Author Anthony Winkler signs a copy of his latest book for Judy MacMillan (centre) who designed the cover and Denise Stokes, recently. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer

Anthony Winkler's first published novel, 1983's The Painted Canoe (LMH Publishing) begins with a description of its central character.

Winkler writes: "His name was Zachariah Pelsie. He was unspeakably ugly. When he was a child he contracted a disease that left him horribly disfigured. His jawbone was swollen and elongated, giving his jawbone the truculent underbite of a barracuda ... Yet he was a man of unyielding pride, who insisted that men call him his rightful name given by his mother. He would not endure being demeaned by some frivolous nickname, such as fishermen are fond of calling one another."

The 'about-the-author' section says that Winkler wrote the book when he was teaching at Moneague Teachers' College from 1975-1976. 'Zachariah Pelsie', though, goes back to his childhood.

Winkler explains that a fisherman, 'Baba', kept his canoe and fishing gear in a cave on the property his family moved to in Montego Bay, St James, before Walter Fletcher Beach was created. When Baba came to ask permission to continue keeping the tools of his trade there, Winkler's father did not even know the cave was there.

dangerous

Baba showed them and Winkler tells The Sunday Gleaner "he and I got to talking. I pleaded with him, asked him to take me out to sea with him and he said it was too dangerous".

It was. One day Baba went out to sea and did not come back. Winkler says "his canoe was found floating upside down on the reef".

"When I sat down to write The Painted Canoe I did not intend to write about him. But he came on the page. This is the power of literature. The man would not take me fishing with him, but I took him fishing with me," Winkler said.

And in The Painted Canoe Winkler takes Zachariah Pelsie back to shore, after going missing at sea and having a terrific battle with the elements, the fisherman repeatedly telling his canoe "dem can't harm you".

Even when he miraculously came back to shore, Pelsie had to battle debilitating illness, finally going back out to sea when he was very weak.

Winkler writes: "For everyone ashore who saw the canoe slip through the breakwater thought that Zachariah had gone to sea to die. But they were wrong. He had gone out onto the deep not to die, but to pray".