JON PEIRCE grew up in the New York City suburb of Darien, Connecticut. He later attended Phillips Academy (Andover) and Amherst College, graduating from the latter in 1967 with a degree in English. His first job was as a reporter for the Springfield (Mass.) Union. After doing alternate service as a social worker for the Baltimore Welfare Department, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1970 to do graduate work in English at Dalhousie University. Eventually he obtained an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Dalhousie, interspersing graduate studies with stints as a bartender, mover's helper, private school English teacher, and newspaper editor. He taught English literature, composition, and communications for five years, until a shortage of jobs in his field led him to make a career switch, to industrial relations, in which he received a master's degree from Queen's University. After a succession of research and teaching jobs in his new field, he obtained a position with the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, a union representing professionals in the federal public service, in 2001. There he spent the last decade of his working life, working primarily as a labor relations officer,until his retirement in 2011.
Jon has published four books, the most recent (and most important) being "Plague Take It: A COVID Anthology by and about Elders," (Loose Cannon Press, 2021) which he co-edited with Ann McMillan. "Plague Take It" is a bilingual (French-English) and multidisciplinary social history of the first year and a half of the COVID pandemic. It contains plays (one written by him), poems, and short stories as well as the more traditional essays and memoirs. His previous books include "Love and Love," a novella about tennis and romance, and an industrial relations textbook, "Canadian Industrial Relations," and an essay collection, "Social Studies." His stories have appeared in four "Chicken Soup for the Soul" anthologies; his articles, reviews, and opinion pieces (over 200 in all) have appeared in major publications across the U.S. and Canada, including "The Christian Science Monitor," "The Globe & Mail," "The Ottawa Citizen," "Books in Canada," "The Toronto Star," and "The Kingston Whig-Standard," to name but a few. An actor as well as a writer, Jon has appeared in a dozen live and virtual community theatre productions, the most recent being a Zoom play, "Fishing for Fate," put on by Rural Route Theatre. Outside of writing and theatre, his major interests include tennis, swimming, bridge, cooking, travel, civilized conversation, and progressive politics. Twice-divorced, he has three grown children, two of whom live in Ottawa and one in Halifax. He is a board member of Ottawa Independent Writers. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec, where he strives to improve his French and to learn how to deal with the Quebec health-care system, faring better, for the most part, with the former than with the latter objective. Check out his approach to mentoring at www.jonpeirce.ca.
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