Wayland Drew

Wayland Drew (1932-1998) was a writer born in Oshawa, Ontario. He attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where he earned a BA in English Language and Literature (1957). Shortly after graduation he married Gwendolyn Parrott and together they raised four children. From 1961-1994 he was a high school teacher in Port Perry, Bracebridge, and Muskoka Lakes. He also worked for the Ontario Ministry of Education.

Drew began to write seriously in high school and published a number of short stories (to magazines such as The Tamarack Review) and non-fiction pieces throughout his career, while also selling radio and film scripts. His first novel (and sometimes stated to be his best) was The Wabeno Feast (1973). While rooted in Northern Ontario, the story indicted modern industrial civilization as an extension of the European colonization of Canada by depicting an entire society's fall into ruin. In her essay on "Canadian Monsters: Some Aspects of the Supernatural in Canadian Fiction ", Margaret Atwood noted that Drew's use of the aboriginal wabeno revealed a concern "with man's relationship to his society and to himself, as opposed to his relationship with the natural environment" and she concluded that Drew's novel combined "both concerns in a rather allegorical and very contemporary fashion".

Many readers, though, surely know him better as the author of an ecological science fiction trilogy, the Erthring Cycle (1984-1986), and of several movie novelizations (Corvette Summer, Dragonslayer, Batteries Not Included, and Willow, the last three of which were translated into French and the second in German). His non-fiction also reflected his concern for the environment and interest for Canadian landscapes, as seen in books such as Superior: The Haunted Shore and A Sea Within: the Gulf of St. Lawrence. His final novel, Halfway Man (1989), echoed themes from his first, The Wabeno Feast.