John Van Rys
John Van Rys is no longer young, he hasn’t been urban for about 30 years, and he’s never been hip. That makes him old, rural, and pretty square. That said, when he was 61, the Canada Council for the Arts designated him a New and Emerging Artist. Go figure!
John lives on a hobby farm outside Dunnville, Ontario, with his wife April, dogs, cats, horses, free-run egg-laying hens, and Cayuga ducks, as well as two of his adult children, their partners, his granddaughter—and, just to keep things interesting, his mother-in-law. This life has supplied much of the inspiration for his fiction. People tell John that he has a thing about chickens, so he’s been given chicken mugs, chicken boots, chicken T-shirts, a stuffed chicken, and a chicken lunch bag. Chickens do appear all over the place in his fiction, but he’s convinced that doesn’t mean he has a weird obsession with them.
Until his retirement on July 1, 2025, his day job involved being a mild-mannered English professor, but his passion since late 2016 has been writing stories. He’s had short stories published in The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, Agnes and True, Blank Spaces, and Solum Literary Journal. His story “Excavations” won the 2022 Prairie Fire MRB Short Fiction Contest. His first book-length collection, the story cycle Moonshine Promises, was published in 2021 by Wipf and Stock. He has drafted a second collection of stories, The Healing Arts, through the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and a mentorship at the Humber School for Writers Graduate Certificate. He completed his first novel, Milksop, through The Novelry. You can find out more about John’s writing by visiting his website. If you wish to stay up-to-date with his writing shenanigans, you can follow him at his Facebook page and at his Substack newsletter, Old Dog Dumps (ODD): Dispatches from a Journeyman Writer.
