MACKEY, Frank 1947-

PERSONAL:

Born December 21, 1947, in Lachine, Quebec, Canada; son of Douglas Joseph (a metallurgical engineer) and Thérèse (Rhéaume) Mackey; married Elizabeth Ann Carroll (a journalist), September 7, 1968; children: Roselaine, Lia Mackey Haberman, Daniel. Ethnicity: "Scottish-Irish-French." Education: Loyola College, Montreal, B.A., 1967; McGill University, graduate study, 1967-68.

ADDRESSES:

Home—4380 Colebrook Ave., Montreal, Quebec H4A 3G2, Canada. Office—Gazette, 250 St. Antoine W, Montreal, Quebec H2Y 3R7, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Worked for various newspapers in Alberta, Newfoundland, and Quebec, Canada, 1970-74; Canadian Press (wire service), correspondent and editor from Montreal and Quebec City, Quebec, and from London, England, 1974-84; Horizon Canada, Montreal, English-language editor, 1984-87; Gazette, Montreal, copy editor, 1987—. Concordia University, Montreal, instructor in journalism, 1987-89. Member of McCord Museum of Canadian History and Marine Museum of the Great Lakes.

MEMBER:

Canadian Nautical Research Society, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Chateâuguay Valley Historical Society, Grenville County Historical Society.

WRITINGS:

Steamboat Connections, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2000.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A book of stories about blacks in Montreal from the 1780s to the 1880s, tentatively titled Something Else; research on blacks in Montreal from the end of Canadian slavery to the end of slavery in the United States.

SIDELIGHTS:

Frank Mackey told CA: "Is there such a thing as literary bulimia? I think that is what I had as a young man. I read Blaise Cendrar's marvelous poem, 'Prose du Transsibérien,' and I had to devour all I could about him and his world, to the extent of taking a degree in French literature. I happened to read Mikhail Sholokov's Quiet Flows the Don and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon around the same time and wound up gorging on works about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. No sooner had I read Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England than I was binging on books about the Puritans, the Reformation, church history—I bottomed out at the Bible that time. The truth hit me in my late twenties: I thought it was poetry and fiction that I fancied, when all the time it was really the nitty-gritty behind them.

"That was the extent of my training in history. Nothing formal. It is pretty well all that I read and write now, but not History with a capital 'H', an academic discipline. It's personal, more like coming around to the present by the nineteenth-century lane at the back, looking over the messy yard, the ghost of a garden, the grass uncut for ages, and wondering: is this really my house?"