Talking Trees

A Carpentry of Wood and Word

John Terpstra was born in Brockville to parents who had recently immigrated from the Nether­lands. After schooling in Edmonton and Hamilton, John attended Trinity Christian College in Chicago, Illinois, and the University of Toronto, where he obtained his B.A. degree. Then, to quote from his website, he "chose to earn his living as a cabinetmake while maintaining a writing career" in Hamilton, Ontario, where he has resided, apart from a few brief intervals, since the age of 12.

Starting with a poetry collection in 1982, John has published a number of individual poems, several chapbooks, at least 11 books of poetry, five works of "creative" non-fiction, both biographical and historical, and three full-length recordings of readings, some with musical accompanyment. These have received considerable praise from critics and readers alike. His works include those listed below. In addition, his poems and short essays have been reprinted in a number of anthologies.

• Poetry
  • Forty Days and Forty Nights (1987), which won the F G Bressani Literary Price for Poetry in 1988;
  • Captain Kintail (1992), which won the CBC Radio Literary Competition in 1992;
  • Disarmament (2003), which was shortlisted for a Governor General`s Litarary Award.
• Biographical non-fiction
  • The Boys, Or Waiting For The Electrician's Daughter (2005), "an elegy" in prose for his wife`s three brothers, all of whom died within a six-month period in 1978, and a finalist for the Charles Tayor Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
• Historical non-fiction
  • Falling Into Place (2002), thoughts on Hamilton`s Iroquois Bar, the glacial sandbar on which a good portion of the old City of Hamilton was built, and its impact on the city and its residents;
  • The House with the Parapet Wall (2014), "stories (both historical and fanciful) of the nineteenth-century houses in [John`s] Hamilton neigh­bour­hood and of the families which have inhabited them";
  • Daylighting Chedoke (2018), "a meditation on how urbanization and industrialization has literally buried our natural environment and what it would be like to free our creeks and perhaps, while doing so, free our society".
• And aspects of a Christian life
  • Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations (2009), a "frank re­flec­tion on faith and church in a secular era.";
  • Wild Hope (2020), a collection of prayers and what some have termed "Christian poetry";
  • several other prayers, indi­vi­dual poems, and collections of poems across more than three decades.

John Terpstra holds an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Knox College, in the University of Toronto (2024).

• The video is limited to what was display­ed to the audience on the large screen at the front of the lecture venue. We have no picture-in-picture video of our speaker at the podium.
• The audio was captured in this instance with a hand-held microphone. (The podi­um microphone was not functioning.) Questions from the audience were, as usual, too faint to be heard. (We always ask our speakers to repeat the question before starting their response.)