The date was February 28, 1950. Seven-year-old Hugh Cook and his family had just completed an arduous journey from The Netherlands to Vancouver. Suddenly, Hugh realized he didn’t speak English and the people around him didn’t speak Dutch.

“It was as if everything I had experienced, everything I had known, everything I might have wanted to tell someone, had been taken from me,” he says. “I felt alien and alone.”

No one could have told him that he would not only learn to speak English, but spend his life helping others appreciate it.

Six months after settling in Burnaby, B.C., Hugh and his siblings were speaking passable English and reading books. Every Saturday, Hugh would “bike to the local public library, take out an armful of books, and return them a week later.”

But he credits his love for well-told stories to another source. Hugh’s Dutch Reformed parents had family devotions after supper, where Hugh’s father read stories from a children’s Bible. “On the one hand,” says Hugh, “these stories were historical-redemptive stories of the faith, but they were also what fairy tales are to children. A donkey speaks; an axe floats on water; an evil king visits a witch’s hovel in the night…”

In Grade 8, Hugh made the decision to become an English teacher. After high school, he went to Calvin College, a Christian Reformed liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he studied literature but didn’t feel qualified to take a creative writing course. However, he’d been writing poetry since high school, and was thrilled to have a poem published in Calvin College’s student fine arts publication.

In the year after graduation, he taught Grade 4, married Judy, whom he’d known since grade school, and had several poems published in Canadian literary journals. He enrolled in a master of arts program at Simon Fraser University and then taught high school English for three years, but, realizing he preferred to teach “where students wanted to learn,” he took a job teaching at Dordt College in Iowa. During this time, his poetry dried up, but after reading Flannery O’Connor, he began writing short stories, then enrolled in the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a master of fine arts degree.

In 1982, Hugh and his family moved to Ancaster, Ontario, so Hugh could take a position at Redeemer University College.

Hugh adapted to teaching during the school year and writing in the summer. His first story collection, Cracked Wheat and Other Stories, was published in 1985. A novel, The Homecoming Man, followed in 1989. In 1997, Hugh was given the Leslie K. Tarr Award for his contribution to Canadian Christian writing. Also in 1997, his second short story collection, Home in Alfalfa, was published. It won the 1998 God Uses Ink fiction award and the 1998 City of Hamilton Book Award.

Having taken early retirement from Redeemer this spring, Hugh says he hopes to complete his second novel soon.

Asked what drives him to write, Hugh quickly responds, “The conviction that literature is one of God’s good creational gifts and has inherent value. I dedicate myself to giving God my best.” He says he will often spend an entire morning getting a single paragraph “right.”

Hugh’s stories are about ordinary people who “struggle with what it means to be Christian in today’s world.” Most of his work focuses on the Dutch-Canadian immigrant community. “Nobody has written fiction about it, so I guess I’m elected,” he says.

While he believes there is a place for writing that simply entertains, Hugh seeks to do more. “If that’s all a person reads, I believe they’re missing out. Good literature challenges people’s beliefs. People keep coming back to it because they keep seeing things in it even after a long time.”

The little Dutch boy who felt isolated by his language has come a long way. But Hugh acknowledges that he still feels “a keen sense of regret that I do not know my first language better, as if it were a child I have had to give up for adoption.”

It is easy to be glib when we say that God works all things together for good to those who love him. Yet it is entirely possible that both the tenacity and the love for the English language that are at the very core of this man, may have been formed as that small boy took his first steps to communicate in his adopted country.

Visit Hugh Cook’s website at www.redeemer.on.ca/~hcook

N. J. Lindquist is the executive director of The Word Guild (www.thewordguild.com). Her mystery, Shaded Light, was released last fall.

Published in ChristianWeek June 10, 2005 Volume 19 Number 09