took me back to when I was 7 and having lunch with our elderly neighbor in her kitchen. Her cat Biddy was hanging around the kitchen and the neighbor wanted to let me play with the cat so she cut a piece of string and tied a crumpled piece of paper to one end and gave it to me to tease the cat.
A simple, but fun thing to do which spared my hands from the scratches of hands-on play?
Including 60 textbooks and teacher’s guides (over 1 million sold as of 2005), several chapbooks, over 100 magazine publications (U.S. and Canadian), many contest winners, several contest judgings, blog entries (2 blogs, 15 yrs. total), hundreds of readings and in-services, plus the completed, but unpublished projects including Inside E-Media, Hamlet: The Magazine, an anthology of short stories (gr. 9), and an anthology of modern drama.
RD: “Looking back, I was very lucky and I knew it.”
‘Word’ and poetry moments:
(definitely an influence)
(back of one of my chapbooks)
(starting up with Spiritus, performance poetry trio)
(first memorable publication: of an article on Canadian literature)
(the textbook career: 1980-2007, began with this title for general/non-academic courses; books were illustrated by Alligator Pie‘s Frank Newfeld and edited by Toronto friend Anthony Luengo who later also edited the Nelson Canadian Writer’s Handbook)
(even did writer’s handbooks beginning with this one)
(poetry readings continue to today; here at CBC Edmonton, Edmonton Centre)
(you have to read to write; lately, Virginia Woolf has been an influence)
(Cohen, Dylan , and The Beats were other influences)
(teaching sr. high English for 30 years inspired poems)
(the late Brian Kells, gr. 11 teacher, introduced me to Robert Frost’s poems; he also read the 1st poems I wrote in university)
(in an Edmonton cafe)
(poet at large, Victoria)
(wild reading with Spiritus around 1990 at ye olde Woodward’s Books, Southgate, Edmonton)
(wrote my 1st humorous pieces in gr. 9 (above, yearbook staff); later wrote for sr. high newspaper, The Huskian; but long before that, my bio story broke up my gr. 2 class at Bannatyne school, 1958 A.D.–made me more audience-conscious)
(with close writing partner Glen Kirkland in the early ’80s; my 1st books were with him and he showed me how to write good free-verse poetry; after 2000, I worked with the equally-talented, friend Jerry Wowk)
(my last chapbook, 2021)
Recent publications: a poem in the 2023 Stroll of Poets Anthology and poems for Prairie Journal magazine. And I still continue to publish creative works (poetry and prose) and non-fictional prose online on this blog.
Beginning at age 3, when I was left for long periods of time with our radio console and record player. From age 4 to my mid-20s, I spent a good chunk of time listening to top 40 radio, amassing collections of 45 rpms and 33 lps. I walked around everywhere with my 2 transistor radio playing the songs of the day from grade 4 to 11 till it finally gave out.
Moved by the ’60s hootenany era, I picked up and learned to play a guitar beginning in grade 10, performing in high school musicals and started forming and playing in groups in university and in my first years of teaching. Later, buying electric guitars, amps, a percussion machine, and a mike allowed for many public performances and dances over the years. Up to 2002, I played each of my 30 years of teaching for student and staff functions again in programs and groups of my own creation. I have played literally for thousands of people.
Beyond 2002 when I retired, I’ve explored the depths and breadths of jazz and classical music as a listener and have collections of each, including videos. These two genres are complex, more soulful genres.
Looking back, listening to and performing music accounts for much of my life–what I have happily done and truly enjoyed. My life has been much, much richer by music and I have seen music change many other people’s lives similarly, too.
Mostly deception these days, designed to separate consumers as much money as possible.
trolling, suing, and physically attacking strangers in public, I continue to support peace, reason, and diversity.
We know that nobody is perfect, but that is no excuse for dumping others to satisfy our egos, jealousy, and what Golding called “the Beast within”.
Screwball Central has major consciousness, thinking, and Big Picture problems. There is a movement afoot to deconstruct and tear down everything including the benefits that Western civilization has given us. To reduce everything to the lowest, dumbest common denominator which Vonnegut wrote about, presciently, in “Harrison Bergeron” and Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies.
There is also a strong desire to move back to the ‘master-race’ colonial era and eliminate all civil rights, particularly among women and non-whites. In short, a return to injustice, inequality, and public racism.
The Western moral compass is in great jeopardy and will be utterly and irrevocably smashed if Trump is irrationally re-elected, eluding justice and finishing the job of destroying the U.S., the West, global economy, and enabling the other dictators and crazies of the world from taking over.
The world, as we knew it, changed forever with Covid, but all we value and hold sacred and necessary for survival and success will come to an end if Trump gets in.
That he would control the nuclear button should terrify everyone on the planet yet again. He is the crazy madman of Edwin Brock’s “Five Ways to Kill a Man”.
are the many men spitting shamelessly in public, ignoring former no-spitting city ordinances. Like so many other courtesy signs fallen by the wayside.
I’d have to add, though, that professional athletes and media have vetted spitting on camera and the public takes its cues from its highly-overpaid professional athletes.
at my daughter’s place in Ellerslie.
Skye celebrating rebirth, renewal, hope, and spring.
that made Jeremy Irons–right–a star. (Here, with Anthony Andrews–left–as Sebastian in his best-ever role)
