Casting into Mystery

Robert Reid is a writer, journalist, and avid angler whose career in journalism spanned forty years. Reid got his start writing for newspapers in Strathroy, St. Thomas, Timmins and Simcoe before he landed a position covering arts at the Brantford Expositor, and later, the Waterloo Region Record. He reported on a wide range of cultural activities from London to Hamilton to Toronto, and served as a lecturer, literary judge and arts commentator, as well as a writer, interviewer and associate producer on a couple of syndicated arts programs produced for television. He was the first non-fiction writer to be appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waterloo. Since his retirement, Reid has continued to write about his passions—art and culture, malt whisky, dining and travel, and especially fly fishing—on his website at www.reidbetweenthelines.ca.

Wesley W. Bates was born in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. One of Canada’s best-known wood engravers, Bates has ventured into book illustration (W. O. Mitchell’s The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon), film (Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry), commercial art (the voyageur motif for Upper Canada Brewery), letterpress publishing (through his West Meadow Press) and acoustic country—played, naturally, on a bouzouki. A collection of his engravings, The Point of the Graver, was published to great acclaim in 1994. A retrospective of his engravings In Black and White was published by Bird & Bull in 2005, with a revised edition published by Gaspereau Press in 2008. He now maintains his studio, which is open to the public, in a nineteenth-century storefront on the main street of Clifford, Ontario.