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David Carpenter is a fulltime writer in Saskatoon. He was conceived there, born and raised in Edmonton, where he studied English and modern languages at university. He grew up spending a lot of time in canoes, shivering by campfires. When he moved (back?) to Saskatchewan, he took several two-week writing courses at Fort San, from 1977 to 1979, taught primarily by Jack Hodgins and Robert Kroetsch, and he published his first short story in 1980. It was a fictionalized childhood memory entitled "Protection" about a boy who joined an all-Jewish football team. Since the day that first story emerged, Carpenter has published three books of literary and personal essays, four novels, two collections of short fiction and a book of poems. Welcome to Canada, came out in November. It is a new and selected, a collection of novellas and shorter works, one of which is his very first short story, "Protection." That day back in 1980, when an editor from Saturday Night phoned and told him they wanted to buy his story, was a turning point in his life. When he hung up the phone, he leapt for a ceiling beam in his kitchen that he had never been able to touch. But that day he touched it and then returned, very slowly, to earth. Hi current work of nonfiction entitled, A Hunter's Confession, was launched early March 2010.