Born in 1957 in Winnipeg, Canada with a hole in my heart, I was a “blue baby”. I would turn blue and faint from a lack of oxygenated blood.

Thanks to what was cutting-edge medicine at the time, I survived, but with a childhood filled with hospitals and poor health. At age seven I had the second of two open-heart surgeries, and soon afterward visited Barbados on a family trip.

I fell in love with the island, and later lived there for a year, and married my wife Margaret.

These events shaped my writing to this day.