I am in the happy process of becoming a first-book author -- an author, finally, at age 71 (I'll be 72 when the book comes out) after some 50 years as a mostly failed writer. The book is a memoir, called Leaving the Farm, and will be published by Oolichan Books, a small Canadian house, in March 2007.
I was a junior in a Minnesota high school when, after reading a biography of Jack London, I decided that being a writer must be the most exciting, most satisfying thing a guy could do in this world. Never mind that London, once the most popular and highest-paid writer in America, died, diseased and disappointed, at 40 -- probably by his own hand. His tragic end hardly registered with me when I was 17. What did was London's determination and discipline, his ultimate success as a writer.
I started writing seriously (that is, submitting to magazines) after joining the Navy at age 20 and gave myself the four years of my enlistment to achieve at least a little of London's success. During those years, in my off-duty hours as a Navy journalist, I wrote some 50 stories and actually published seven of them -- admittedly in obscure magazines, although one "sold," for $35, to Adam, an early Playboy imitator, and another, published in a small literary quarterly, later won a $300 award for fiction from the still-extant, I think, Longview Foundation.
The Longview Foundation's letter and check reached me the month after my release from the Navy, and when I'd cashed their check and it didn't bounce, I thought I was finally on the verge of becoming a writer. Naive is hardly the word for it.
That was in January 1959. I was already in college -- the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism on the G.I. Bill -- and immediately after graduation, in 1961, I went to work as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Then full-time employment, courtship and marriage, homesteading here in B.C., childrearing -- all intruded, overwhelmed, as the years went by and I began to think of myself as a failed writer. Of course, I lacked the discipline, the absolute dedication, the unwavering belief in oneself, and, yes, the selfish drive, in the face of life's temptations, its appeals, its obligations, to sit before a typewriter (eventually a computer) every day, without fail (except Sunday, perhaps, to pay attention to one's wife and family), if only to stare at the empty page, the empty screen, for a couple of hours. At times I tried getting up at five every morning, to write for two hours before work; tried writing at night after supper. But I didn't stick to either regimen. Too many diversions, too many chores -- too many excuses. And yet I dreamed, at first, of eventually freeing myself from the frustrating nine-to-five treadmill through my writing. I got over that after I married and realized I would have to buckle down now and make a living for myself and my family.
Still, I never stopped writing -- never stopped trying. I'd dropped out as a working journalist after only three years, but I kept my hand in as an occasional freelance. I wrote some pieces for the Chicago-based Bowlers Journal, my employer for a year after leaving the Tribune, and later, in Canada, became a regular, freelance book reviewer for the Calgary Herald, as well as a movie reviewer for the online Nelson Observer. But I published no fiction after moving to Canada until 1997, when Event, a literary quarterly out of Vancouver, accepted a story set in Mexico called "Gringos," and even paid me for it, a nice $350. I've published no fiction since, though I'm still writing it.
Since my retirement in 1998 from Selkirk C0llege -- I worked in student services on the Nelson campus; before that I was the assistant registrar of Notre Dame University of Nelson for the last five years of its existence -- I've been able to write full time (mornings only, you understand; there continues to be both inside and outside chores to attend to: my wife and I garden, and in the fall we must gather firewood to keep us warm in the winter). But there were other times, in my younger years, when I was between jobs and enjoyed intervals as a full-time writer.
In 1963-64 I spent six months in Europe, mostly in London, a wonderfully romantic time for me during which I wrote very little but courted the girl (yes, girl: she was 17 at the time) I'd met on the ship going over and who became my wife a year later; we two were introduced to Marxist politics that winter in London, became "fellow travelers," and we've been Left-leaning ever since, easy enough to do in these ultra-conservative times.
Then, while living in Detroit, after working as a high school janitor and later as a mail carrier, and following a brief return to journalism (a four-month stint as a copy editor for the Detroit Free Press that ended when I was fired for being too slow at poring over reporters' often slapdash stories and writing snappy headlines for them; it was like correcting student papers for eight hours every night, not my "cup of tea," as the managing editor told me; I was immensely relieved to be let go), I was allowed to stay home and write that winter of 1967-68 while my wife supported us by working at Sears. I turned to the commercial market, namely the raunchy men's magazines, and found I could write publishable stories for them -- found I could write about what I knew, farm boys and girls, so long as I stuck in a couple of graphic sex scenes. I soon tired of that genre, however, despite that an agency specializing in commercial fiction invited me to join its stable.
Then my wife and I moved to my native Minnesota, where I worked for the next two years on my family's golf course (built by my father on what remained of our family farm). It was a seasonal job -- I was laid off from November to March -- so I had my winters to write. After our second season on the course, the winter of 1969-70, my wife and I went to Mexico -- spent four months as the only gringos in a village outside the city of Oaxaca, where I wrote every day, imagining myself a latter-day D. H. Lawrence and my wife a latter-day Frieda in that exotic setting. Produced a couple of unpublished stories and an unfinished novel.
