The All Canadian Story Book is a collection of deeply human, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking short stories, each a snapshot of a person, a place, or a moment that feels achingly real. What was the inspiration for this collection of stories?

I just deleted my initial response to the question of inspiration, and replaced it with this, only because my book is a collection that goes back to 1983, providing fifteen unique inspirations to consider. I’m just not the guy to tackle such a task.

But I do have moments in my earlier life that, in retrospect, nudged me down the path to this milestone of my writing life. When I was fifteen, I boarded with my mother for a year while I decompressed from one of my dark and rowdy periods. We lived in Toronto and the only condition for the warm meals and the roof over my head was that I spend my time writing while she was at work. Mum was a research librarian. She was a poet, modelling herself after her grandfather Archibald Lampman, a revered Canadian poet. I lived for a year at her kitchen table, forcing myself to find something to put down on the piles of loose-leaf paper strewn at my fingertips. “Show, don’t tell,” and “just feel the words” and other such wisdoms were prompts that I at first ignored – it was more relaxing to stare out the window at the crows on the wires – but, quite suddenly, I got swept up in the task, and dug right into verse-bits and story-starts and character highlights. I started borrowing ‘writing’ books – I even returned some of them.

Two years later my ancient smoking and drinking Aunt Mary died. I was on my own again, and for some reason the family asked me to write her obituary. I loved Aunt Mary’s love for hockey, the Leafs, and her passion for feeding the birds in the depths of the Ontario winters. I wrote about those things, and I was told that some people were moved.

I kept on scratching away through some turbulent years; in spurts and spasms, (I even did some ghost-writing for Monsanto Chemicals. I’d go into a tiny, weed free office in downtown Toronto, and they would hand me a tape of some farmer in the American Midwest, in a small town diner, chatting about his farm and his tough life and his pigs and casually dropping the company’s products into the conversation) until I began to see that although ten cents a word was not my idea of a get rich quick scheme, it represented a meaning and a direction in my life. So now I can look back and see the sun rise.

When I see a weed now, I just pour some vinegar on it. Smells like a basket of fries. Dig in. Yummy.

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?

Good posture and nice teeth are nice human conditions, but I love fighting; not so much the punchem-out variety – more the spirited, resilient, unbreakable type. The fight is, of course, in the character. It can be gritty, or it can be gentle, but it makes things happen and it can be disguised heavily in the garb of other characteristics. It’s not a direction so much as an engine, perhaps waiting to be fueled and fired up. I dislike Angst. I will never write a story about a martyr/ (well, I guess if they de-martyred themselves? But then would they turn Angsty because they were no longer martyrs. I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.)

I think any human conditions and characteristics need to be pushed a little, or a lot, and need to be pumped up and pressurized before they are brought to life in the mind’s eye of a reader. A hermit living in a cave, for instance, who is never discovered in the darkness of his hole, raves at the Bats hanging above him, and perhaps scratches without purpose on the rock walls that entomb him. Why read on? He’s a goner. But the moment he tries to escape the cave, he, or she, becomes the dynamic subject of a real story. Yay, read on!

With this question, you have opened a vein in me that wants to gush out thoughts and ideas and opinions, undisciplined conjecture in all directions, and all at once. But I know, deep down, that I don’t have the skills or insights powerful enough to answer it properly. I will always rely on the goodness and humour of the humans that I most admire, in everyone’s writing and in my day-to-day life.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Growing up, but not just growing up – growing into something worthwhile…recognising the steps, the supports for you, hiding always in plain sight. Always remembering the past, not trying to repeat it – but using it like a tool, car jack, to change your worn down tires when needed. Smiling at everything and everyone you can, and laughing sometimes even if it makes you you cry. Getting on the boat, leaving the harbour -taking to the sea – accepting the adventure. Recognising the beauty around us, in the quiet moments, in the deep waters at our bows and swirling in our wakes.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

……….First off, I have to collect 37,000 words that I like the sound of – from my English Dictionary, or free-range from the wilds – and then I need to figure out how to arrange them somehow. Large, small, subtle, grumpy, silly and pithy, long or stubby – pretentious and blunt. All of them; they will all have a place, all their own, to live in – forever side by side – cheek to cheek, cozied up between the covers. Right now, I’ve snared 582 of the words I need. I am on my way, but the course is yet foggy and unknown. Here I am, pitching the next book to myself. It had better be interesting. It had better not be naval gazing or self indulgent. It’s got to be fun to read and create lots of surprises and mysteries. It has to have an abundance of Arletta’s wonderful illustrations in it. And…it had better have a woman in it who adopts her own son. That’s good, because that part’s done.

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