Coming Ashore

August 25, 2014
Readers who met Cathy McClure Gildiner in her memoirs Too Close to the Falls and After the Falls will be thrilled to have another opportunity to follow her life in the third and final installment. She’s a gifted writer with a stunning memory for detail. Here, Gildiner describes her experiences in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time when she studied at Oxford University, taught high school in Cleveland, and relocated to Canada to study literature at the University of Toronto. Tenacious, outspoken, and intelligent, Gildiner was a magnet for adventure. While in the U.K., she hiked down Welsh mountains in the darkness and dined among the country’s wealthiest. As a teacher in Cleveland, she worked to inspire a love of poetry in kids whom the rest of society appeared to have given up on. In Canada, she inadvertently found herself sharing living quarters first with Quebec separatists and later with one of the country’s biggest drug dealers. Gildiner depicts herself as a hard-headed, risk-taking young woman who spoke her mind and fully embraced life. For readers, following that life is an irresistible roller-coaster ride full of humor, wise insights, and poignant reflections.