Fraser McKinnon

Atlantic roots. A novelist's eye. Exacting attention to evidence. Expertise that helps you see further into the stories, places and histories that matter to you.

You can know a place all your life and still have more to discover. The family story everyone repeats. The custom nobody can explain. The voice on a recording you cannot bring yourself to delete. I help you recognize what those things carry, and ask better questions of them.

I come from three generations of fishermen. I spent a decade in the Alberta oil patch before coming back east. Work, departure and belonging are lived knowledge here. That grounding, together with my work in fiction and folklore, gives you a way into Atlantic life that holds the human detail and the larger history in the same frame.

Sharpen your judgment

My standard is exacting: who kept the record, when, and what could they actually know? Bring that discipline to a ghost story, a family account or a notorious case and you can make a better judgment of your own. Folklore is evidence of what people believed; establishing what happened takes a different kind of proof. You deserve to see where that distinction falls.

Develop your eye for story

The gothic lives in the precise detail: a room kept ready, an inherited phrase, a machine that outlasts its owner. My craft is finding the detail that carries the weight, and knowing when to leave an ending open. You can bring that attention to your own writing, your reading and the stories you choose to preserve.

Start with something that has stayed with you. Follow that thread and see how much more it has to tell you.