Don Denton, who runs the on-line literary magazine literaryphotographer.com, has done a terrific Q & A session with me to coincide with the arrival of the first copies of The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning Story at your local bookstore. I was also pleased to tell Don about my other writing adventures, which include the chapter I wrote for The Story That Brought Me Here: To Alberta From Everywhere. The great photo accompanying Don’s article was shot by my good friend Bob Blakey.

A story in today’s Globe and Mail reports that Canadians seem to love biographies. It lists my new book, The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning Story, as one of the “noteworthy” titles that Canadians will find in their favourite bookstores this fall. Books by three other Alberta authors, my friends Fred Stenson, Rudy Wiebe and Andrew Nikiforuk, are also included in the Globe’s selective list of fall titles.

The Story That Brought Me Here: To Alberta From Everywhere, a new book published by the estimable Brindle & Glass, contains a chapter about the how and the why of my coming to Canada in 1966. The chapter will you a taste of the full-length autobiography I hope to complete in the next year. The Story That Brought Me Here was launched in Edmonton tonight, with two dozen of the participating authors in attendance, and will be available in bookstores everywhere during the next few weeks. Proceeds from sales of the book are going toward PEN Canada’s Writers In Exile Network.

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed has emerged as one of the Top 10 nominees in the Calgary Herald’s contest to find Alberta’s Greatest Citizen of the last century. I am very pleased about this because Mr. Lougheed was kind enough to write a wonderful blurb for the cover of my new biography of former premier Ernest C. Manning. Of course, I would have been even more pleased if Manning, too, had been one of the Top 10 finalists picked by Herald readers. But there are three other former Alberta political figures in the running - the late Senator Patrick Burns, the late NDP leader Grant Notley, and the late Lieutenant-Governor Grant MacEwan - and that’s probably as many as one might have expected in a list that also includes country singer Paul Brandt, former hockey great Lanny McDonald, philanthropist Martha Cohen, the late suffragette Nellie McClung, homeless advocate Pat Nixon and the generic Alberta Soldier. (Ralph Klein, for those keeping score, did not make the Top 10 list either.) The winner will be announced in the Herald on October 16, two days after Canadians go to the polls to either renew the mandate of the current federal government or vote for a new one.