John Schreiber

John Schreiber has worked at logging camps, in an iron ore mine, on a seine boat, and in a coast pulp mill. He has been a parole officer and travelled through Morocco and parts of Europe. Now retired, he was an elementary school counsellor for more than twenty–five years.

Schreiber spent his early formative years in the North Thompson Valley, north of Kamloops, a powerful experience which, he says, compelled him to explore the Chilcotin as an adult in the late 1960s. He became obsessed with the place, and has walked, driven and ridden through the Chilcotin region many, many times since. In Stranger Wycott's Place, Schreiber's goal is to fully describe the specific landscape of the Chilcotin from a number of different vantages — environmental, historic, cultural, personal, spiritual, and through the region's stories — all from the point of view of a walker. Schreiber's "quietism" is moored in the local and specific, as opposed to the sweeping and global.
Calling himself a "knowledgeable outsider," Schreiber is never more at home than when walking a Chilcotin landscape or, perhaps, relaxing with a fine glass of B.C.'s own Blue Mountain, having just climbed the wine's namesake.