-NEWFOUNDLAND AUTHOR-
JAMES CASE
I have been writing my entire life. In the 1970s, I took Creative Writing at Memorial University, with Helen Fogwill Porter at a fourth-year level - prior to entering architecture at NSTC in Halifax. I graduated from Architecture School in 1981. After working professionally throughout Atlantic Canada and for extended periods in Quebec, Australia, Korea and Norway, there came a time when I was able to quit architecture - so I did - to put my creative energies into writing.
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I joined a creative writing group at the local library, dedicated to studying and writing poetry. It was around this same time that ideas began to formulate for a fictional novel featuring my great, great, great grandfather, Ananias. I had been researching aspects of the story for many years, but the encouragement that I received from my library writing group propelled me into a rigorous routine that culminated in a 96,000 word manuscript.
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“Ananias” was published in October of 2020 by Nevermore Press of Lunenburg, NS. (ISBN 978-1-7753717-8-6). My debut novel performed well throughout Atlantic Canada, with paperback sales approaching one thousand copies, despite having been released during the lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has consistently posted 4.6 stars on Goodreads, and many reviews of Ananias have vastly surpassed my expectations.
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This website provides a description of my debut novel. It also features a blog that offers interested readers a detailed glimpse into the background and research of Ananias on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Feedback from many of these posts has shaped much of my current research and writing.
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Early in 2022, Ananias was released as an eBook and has since been featured in Books by Heart - a public humanities project by King’s College and the QEII Health Science Centre in Halifax that explores the potential of book culture to affect the wellbeing of patients and staff in a hospital setting. (https://ukings.ca/programs/experiential-learning/books-by-heart/)
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In October of 2022, a short story that I wrote entitled “The Quarantine” was published in an anthology of writing collected during the Covid-19 pandemic. The collection, entitled “Inside – Thoughts from a Pandemic” (ISBN 978-1-7775549-3-4) is also from Nevermore Press.
Ananias gained a considerable following in the south of England due to the protagonist’s formative years in Dorset and Cornwall, and facilitated by the publication of Ananias as an eBook. This led to my participation as a guest author/speaker at the 2022 Sturminster-Newton Literary Festival.​
My second novel has been researched and written over the past three years. It currently stands at just over 90,000 words. It is a story that will appeal to readers of historical fiction, but the themes that paint the background for Vicory (the cycle of survival, travel as a vehicle for education, and the interpersonal relationships that serve to both divide and bond families) are universal. It is a deep dive into a time and place in Newfoundland as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing into manhood.​
These days, I divide myself between St. John's and Salmon Cove along with my long-suffering wife of forty-five years, Cindy, and our Irish Wolfhounds, Tully and Belle.