After that we moved to Canada, where eventually I had my 15 minutes of fame when I won first prize in the personal essay division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's annual literary competition for 1990 for a piece called "Leaving the Farm," now the first chapter of my book-length memoir. (I got the call to say I'd won in my division from Robert Weaver on Christmas Eve that year.) The prize included $3,000 and a professional reading of the essay over national CBC radio early in 1991, and as I say made me something of a celebrity for a while. It led to a Canada Council grant that enabled me to take a nine-month leave of absence from my job at Selkirk College to do research and begin expanding my original essay into a book. It also led to teaching writing, part time, at the Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson, which, like copy editing for a daily newspaper, turned out to be not my cup of tea, either. I felt like such a phony as a writing teacher, standing before all those wannabes who thought I might have something to tell them, when all I could say was, "Read. Read and write. Write and read." Sure, I could show them a few tricks, a few shortcuts. But I'm a self-taught writer, after all, with no gift for teaching others. All I could impart to my students was that they, too, might teach themselves.
Meanwhile, I'd made little progress on my book. Instead I kept going over and over what I'd written during my leave of absence, striving for some shape, some focus, not sure what to put in, what to cut. That's the difficulty when writing any kind of book, I suppose, and particularly when writing a memoir, where you have a lifetime of material and must somehow extract a portion of it, give it theme and structure, know what you can, must, leave out.
It wasn't until after my retirement that I managed to finish a first draft; then a second and a third; then a fourth and a fifth (Oolichan accepted my 13th draft, following which I wrote a 14th). Once I had a "finished" draft, I began to send out queries with an outline and samples of the writing, followed by, on request, the complete manuscript. I was lucky. Not counting Douglas & McIntyre, who after asking to see it turned down my very rough, unfinished first draft, my book was rejected by only four other publishers, over an eight-year period during which I kept revising, before Oolichan accepted it (I've heard of writers whose first book was rejected 15 or 20 times before finding a home) -- accepted it after I'd begun to despair of ever publishing the damn thing unless I did it myself.
That I haven't had to resort to self-publishing seems like a miracle to me. In fact, during all these years I've more or less "played" at writing, "pretending" to be a writer in order to keep at it -- and so to have a book accepted after all these years, about to be published, is nothing less than an impossible dream come true.
Now, maybe because of my age, I seem to be accepting my good fortune almost matter of factly, as only my due, in fact. I never really doubted myself, or my modest talent, through all my years of rejection, and never quite gave up on the idea that I'd eventually succeed as a writer if only I kept trying. (The critics might question my success, once my book is out; as for ultimately making a living as a writer, it's far too late for that, just as it's far too late to quit.)
Anyway, I've written a book in my old age, a book started in my middle age, and, my God, it's going to be published! I may never write another book, let alone publish it, in what's left of my life; but I'll have this one to pass on to my survivors.
I was a junior in a Minnesota high school when, after reading a biography of Jack London, I decided that being a writer must be the most exciting, most satisfying thing a guy could do in this world. Never mind that London, once the most popular and highest-paid writer in America, died, diseased and disappointed, at 40 -- probably by his own hand. His tragic end hardly registered with me when I was 17. What did was London's determination and discipline, his ultimate success as a writer.
I started writing seriously (that is, submitting to magazines) after joining the Navy at age 20 and gave myself the four years of my enlistment to achieve at least a little of London's success. During those years, in my off-duty hours as a Navy journalist, I wrote some 50 stories and actually published seven of them -- admittedly in obscure magazines, although one "sold," for $35, to Adam, an early Playboy imitator, and another, published in a small literary quarterly, later won a $300 award for fiction from the still-extant, I think, Longview Foundation.
The Longview Foundation's letter and check reached me the month after my release from the Navy, and when I'd cashed their check and it didn't bounce, I thought I was finally on the verge of becoming a writer. Naive is hardly the word for it.
That was in January 1959. I was already in college -- the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism on the G.I. Bill -- and immediately after graduation, in 1961, I went to work as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Then full-time employment, courtship and marriage, homesteading here in B.C., childrearing -- all intruded, overwhelmed, as the years went by and I began to think of myself as a failed writer. Of course, I lacked the discipline, the absolute dedication, the unwavering belief in oneself, and, yes, the selfish drive, in the face of life's temptations, its appeals, its obligations, to sit before a typewriter (eventually a computer) every day, without fail (except Sunday, perhaps, to pay attention to one's wife and family), if only to stare at the empty page, the empty screen, for a couple of hours. At times I tried getting up at five every morning, to write for two hours before work; tried writing at night after supper. But I didn't stick to either regimen. Too many diversions, too many chores -- too many excuses. And yet I dreamed, at first, of eventually freeing myself from the frustrating nine-to-five treadmill through my writing. I got over that after I married and realized I would have to buckle down now and make a living for myself and my family.
Still, I never stopped writing -- never stopped trying. I'd dropped out as a working journalist after only three years, but I kept my hand in as an occasional freelance. I wrote some pieces for the Chicago-based Bowlers Journal, my employer for a year after leaving the Tribune, and later, in Canada, became a regular, freelance book reviewer for the Calgary Herald, as well as a movie reviewer for the online Nelson Observer. But I published no fiction after moving to Canada until 1997, when Event, a literary quarterly out of Vancouver, accepted a story set in Mexico called "Gringos," and even paid me for it, a nice $350. I've published no fiction since, though I'm still writing it.
