My name is Peter Mansell, and I’ve spent most of my life in front of a classroom.
Thirty-five years teaching drama in Waterloo — trying to convince teenagers that Shakespeare was worth their time, that stories mattered, that the right words at the right moment could actually change something. I believed it then. I still do. What I perhaps didn’t anticipate was how much of that time I was quietly accumulating material: the way people talk under pressure, the dynamics of a room, the moment when something clicks for a young person who didn’t think they had it in them. A drama teacher watches all of that, every day, for decades.
Outside the classroom, theatre was never far away either. I’ve been involved in community performance in the Waterloo Region for years — including time as president of KW Silver Stars — so storytelling in one form or another has been the constant thread running through most of my adult life. You could say the novel was always coming. It just took retirement to clear the runway.
The Winkleys: A Test of Magic is my first published novel, and writing it felt like a natural arrival point rather than a departure. The story is rooted in the history and landscape I know well — the Waterloo Region, with its layered, sometimes surprising past — but it’s also a fantasy, and unapologetically so. There’s magic here, and mystery, and young people discovering they’re capable of far more than anyone told them. Which, if I’m honest, is the same thing I was trying to teach for thirty-five years, just with considerably more creatures and considerably fewer hall passes.
The Winkleys is planned as a nine-book series. This first volume is both a beginning and an invitation — into a world I’ve been building for some time, and into a conversation I hope to keep having with readers for years to come.
This blog is where I’ll share the thinking behind the writing: the history I’ve drawn on, the characters who surprised me, the craft decisions that worked and the ones that didn’t. If you’re a reader, a fellow writer, or simply someone who believes that a good story is worth the time it takes to tell it right — I think you’ll find something here.
Welcome. I’m glad you came.