Writer Explores Hamilton Neighbourhood

John Terpstra writes about Hamilton, Ontario, about bricks and sandbars, trees and city lights. Because it’s an inescapable part of him, he also writes about faith.

The Hamilton poet and writer recently launched a book of creative non-fiction, House with the Parapet Wall with a series of events including a reading at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario.

Grieving the death of his elderly mother, Terpstra takes the reader for a walk through a lower-Hamilton neighbourhood both past and present, exploring the relationship of people and families to the space they inhabit – the homes and streets, the time and culture.

In prose, but with a poetic feel, Terpstra examines how the spaces we live in shape us even as we shape the spaces we live in.

“Much of my writing is grounded in Hamilton, because the natural and the built geography are inspiring,” he says. “Place, physical context, rootedness are all important to me.”

Terpstra, who grew up in Brockville, Edmonton, and Hamilton, started writing in high school, as the result of a poetry-writing assignment in class.

“By the time I got to the bottom of the page, I knew that this kind of activity was absolutely essential to the world, and that I had to do it.” 

His work – nine books of poetry and four of non-fiction – has been well received by Canada’s literary community, winning a number of awards and placing Terpstra as a finalist for prestigious awards such as the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, in 2004, and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, in 2006.

On reviewer has said that Terpstra’s work brings out the “aliveness” of everyday life.

In reflecting that bricks and people have both been formed out of clay, or that the lights of downtown Hamilton as seen from the Escarpment can remind one of Pentecost, or that the cross-shaped telephone poles are trees that have, in a sense, sacrificed themselves to serve humanity, Terpstra invites his readers to look at the ordinary objects around them – “every square inch’’ – in a new way, one which can build and inform faith.

With his interest in physical space and objects, it’s not surprising that Terpstra’s other creative work is woodworking.

He introduces himself on his website as “a poet, writer and cabinetmaker,” and includes some of his favourite finished woodworking projects alongside his books in his list of works, reflecting his conviction that the everyday and the sacred, the mind and the hands, the landscape and its inhabitants, are all part of the same gift.

When asked what he wanted CRC people to know about him, he answered, “That I am a poet and writer who tries to make meaning, in the shape of words, from experience and the world. We try to make meaning particularly through those times and situations that defy our belief that there is any.”