Joyce Barkhouse is the author of the award-winning book PIt Pony.
As a child, Joyce Barkhouse dreamt of becoming a missionary. Instead, she trained as a teacher, nurtured generations of children in the pleasures of reading and writing and became a published author herself in middle age. One of the children she encouraged was her niece Margaret Atwood. "She was an important early support to me in my writing. She took it seriously," Atwood said in a telephone interview, recalling that she had shown her aunt "rather horrible poems" as an adolescent.
As an elementary school teacher, Barkhouse often wrote short stories, poems and plays for her young students to make up for the lack of Canadian materials in the school curriculum. But she put her ambitions as a published author on hold while raising her family and it wasn't until after her husband had died, and she was in her 50s, that she began writing professionally.
Her first book, George Dawson: The Little Giant, was published in 1974, although she had begun working years earlier on the story of the Nova Scotia-born son of Sir William Dawson. Despite being physically disabled as a child from tuberculosis of the spine, Dawson became a foremost scientist and surveyor and head of the Geological Survey of Canada. In reviewing the book for The Globe and Mail, Anne Montagnes describe it as "a meticulously researched, carefully authenticated, earnest and friendly chronology."
In 1980, Barkhouse collaborated with Atwood on a children's book, Anna's Pet, illustrated by Ann Blades. "She was a doll" to work with, said Atwood. "She had a great sense of humour" and because she had been "an elementary school teacher for many years, she would tell me what vocabulary was or was not suitable."
Barkhouse also wrote the novel Pit Pony, the story of Willie, an 11-year-old boy in early 20th-century Nova Scotia who is forced to work as a trapper in a Cape Breton coal mine, and Gem, the Sable Island "pit" pony he befriends. The story won the Ann Connor Brimer Award for children's literature and was later turned into a Gemini-winning CBC-TV film, co-starring Ellen Page, and then a miniseries.
Near the end of her long and active life, Barkhouse allowed that her capacities were diminished, but her family disagreed, describing her as open and self-sufficient until the end.
"My mother and I were very close," said her son, Murray Barkhouse, who visited her every day. "She always said, 'Never be afraid to tell me family secrets. How can I help you out if you don't tell me things. I want to be involved.'"
Joyce Carman Killam was born on May 3, 1913, in Woodville, King's County, N.S., one of five children of Harold Killam, a country doctor, and his wife, Ora Louise Webster. She graduated from King's County Academy at 17 and attended the Provincial Normal College in Truro, earning her teacher's licence in 1932. While teaching in Liverpool, N.S., she met her future husband, Milton Joseph Barkhouse, a teller with the Royal Bank of Canada. They married in 1942 and eventually had two children, Murray and Janet.
The family moved around the Maritimes and to Quebec in the 1950s as Milton moved up the bank hierarchy to become manager of the Peel and Sherbrooke branch in Montreal. After he died in 1968, she returned to Nova Scotia, settling in Halifax and embarking on the writing career she had put aside for several decades.
Besides working on her own books, Barkhouse was active in a number of writers organizations. Atwood remembers being taken, at age 18, to a Canadian Authors' Association meeting in Montreal by her aunt in 1958. She has recounted the experience in "Great Aunts" in Moving Targets. "We felt like spies of a sort, infiltrators," Atwood writes, after admitting that she and her aunt were "both so desperate for contact with anything that smacked of the world of letters that we were willing to take our chances with the CAA."
An early member of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia, The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and the Canadian Society of Children's Authors, Illustrators and Performers (CANSCAIP), Barkhouse was named to the Order of Nova Scotia in 2007 and the Order of Canada in 2009.
Barkhouse, who was living on her own in a retirement facility in Bridgewater, N.S., died on Feb. 2 after suffering a heart attack. She was 98.
She is survived by her two children, five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and her extended family. A celebration of life is planned for the summer in Nova Scotia.