Michael Bedard
Personal Information
Description
Michael Bedard grew up in a busy household in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. His first experience with writing came in high school when a teacher introduced him to poets such as William Blake, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson, and he soon determined to become a writer himself. Studying both English and philosophy at the University of Toronto, Bedard graduated in 1971 and took a job in a university library. He also married and started a family. While working as a pressman for a small print shop, he found a publisher for his first two original fairy tale collections for children, Woodsedge and Other Tales and Pipe and Pearls. From the outset, Bedard followed a challenging path as a writer. In both his early collections he made few concessions to young readers in terms of language. Although some reviewers complained, this adult tone is a quality Bedard has maintained throughout his fiction.
Books
The painted wall and other strange tales
An adaptation of the tales of Pu Sung-ling
Sitting Ducks
A sympathetic alligator befriends a lonely duck and becomes alienated from the rest of the town's alligators who think of ducks only as food.
Glass Town
A brief, fictionalized account of the daily lives of the Brontës, told from the point of view of Charlotte.
Stained glass
Painted Devil
A visit from strange Aunt Emily invokes in Alice a foreboding sense of evil, as they find connections between the local library's collection of old puppets and a sinister magic show that took place twenty-eight years earlier.
Redwork
Teenage Cass feels an inescapable psychic link with his incredibly old landlord Mr. Magus, whose secret experiments in the garage reflect his preoccupation with finding the wholeness of life.
A darker magic
Three people find their lives in danger when a ghostly magician haunts them with visions of an extraordinary, deadly magic show he originally staged in 1936.
Woodsedge And Other Tales
Includes the short stories: Pool of Paradise; Dream Path; The Book; The Two Hills; Witch Tree; Lightning Bolt; The Dreadwood; The Gift of the Fairies; The Turret Room; The Playground; The Briar Way
The green man
A collection of stories and poems by a variety of authors relating to the Green Man and other myths of the forest.
The nightingale
The divide
Two backcountry skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. Identifying her takes no time at all - Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of eco-terrorism, and her picture is on law enforcement computers all across America. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?
The wolf of Gubbio
No one in Gubbio is safe from the monstrous wolf that stalks them. The townsfolk, armed with pitchforks, travel in groups and never venture out at night. Then a band of strangers comes to town led by the Poverello, the poor one. People say he understands the language of bird and beast. Even so, when he offers to go into the forest and face the wolf, everyone is certain he will never return. This is the story about St. Francis of Assisi and the wolf of Gubbio.