Wayland Drew

Who was Wayland Drew?

Wayland Drew was a writer born in Oshawa, Ontario. He earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1957, and began a teaching career in 1961 at the high school in Port Perry, Ontario. He later went on to teach in Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes, in addition to stints at the Ontario Ministry of Education, before retiring in 1994. He married Parrott in 1957; they had four children.

Drew began to write seriously in high school and published a number of short stories and non-fiction pieces throughout his career, while also selling radio and film scripts. His first novel was The Wabeno Feast. While rooted in Northern Ontario, the story indicted modern industrial civilization as an extension of the European colonization of Canada by depicting an entire society's fall into ruin. In her essay on "Canadian Monsters: Some Aspects of the Supernatural in Canadian Fiction", Margaret Atwood noted that Drew's use of the aboriginal wabeno revealed a concern "with man's relationship to his society and to himself, as opposed to his relationship with the natural environment" and she concluded that Drew's novel combined "both concerns in a rather allegorical and very contemporary fashion".