Prize for best first book in 1992. His other awards include the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Artist of the Year Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize for his most recent collection, That Night We Were Ravenous.

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Wayne Johnston is the author of several novels. He has won many prestigious awards for his work including the Books in Canada First Novel Award for his debut novel, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Most Promising Young Writer, and the Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award for The Divine Ryans. Both The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York spent extended periods of time on bestseller lists in Canada and have also been published in the US, Britain, Germany, Holland, China and Spain. Colony was identified by the Globe and Mail newspaper as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced (including both fiction and non-fiction).

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Mary Jane Losier wrote "Whisper to the Wind" in memory of her mother-in-law, Lina Robichaud. She is a co-author of The Children of Lazarus: The Story of the Lazaretto at Tracadie (1987) and the author of Amanda Viger: Spiritual Healer to New Brunswick's Leprosy Victims (1999). She is the Community Liaison Representative in Bathurst for the Department of Extension, University of New Brunswick, and she gives workshops on life writing to children and adults.

Mary Jane Losier's profile page