Firstly, I've spent most of my life in Canada. I'm sure it has inspired and influenced me in ways that I will never fully recognize or understand. It's hard to have any perspective on it when you're in its midst and it's all you've known.

Here's a crack at it:
It is out of the soil of Southern Ontario and the communities of a small church, a small school and a large family that most of my early experience and memory has grown. I spent my childhood wandering the fields and forests of the Niagara Escarpment down the back lane of our farm. Out there, you have time to think and dream. Out there, your imagination is set off by the howl of coyotes and the confusion of geese settling in for the night. Out there, you can imagine the many that have gone before you standing atop the bluffs that overlook the lake below. It is almost tangible, to feel the presence of the Neutral (Attawandaron) Indians scanning the watery horizon for approaching canoes and foreign ships in the early 1600s. The timelessness that you can ponder and the lives that you can imagine are gifts from a place that has been nurtured, respected and mostly left to its own impulses. I seem to write about the things that excite me in this way, from a feeling I get that I don't necessarily think I can consciously understand. I may write to express a humble feeling or emotion that vaguely articulates something that is mostly beyond words. That's where music comes in and where it comes from is something you can ask the birds, they may know better. I think there is magic everywhere, but most obvious for me is the magic of rural land; the magic of time layered on top of place.