Posts Tagged ‘Halifax’
new: three Urban Mysteries
I have released three of my new books in the Urban Mysteries Series: Office Green, City Grotesque, and Roundabout. These three are set in the cities of Halifax (Nova Scotia), Saint John (New Brunswick), and Fredericton (New Brunswick). The stories are fiction, but the settings are real and illustrate the diversity of downtown Halifax, some of the interesting architecture of Saint John, and the traffic movements in Fredericton.
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Office Green is dedicated to Susan, good friend and co-worker, who operated a real business, watering plants in office buildings in a city out west. The image of her carrying her watering can through the streets inspired my story. The book is available here.
City Grotesque is dedicated to wonderful friend and author, Ana, a member of my writing group, Fictional Friends. Ana first introduced me to the ‘grotesques,’ sculptures on the Chubb’s Corner building in Saint John. The book is available here.
Roundabout is dedicated to my husband, Glen, a patient man and good friend. He sat with me for hours beside the Victoria Circle roundabout in Fredericton, to identify categories of vehicles and record possible elements for my story. The book is available here.
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All three books are available from Amazon, here.
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The next three books in the Urban Mystery Series will be released next year: Hollow Hotel, Dancing with Trees, and Hunting the Dragon.
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Enjoy the reading of these books as much as I enjoyed writing them. They are illustrated with my pencil drawings and a few personal experiences are included within the pages.
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All my best and Merry Christmas!!!!
Jane (a.k.a. Alexandra)
a safe space in the bridge
This past week I have been in Halifax for a conference. A part of my morning commute was the slow moving traffic on the ‘old bridge’ across Halifax Harbour, the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge. The second day, I was more familiar with the traffic and the correct lane to be in, so I had a chance to experience the architecture and some of the wild life of the bridge (by this I do not mean that the commuters are holding wild parties).
The Angus L. Macdonald is an amazing structure, built the year I was born and opened in 1955. It is a long-span suspension bridge, supported by cables between two vertical towers. The bridge is 1.3 km long, with a supported length of 762.1 meters.
The bridge is usable by pedestrians and cyclists. Because of its reputation as a suicide bridge, it is equipped with various barriers to potential suicides, including high inward-facing bars on the pedway and nets suspended in the open area between the traffic deck and the pedway.
In these areas, hordes of starlings (Stumus vulgaris) gather, creating a din and an occasional cloud of startled starlings. Starlings are known for their synchronized group flights – the birds move as one in a shifting horde of birds. To hear the birds, I had my car windows open, but I quickly rolled them up since the birds were flowing very near to my car!
Starlings are an invasive species, introduced by Eugene Schieffelin to Central Park in 1890 as part of a project of the American Acclimatization Society. Their goal was to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s writings into North America. All of the birds I saw in the bridge are descendants of the 60 to 100 birds released in 1890!
A group of starlings is known as a ‘murmuration’.
For those of you familiar with the excellent series of made-for-TV Jesse Stone movies (starring Tom Selleck), The Angus L. Macdonald Bridge is the bridge featured in the movies (although the setting for the movie is a small town in Massachusetts).
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morning, Angus L. Macdonald Bridge
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traffic huddles and a thousand Shakespearian
starlings squabble one another
yellow beaks and feathers packed
soft slate bodies rolled into the safety
of the suicide net and pedway bars
porous barriers: a cyclist whips by
and starlings sift through wire
a mumuration between orange
cables and green girders
impossible way, red and blue
pulse of bridge security
weaves the path materialized
within three tangled
lanes of traffic
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© Jane Tims 2011
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