Since my retirement in 1998 from Selkirk C0llege -- I worked in student services on the Nelson campus; before that I was the assistant registrar of Notre Dame University of Nelson for the last five years of its existence -- I've been able to write full time (mornings only, you understand; there continues to be both inside and outside chores to attend to: my wife and I garden, and in the fall we must gather firewood to keep us warm in the winter). But there were other times, in my younger years, when I was between jobs and enjoyed intervals as a full-time writer.
In 1963-64 I spent six months in Europe, mostly in London, a wonderfully romantic time for me during which I wrote very little but courted the girl (yes, girl: she was 17 at the time) I'd met on the ship going over and who became my wife a year later; we two were introduced to Marxist politics that winter in London, became "fellow travelers," and we've been Left-leaning ever since, easy enough to do in these ultra-conservative times.
Then, while living in Detroit, after working as a high school janitor and later as a mail carrier, and following a brief return to journalism (a four-month stint as a copy editor for the Detroit Free Press that ended when I was fired for being too slow at poring over reporters' often slapdash stories and writing snappy headlines for them; it was like correcting student papers for eight hours every night, not my "cup of tea," as the managing editor told me; I was immensely relieved to be let go), I was allowed to stay home and write that winter of 1967-68 while my wife supported us by working at Sears. I turned to the commercial market, namely the raunchy men's magazines, and found I could write publishable stories for them -- found I could write about what I knew, farm boys and girls, so long as I stuck in a couple of graphic sex scenes. I soon tired of that genre, however, despite that an agency specializing in commercial fiction invited me to join its stable.
Then my wife and I moved to my native Minnesota, where I worked for the next two years on my family's golf course (built by my father on what remained of our family farm). It was a seasonal job -- I was laid off from November to March -- so I had my winters to write. After our second season on the course, the winter of 1969-70, my wife and I went to Mexico -- spent four months as the only gringos in a village outside the city of Oaxaca, where I wrote every day, imagining myself a latter-day D. H. Lawrence and my wife a latter-day Frieda in that exotic setting. Produced a couple of unpublished stories and an unfinished novel.
After that we moved to Canada, where eventually I had my 15 minutes of fame when I won first prize in the personal essay division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's annual literary competition for 1990 for a piece called "Leaving the Farm," now the first chapter of my book-length memoir. (I got the call to say I'd won in my division from Robert Weaver on Christmas Eve that year.) The prize included $3,000 and a professional reading of the essay over national CBC radio early in 1991, and as I say made me something of a celebrity for a while. It led to a Canada Council grant that enabled me to take a nine-month leave of absence from my job at Selkirk College to do research and begin expanding my original essay into a book. It also led to teaching writing, part time, at the Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson, which, like copy editing for a daily newspaper, turned out to be not my cup of tea, either. I felt like such a phony as a writing teacher, standing before all those wannabes who thought I might have something to tell them, when all I could say was, "Read. Read and write. Write and read." Sure, I could show them a few tricks, a few shortcuts. But I'm a self-taught writer, after all, with no gift for teaching others. All I could impart to my students was that they, too, might teach themselves.
Meanwhile, I'd made little progress on my book. Instead I kept going over and over what I'd written during my leave of absence, striving for some shape, some focus, not sure what to put in, what to cut. That's the difficulty when writing any kind of book, I suppose, and particularly when writing a memoir, where you have a lifetime of material and must somehow extract a portion of it, give it theme and structure, know what you can, must, leave out.
It wasn't until after my retirement that I managed to finish a first draft; then a second and a third; then a fourth and a fifth (Oolichan accepted my 13th draft, following which I wrote a 14th). Once I had a "finished" draft, I began to send out queries with an outline and samples of the writing, followed by, on request, the complete manuscript. I was lucky. Not counting Douglas & McIntyre, who after asking to see it turned down my very rough, unfinished first draft, my book was rejected by only four other publishers, over an eight-year period during which I kept revising, before Oolichan accepted it (I've heard of writers whose first book was rejected 15 or 20 times before finding a home) -- accepted it after I'd begun to despair of ever publishing the damn thing unless I did it myself.
That I haven't had to resort to self-publishing seems like a miracle to me. In fact, during all these years I've more or less "played" at writing, "pretending" to be a writer in order to keep at it -- and so to have a book accepted after all these years, about to be published, is nothing less than an impossible dream come true.
Now, maybe because of my age, I seem to be accepting my good fortune almost matter of factly, as only my due, in fact. I never really doubted myself, or my modest talent, through all my years of rejection, and never quite gave up on the idea that I'd eventually succeed as a writer if only I kept trying. (The critics might question my success, once my book is out; as for ultimately making a living as a writer, it's far too late for that, just as it's far too late to quit.)
Anyway, I've written a book in my old age, a book started in my middle age, and, my God, it's going to be published! I may never write another book, let alone publish it, in what's left of my life; but I'll have this one to pass on to my survivors.
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