in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
May 07, 2025
BY JOHN BUTLER — Dan Needles, the playwright who gave us the immensely popular Wingfield Farm plays, knows farm life. He writes about it. He lives it every day, not far from the Beaver Valley where he will talk about his latest book, Finding Larkspur: A Return to Village Life at 2:00 pm on Wednesday May 14 at the Kimberley Community Hall, 235309 Grey Road 13, in the village of Kimberley (doors open at 1:30). This event is free and open to the public (no registration required.) It’s the latest in a popular lecture series sponsored as a public service by the Grey Highlands PROBUS Club in cooperation with the Kimberley Community Association and the Grey Highlands Public Library.
Says Dan, Finding Larkspur is “written both for the old-timers who wonder what to make of this sudden influx of city people and the newcomers who seek to understand their strange new surroundings.” Whether you are a newcomer or an old-timer, a farmer or a farmer-wannabe or just an observer of country life around us, you will recognize your community in what Dan says and writes — but he has leached out the humdrum and left the humour (and occasionally the tragedy.)
Dan’s attachment to country life goes way back, to a childhood spent half of each year in Toronto, and half on his mother’s ancestral farm near Rosemont in Mono Township, where he tended to a herd of Jersey cows and worked on neighbouring farms.
Most city kids who spend warmer weather on farms do so within the school’s summer holidays. Not so with Dan — at the onset of warm weather each year, Dan’s mother removed him from his city school and enrolled him in country school. “You can’t do that,” said school officials. But Dan laughs as he recalls that “can’t do” wasn’t part of his mother’s anti-authoritarian vocabulary. He credits her with giving him a critical eye, albeit a loving one when it comes to farm life. And he credits both his parents for teaching him to be creative in expressing things he saw with his critical loving eye: his mother Dorothy-Jane Needles was a broadcaster and writer, and his father George William Needles was a Stratford Festival stage actor.
Dan spent his early adult years exploring and working in British Columbia, Australia and Europe until university beckoned. After graduation with a degree in economics in 1974, he settled in as editor of the weekly Free Press & Economist newspaper in Shelburne, where he created a column called the Letter from Wingfield Farm, about an imaginary Toronto-bred stockbroker, Walt Wingfield, who took up farming and endured the fate and foibles that go with it, in concert with his cast of new neighbours.
Dan’s career then veered into the worlds of provincial politics and business. From 1976 to 1981 he was speechwriter and legislative assistant to Ontario cabinet minister George McCague, and in 1981 he became director of public affairs for Canada Life.
Bur Walt Wingfield, every bit as stubborn as his creator’s mother, never left Dan’s side. In 1985 Dan wrote Letters from Wingfield Farm, the first of seven highly successful one-man plays performed by Rod Beattie that chronicled Walt Wingfield’s country life as it entwines with the lives of his fellow country and small-town folk.
In 1988, Dan and his wife Heath (who hails originally from Proton Township) made their home at 100-acre Larkspur Farm in Simcoe County near Nottawa where he developed his career as a freelancer, playwright and author. Dan and Heath still live there, tending sheep on six acres and renting out the rest of their acreage.
Larkspur Farm gave Dan a new cast of both imaginary and real characters to explore. His book With Axe and Flask, The History of Persephone Township from Pre-Cambrian Times to the Present, won for Dan the 2003 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. This book traces with deadpan humour the imaginary history of Persephone Township, patterned on real-life Nottawa, Collingwood and environs. And his most recent book, Finding Larkspur: A Return to Village Life, is the closest to an actual memoir that he has written so far — but as full of pretension-puncturing humour as any of his previous work.
Dan’s work leads to out-loud laughs among his readers and audiences, but it is based on a deep understanding (shaped by his meticulous historical research) of a number of tensions that underlie life today, as in the past:
But most of all, Dan’s works point to a paradox that each one of us lives through every day — our communities nurture us and strangle us at the same time.
Let Dan and his characters tell you more about this paradox, and about the humour we need to survive it, when he introduces you to Larkspur on May 14 at 2:00 pm at the Kimberley Community Hall.
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