IT'S OVER IT'S BEGINNING AGAIN
F.W. Watt published It’s Over It’s Beginning in 1986 (The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc.). More than fifty poems were included, capturing what seemed like a whole lifetime of personal experience, in contrasting country and city worlds, poems about gains and losses, successes and failures, living and dying, sorrows and celebrations. Not all the journeys, meditations and discoveries he thought at the time worthy of recording were included in this first collection. As well, there were more years still to live, more poems to be written. It was happening — again: the need to put down in words the moments that cry out to be understood, preserved and shared. Over thirty more poems about loving and losing, about sex, about trees, dogs, cats, horses, about that best kept secret of old age — that the wanting outlives the having. More laughing poems. Death-row joking while doing time in the inescapable prison called “the golden years” by people who aren’t there yet. Together with those previously published poems, they make up this new book called It’s Over It’s Beginning Again.
HEADS OR TAILS: 23 STORIES
Readers with a taste for sophisticated literature will find a great deal to interest them in this collection of beautifully crafted short stories. They bring a variety of creative, illuminating, often amusing, and sometimes very affecting perspectives to a range of life experiences. Deeply observed, packed full of emotional twists and turns, they contribute a fascinating set of fully dimensional dramatis personae, engaged in impactful and recognizable states of human emotion. The stories range from wry, to rueful, to eerie, to heartbreaking and lots of things in between . . . with even a little erotic sci-fi thrown in. They're stylish, literary and a treat from first word to last.
AFTER THE FUNERAL
Bill Hartley's life was shaped by a panoramic sweep of Canadian history. An illiterate prairie boy, he enlisted in 1914. Survived the Great War. Returned with a British war-bride nurse and their baby. Broke the virgin Saskatchewan soil of his soldier's homestead grant. For a decade grew wheat and bore more children. Sold his farm and moved his family west, like so many others, searching for a better life in Vancouver.

But there they found themselves plunged into the Great Depression. This ordeal passed easily for Tom, the youngest son, still a child during the struggles that drove his father into a frustrating attempt to educate himself and escape poverty. Looking back at his father's life, both having achieved success after the Second World War, Tom is caught up in his effort to understand the challenges his father endured. His strengths and weaknesses. The obstacles he overcame. The mistakes he made. And also the many ways, through the best and worst of times, that Tom's mother bravely played out her wifely part.

How should his father be judged? In what ways, if at all, is it Like Father Like Son? Tom is helped in his judgments by Max, family friend, almost an older brother, who has his own father-son relation to puzzle over. Both have complex memories of Bill Hartley's turbulent life as it touched theirs. Finally they may only agree that for all the sadness, there is life worth living after the funeral.
LOVING DAUGHTERS
Clarence Martin, a dour and testy small-town lawyer in his later sixties, likes to think he can maintain a stoical distance from the troubles of his clients, especially the women whose female nature is beyond his understanding. Yet over many years he keeps getting involved, especially with his old friend Gladys Hampton and her only child, Sarah. His dealings with them remind him of his own wife, Mary, long-divorced, for a reason he tries to forget, and his step-daughter Annabel, who like Sarah deserted an unhappy home as a teenager.

Clarence gets caught up, too, in Sarah's complicated life, including a dangerous episode from which she narrowly escapes unharmed, and which he brings to account in the safe confines of his office. Her early involvements with what appear to be highly unsuitable men result in her alienation from her mother, whose burning desire to preserve the continuity of her 150 year old family estate tests all of Clarence's patience, toughness, and legal skills.

Through all these personal and professional involvements, Clarence struggles to deal with the challenges, limitations, and humiliating mistakes of his own maleness. Perhaps they keep him from fully understanding the passionate affairs of the mothers and daughters in whose lives he plays so central a role. But in the end he can share the joy of an event that transcends all barriers between the sexes.
THE LANNIGAN SET-UP
What begins as a shocking discovery of a drowning victim in a private lake in rural Ontario leads into a web of crime and politics with wider city, provincial, and even international complications. Mr. Lannigan of Lannigan and Ferris, a powerful business empire based in Toronto, but the target of veiled U.S. interests, finds his secluded semi-retirement haven north of the City invaded by platoons of police from local towns and by provincial detectives. They are trying to solve the mysteries surrounding the gruesome death on a property which was set up to protect Lannigan from the outside world, as well as to satisfy a hobby dear to this prominent but secretive citizen in his old age. Morgan Streit, an up and coming executive of Lannigan and Ferris, is charged with the job of winning the Toronto riding of the Finance Minister, whose re-election would serve the needs of the corporation and its U.S. interested party. His involvement with and his uneasy sense of responsibility for his wife’s au pair girl drag him into depths ahead for them both. In the end, Mr. Roger Ducharme, the ruthless private secretary for Mr. Lannigan, along with his physically imposing and brutal chauffeur, Spade, may meet the ugly fates they truly deserve. But perhaps it is Mr. Lannigan himself who best survives the terrible events, riding his favorite hobby to rest in a place of quiet comfort where his partner Mr. Ferris has found peace before him.
THE ROAD TO SUTTON
David Pearce, a government research psychologist living under the threat of a second heart attack, is engaged in a bitter and self-centered search for happiness that estranges him from his wife and child.

