His short story Red Rock and After received the Canadian Magazine Fiction Gold Medal and was reprinted in The Journey Anthology (1990).
He also edited three anthologies of short fiction, published the collection of short fiction Meteor Storm in 2010, and wrote the memoirs Rollercoaster:A Cancer Journey (2002), about living with cancer, and On the Fly (2012), about sport fandom and his lifelong involvement with hockey.
In 2010 Red Rock was cited in T. F. Rigelhof's Hooked on Canadian Books as "one of my first five choices" to be placed on a Canada Reads list.
[5] Tefs lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba,[6] with his wife, Kristen Wittman, a commercial lawyer and poet.
Tefs was born the middle of three children in St. Boniface, Manitoba (then an independent community east of the old Winnipeg) to Armin and Stella Tefs, and lived in Northwestern Ontario before moving to Steinbach, Manitoba in the 1960s where he graduated high school at the Steinbach Collegiate Institute and met future poet Patrick Friesen.
In 1994 he was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer, which he contended with the aid of biological modification drugs and radio-isotope therapies.