Imagine!: Colorful Yarns and Memories of Growing Up on a Farm

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The dust cover invites the reader to “sit back, pour yourself a cup of
tea and spend a while with Phillip DeVenney as he spins yarns and shares
warm memories of growing up on a farm in Hants County, Nova Scotia,
during the depression.” The yarns are indeed spun, and the memories
are unquestionably warm—but many of these tales are not for a
tea-drinking crowd. One anecdote is about how a group of farmers tricked
a man into eating a roasted moose vagina, and two others are about
farmers giving bulls an enema. In another story, DeVenney gives a recipe
for sauerkraut that requires a live frog. The tales have an authentic
tone of old-fashioned rural highjinks, but let the reader be warned that
these are the kind of stories you are more likely to hear in a tractor
shed than in a farm kitchen.