What motivates me
15/02/24 20:20
The one question that any interviewer asks any writer is why they write. I'm a Canadian. I love being a Canadian. We are some of the happiest and most content people on the planet despite the crazy long winters, rabid hoards of mosquitoes in the summers, and always, always living under the shadow of the elephant next door - the United States.
As a Canadian, I find that my view of our place in the history of the world can feel less complicated compared to the stories of other countries. That doesn't mean Canada is innocent of anything egregious; like many colonialist countries, we have some awful history with some very bad actors. However, we didn't have a civil war, our history as a country is relatively short and peaceful, and the aboriginal peoples who lived here long before settler people showed up were mostly nomadic and didn't leave behind ancient structures like the Mayans or Egyptians. The one thing that Canadians and pre-Canadians have in common, though, is storytelling. Long winter nights and long treks in search of food tend to foster this kind of relationship to the land and to each other. From Newfoundland to British Columbia to Yukon, humans of all stripes and backgrounds gather around fires, under the stars, and in homes to tell each other stories. Based on the number of well-known musicians, singers, writers, and comedians Canada has given to the world, we seem to do it well.
I could write deep, thoughtful, pondering tomes of Canadian introspection about all the many things we've gotten wrong as a country and a people, but I've never felt that was my job as a writer. I do that as a political cartoonist. Don't get me wrong, I love exploring deep subjects; theology, science, and history all fascinate me, and I enjoy deep dives into these and more. However, writing, for me, is a way to escape the often serious reality we live in. Political and ideological polarization, climate change and climate disasters, residential schools, the impact of unchecked social media on the fabric of society, wars caused by stupid people (predominantly men, sadly), famines, and a host of other headline-grabbing events are enough to make one wish to jump off the planet at times.
So, I write to escape, to offer a brief glimpse of a world where the good guy wins, and the bad guy is given a chance for redemption. I create worlds where loving is foremost, and what a person is and does is not determined by gender, sexual orientation, or the colour of their skin but by a sense of decency and respect for others and the planet we share.
It can seem like wishful thinking or ignoring the reality we live in, but humans have, all throughout history, been storytellers, and I am merely attempting to carry on that tradition.
I like stories that resolve, that leave the reader with a slight hope, a small smile, and a tiny wish that what they just read might one day be our reality.
That's not such a bad thing to hope for.
As a Canadian, I find that my view of our place in the history of the world can feel less complicated compared to the stories of other countries. That doesn't mean Canada is innocent of anything egregious; like many colonialist countries, we have some awful history with some very bad actors. However, we didn't have a civil war, our history as a country is relatively short and peaceful, and the aboriginal peoples who lived here long before settler people showed up were mostly nomadic and didn't leave behind ancient structures like the Mayans or Egyptians. The one thing that Canadians and pre-Canadians have in common, though, is storytelling. Long winter nights and long treks in search of food tend to foster this kind of relationship to the land and to each other. From Newfoundland to British Columbia to Yukon, humans of all stripes and backgrounds gather around fires, under the stars, and in homes to tell each other stories. Based on the number of well-known musicians, singers, writers, and comedians Canada has given to the world, we seem to do it well.
I could write deep, thoughtful, pondering tomes of Canadian introspection about all the many things we've gotten wrong as a country and a people, but I've never felt that was my job as a writer. I do that as a political cartoonist. Don't get me wrong, I love exploring deep subjects; theology, science, and history all fascinate me, and I enjoy deep dives into these and more. However, writing, for me, is a way to escape the often serious reality we live in. Political and ideological polarization, climate change and climate disasters, residential schools, the impact of unchecked social media on the fabric of society, wars caused by stupid people (predominantly men, sadly), famines, and a host of other headline-grabbing events are enough to make one wish to jump off the planet at times.
So, I write to escape, to offer a brief glimpse of a world where the good guy wins, and the bad guy is given a chance for redemption. I create worlds where loving is foremost, and what a person is and does is not determined by gender, sexual orientation, or the colour of their skin but by a sense of decency and respect for others and the planet we share.
It can seem like wishful thinking or ignoring the reality we live in, but humans have, all throughout history, been storytellers, and I am merely attempting to carry on that tradition.
