The dog of your boyhood teaches you a great deal about friendship, and love, and death: Old Skip was my brother. They had buried him under our elm tree, they said-yet this wasn't totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

I came across a photograph of him not long ago... his black face, the long snout sniffing at something in the air, his tail straight and pointing, his eyes flashing in some momentary excitement. Looking at a faded photograph taken more than forty years before, even as a grown man, I would admit I still missed him.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

When I started driving our old four-door green DeSoto, I always took Skip on my trips around town. I would get Skip to prop himself against the steering wheel, his black head peering out of the windshield, while I crouched out of sight under the dashboard. Slowing the car to ten or fifteen, I would guide the steering wheel with my right hand while Skip, with his paws, kept it steady. As we drove by the Blue Front Café, I could hear one of the men shout: "Look at that ol' dog drivin' a car!"

The Halifax area has long played a major role in Canada's military operations, being the port of departure for convoys, naval task forces and army units over the past 100 years or so.

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.

I can think of no one more qualified to write about the modern South than Curtis Wilkie