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Born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Gregory Cook graduated from Acadia University. He has worked as a preacher, newspaper reporter, dramatist, freelance journalist, and Executive Director of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia. He undertook to write a biography of Alden Nowlan following a two-year appointment as writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo. More recently he has lived in Toronto, Thailand, Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick. Cook served as the charter chair of the Nova Scotia Writers' Council, Chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, board member of the League of Canadian Poets and Writers' Development Trust, and first secretary of the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (now Access Copyright).
He is the author of Songs of the wounded, and other notes (Black Moss Press, 2004), Untying the Tongue (Black Moss Press, 2002), My Diary of Earth (Pottersfield Press, 1987), Love in Flight (Ragweed Press, 1985), Love En Route (Goose Lane/Fiddlehead, 1983) and Love from Backfields (Breakwater, 1980).
Contributed to the anthology Pottersfield Nation: East of Canada.
One Heart, One Way: Alden Nowlan: A Writer's LifeGregory M. CookWith an introduction by Robert Bly. Biography Order this book: Shortlisted for the Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award and the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction. |
![[Cover of One Heart, One Way.]](../images/189590059X.jpg)
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Born near Windsor, Nova Scotia, poet, journalist and novelist Alden Nowlan challenged the apparent disadvantages of poverty, and a mere four grades of formal education, to publish 25 books, including three plays. Haunted by ghosts of his early life, Nowlan nevertheless discovered the ultimate "exchange of gifts" in the love of his wife and son. They fueled his bravery in plumbing the depths of human loneliness and confessing love's most tender expressions.
Nowlan's empathy with society's poor, as well as the earth beneath his feet, finds him cited as often in medical school, pulpit, or military mess, as in the work of the poets he inspired. He lived long enough in his 50 years to appreciate the sternest discipline: "The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise."
His writing earned him two honorary degrees and numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the 1968 Governor General's Award For Poetry. That same year he became writer in residence at The University of New Brunswick, a position he filled until his death in 1983.
Gregory M. Cook became a close friend of Alden Nowlan during the last 20 years of his extraordinary life. The day they met for the senior poet's first published interview, Cook records magic moments of Nowlan's paternal and romantic love, his phenomenal compassion for the less fortunate other, and his intrinsic intelligence that was exhibited in his life and his works.
From the U.S., Robert Bly writes of Alden Nowlan: "He comes through as a human voice that everyone has been waiting for, a drink of cold water, a robe made from a woolly mammoth, a genuinely decent human being."