David’s restless mental energies lead him to fill his “Idea Bin” with fragments of curious knowledge and speculation in his efforts to understand himself. To pursue bizarre research projects like the study he half-mockingly calls Disphallic Men and Clitoral Women: the Dilemma of Our Time. He drinks too much and behaves outrageously in his social circle. He takes up horseback riding and is drawn into the country life of horse breeding and training by his passion for a much younger woman, Caroline. Her past sexual relationships, real and fancied, and his wild jealousy, drive him along a strange and dangerous route towards self-destruction.

This is a novel of many moods – drunken hilarity, satire, pathos, the ecstasy of sexual fulfillment and the grief of betrayal and loss. It ends in sadness, but the sadness is buoyed up by the book’s moments of comedy and its continuing mental and verbal exuberance. It is in fact a curiously happy trip, though with unpredictable sometimes painful stops and starts, daring to venture boldly through unmapped regions of the mind and heart.
THE YOUTH DRUG
John Hornby and Norman Shearer are two middle-aged Canadian doctors deeply engaged in the search for a cancer cure. Their quest is beginning to show promising but somewhat puzzling developments, when they are lured away from Toronto to join a research center in California. There they are guaranteed more freedom to conduct their work, wherever it may lead them, reluctant as they are to leave behind patients they are carefully observing and treating - especially the star of the TV Blue Network, Faye Delisle.

Chadwick Hamilton, an immensely wealthy business man with his own motives for enlisting them, supports a private lab in Notlimah, his enormous, spectacular, innovative country estate near Los Angeles. When they take up their residence and their work in Notlimah they are drawn into bizarre life-changing experiences for themselves and for those close to them, including Shearer's needful wife and restless teen-age daughter. For, adjacent to their new research center is Notlimah's sprawling idyllic commune, overseen by Hamilton's estranged son, Garth, whose job is to guide and nourish a unique environment in which young people can thrive freely and creatively.

In this remarkable setting, the Hornby-Shearer medical research project veers into unchartered territory, where the human dream of everlasting youth emerges to collide with the realities of incurable disease and inescapable old age.
WHERE IS JULIUS
When Julius Field, elderly professor of classical philosophy, is admitted to hospital, his wife Edith and their two sons, Rupert and Melvin, are drawn closer to each other by their shared concern. Alone and bed-ridden, Professor Field endures the necessary medical procedures, and the personal and career memories and self assessments that invade his mind, some happy, sustaining, some autumnal, deeply saddening.

Meanwhile, Rupert and Melvin, the elder a family man with a solid business career, the younger still leading a feckless and unsettled life, discover how much they have in common despite how far apart their paths seem to have strayed. Melvin played a part in the troubled story of Rupert's marriage and entry into the world of international business. Rupert stood behind his brother when Melvin's wayward life reached its dangerous nadir. And now, in their different ways, they try to support each other and their mother in this time of radical need.

Edith Field's final response to the family crisis is not entirely what might have been predicted. She seems to have survived as well as or even better than the others. At summer's end, we see her transforming herself, revisiting her family history bravely to see the past, present, and future as beautiful.
JOKING MATTERS
Professor Felix Hart and his wife Jessica are an expatriate English couple carrying baggage from their different pasts into their Toronto mid-life crises. For her, the early death of an idealized first husband has left a deep need for security, something Felix is unable to supply. For him, a two year medical trauma after a near fatal car accident seems to keep him struggling to take seriously anything in his personal or university life.

Felix, though amused and flattered by a visit to his wife's psychiatrist at her insistence, is himself drawn to misfits. Lisa (a hospital nurse), who eased his hospital pains, but later almost drags him into her own mired marital affairs. Alison (an English Department colleague he tries to help), enduring a brutal husband's sadism. A second Alison (a young student needing his comfort), having a dangerous affair with a married fellow professor. Louis Fein (a popular visiting scholar), whose mock theory is that every human relationship is a flirtation. Eleanor (working at CBC Television), a 29 year old virgin who perhaps handles Felix's sex counseling wisely.

In the end, his tennis playing partner and divorce lawyer friend Max, together with his needful wife Jessica, bring Felix to wonder whether real life should be more than just escapism into modern versions of jocosa materia, the old comic tales which are the subject of his serious academic research.