Moving us to Canada was the greatest gift I have ever received, made all the more generous for the price my parents would pay over the decades ahead. All they knew lay behind them. All I would know lay ahead.
August 1958: I was an eight year old English school boy and I had landed in Montreal with my family aboard the SS Homeric. The four day voyage had been the greatest adventure of my young life. How was I to know it was just the beginning.
It’s 1921: A young ten year old Japanese girl wanders the beach at Deep Bay, on BC’s Vancouver Island. She tries to imagine a ten year old girl just like her doing the same thing a hundred years from now.
It’s 2021: A young ten year old girl wanders the beach on Deep Bay, on BC’s Vancouver Island. She wonders if a ten year old girl just like her had walked these beaches a hundred years ago.
Writing for profit is a fool’s game. I don’t, I write for myself. Some of my writing is profound, some is important, but most of it is neither of those two things. I am at my best as an observational humourist, filtering the mundane through the ‘amusing’ lens and writing.
David Sedaris is a great American observational humourist and he has unknowingly guided me as I spelunked my way through many a dark, confusing writing tunnel. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration. He says that human beings are very funny, hilarious at times. The knack he says is to get better at seeing it. He is right, if I have grown as a writer it is because I am better now at ‘seeing’ us as we are, simple and complex, shallow and profound, tragic and hilarious. We are endlessly fascinating, a never ending source of writing inspiration.
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