I like stories that resolve, that leave the reader with a slight hope, a small smile, and a tiny wish that what they just read might one day be our reality.
That's not such a bad thing to hope for.
Enniskillen
15/02/24 19:45
The Key to Enniskillen evolved, as many of my stories do, from a dream.
In the dream, I had inherited a house from my grandfather on Turin Street in Kingston, Ontario. Yes, it was that specific. I have never lived in Kingston, and I have not been able to find such a street there, so my brain totally made the location up. In the dream, I was sharing my house with two friends. One day, we discovered that the locked closet door on the third floor could be opened with a skeleton key I'd found and that it opened to random destinations around the world, mostly overseas. They were completely random; we could not plan where they would open. We could walk through the doors, and then they would reopen 24 hours later in the same spot so we could return home. Some of those spots were in people's kitchens and dining rooms (much to their surprise), grocery stores, parks and dozens of other random places.
My friends and I started a business called Right There Now Inc. and began charging fellow students $500 to access these random sites as a way to have a quick break from higher learning. We were growing our business when agents from Canadian Pacific Air broke down our door and seized the closet. CPA is a defunct Canadian airline. They complained that we were hurting the airline business with our cheap travel option. In reality, CPA didn't have such agents, but it was quite exciting in the dream. I woke up shortly after and jotted the story down. I mulled it over for a few months and then began writing a somewhat more believable plot. My friend Josephine Holmes, who was pursuing a career in editing, offered to take what I was writing and mark it up with red ink as practice. Several months later, I finished a manuscript that was about 160,000 words. Next, I talked with an agent who suggested losing 60,000 words. I took her advice (I say that so simply, but it was agonizing) and then hired a local editor who had worked for a large Canadian magazine as a fiction editor, and she, too, lent her red pencil to the book.
As I hadn't yet travelled outside of North America and didn't quite feel qualified to write about places I hadn't been, I parked the book in a binder and left it untouched until the spring of 2023.
I have travelled overseas multiple times since writing the first draft and experienced the diversity of culture, history and climate that exists everywhere. After the super positive experience of publishing Medusa Gone through Raspberry Press, I felt it was time to pull Enniskillen off the shelf and breathe new life into it. It was a fun, extensive rewrite that I hope offers a few hours of escapism.
In the dream, I had inherited a house from my grandfather on Turin Street in Kingston, Ontario. Yes, it was that specific. I have never lived in Kingston, and I have not been able to find such a street there, so my brain totally made the location up. In the dream, I was sharing my house with two friends. One day, we discovered that the locked closet door on the third floor could be opened with a skeleton key I'd found and that it opened to random destinations around the world, mostly overseas. They were completely random; we could not plan where they would open. We could walk through the doors, and then they would reopen 24 hours later in the same spot so we could return home. Some of those spots were in people's kitchens and dining rooms (much to their surprise), grocery stores, parks and dozens of other random places.
My friends and I started a business called Right There Now Inc. and began charging fellow students $500 to access these random sites as a way to have a quick break from higher learning. We were growing our business when agents from Canadian Pacific Air broke down our door and seized the closet. CPA is a defunct Canadian airline. They complained that we were hurting the airline business with our cheap travel option. In reality, CPA didn't have such agents, but it was quite exciting in the dream. I woke up shortly after and jotted the story down. I mulled it over for a few months and then began writing a somewhat more believable plot. My friend Josephine Holmes, who was pursuing a career in editing, offered to take what I was writing and mark it up with red ink as practice. Several months later, I finished a manuscript that was about 160,000 words. Next, I talked with an agent who suggested losing 60,000 words. I took her advice (I say that so simply, but it was agonizing) and then hired a local editor who had worked for a large Canadian magazine as a fiction editor, and she, too, lent her red pencil to the book.
As I hadn't yet travelled outside of North America and didn't quite feel qualified to write about places I hadn't been, I parked the book in a binder and left it untouched until the spring of 2023.
I have travelled overseas multiple times since writing the first draft and experienced the diversity of culture, history and climate that exists everywhere. After the super positive experience of publishing Medusa Gone through Raspberry Press, I felt it was time to pull Enniskillen off the shelf and breathe new life into it. It was a fun, extensive rewrite that I hope offers a few hours of escapism.
