Richard Somerset Mackie

I was born in Edmonton in 1957 and moved to Vancouver Island when I was 11 and soon started digging up Victorian-era bottle dumps on the margins of mud flats on Tsehum Harbour, North Saanich, starting beneath my parents’ home and moving out from there. I probed the muddy shorelines with a metal rod and learned to distinguish between buried glass and rock. Soon I had a bedroom full of old bottles and pottery pieces. This was worthwhile salvage work because the tidal estuaries tended to get filled in for parking lots or dredged for marinas.

I have been uncovering, salvaging, and interpreting the past ever since. I worked as an archaeologist for a number of universities and museums, studied mediaeval and modern European history at St. Andrews University, and studied Canadian history and historical geography at the universities of Victoria and British Columbia.

My main local attachments have been the shorelines of North Saanich, my family’s log cabin in the Monashee Mountains, my family home (Lake House) on Kalamalka Lake, and the people and forests of the Comox Valley. I am now writing a series of three Vancouver Island logging histories, published by Sono Nis Press; the biography of the environmental activist Melda Buchanan (1924-2004) of Comox; and the story of Proctor and Remnant, English settlers near Cherryville, c. 1912.

I lecture frequently, teach creative non-fiction workshops in the Writing and Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University and at writers' festivals throughout British Columbia.