PLEASE JOIN ME

On a new and terrifying journey into the digital world...

Hi there and welcome to my new Substack page.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a Canadian author who writes stories about every-day urban dwellers dealing with societal inequalities that control their lower-to-middle-class lives. I have referred to my work as “Chump Lit” in response to Chick Lit and Lad Lit, not because I believe my protagonists are chumps as defined by Oxford Dictionary but, rather, because they are part of a vast, suppressed demographic, some broken, most toiling, in the lower strata of the social hierarchy.

In my work, I try to express with humor and poignancy the feelings of regular people living haplessly, e.g., dealing with layoffs, unrealized dreams, or even just everyday concerns. And despite the rampant polarization that these concerns create today, we are all still people with common experiences. My hope is that I provide a thoughtful and rational voice for all.

I was born in Ottawa in 1955 and moved to Toronto in 1975. Other than the few years I spent working as a public servant, my means of earning income throughout my adult life has been as a laborer in the form of paving stone installations¹, renovations, etc. When my son was born in 1991, I stayed home for several years to be a fulltime father and homemaker then returned to paving stone installations once he was older.

Now, I have to admit: The writing bug didn’t bite me in my youth (which, as we all know, is a tender place). I first began writing in the early 80s. But I loved to read at an early age. Of course, arts and entertainment are a reflection of the generation you grow up in and by my mid-teen years, with home computers still the lofty concept of a few far thinkers and the television industry not quite ready to unveil their twenty-five channel universe (complete with remote control capabilities, so long as you didn’t mind a length of cable running from the keyboard-sized converter on your coffee table to the ‘wonder-box’ sitting atop your television), I was obliged to find late-night solace in printed form. My interests back then meandered from pulpy tomes like Science Fiction Omnibus, to loftier works like The Lord of The Rings and especially P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves-and-Bertie series.

During those long, hot Ottawa summer nights in particular (and for those questioning the seeming incongruity of the words ‘hot’ and ‘Ottawa’ in tandem, we’re talking Syracuse’s August temperatures here, not Vladivostok’s), I’d often find myself shooting the shit with friends on someone’s porch until around one a.m. Then, drifting home through the leafy streets of my old neighborhood, The Glebe, while sporting some kind of buzz from the night’s proceedings, I’d fall into bed and read till sunrise before passing out with a book splayed open on my chest.

At some pivotal point in those impressionable times, while I was saturated with Finknottles and Glossops and wandered the house speaking like B. Wooster himself, my then brother-in-law, Derek Johnson, said to me, “Y’know, Dave, with the way you talk, you should be a writer.”

I suppose a successful writer would say that all the components of his or her life coalesced at that exact moment (even if they had to bullshit to satisfy a reverent audience). Nothing so dramatic happened to me. I did puff up with pride for a moment, though, thinking, Wow, writing!  That’d be cool. And as the months and years passed and Derek’s words kept coming back to me, I managed to bundle them into a romantic package that integrated both of those carefree, teen-aged activities of mine, talking with pals late into the night then reading in bed till unconscious, with the craft of writing itself.  In other words, I conditioned myself to think that writing was pleasurable without ever having placed one foot inside its maddening, endless maze. Ha!

Presently, I live in Kitchener, Ontario, and now that I’m retired, I’m able to commit more time to writing. I’ve also been attending Wilfred Laurier University on and off, and I’m in the process of finishing the final year of an Honours BA in English to finally put some letters behind my name. Within this new environment, and with my status as a more-or-less full-time writer, I have joined Substack in the hope of finding a receptive audience for my expected increased productivity.

Subscribers will (hopefully) enjoy my fiction: unpaid subscribers will have access to older stories from my first collection and excerpts from my previously published novel; paid subscribers will gain access to regularly posted new fiction. I will also do my best to engage with you, dear readers, through AMAs and blogs on a regular basis.

So, again, welcome to my page and enjoy! Or let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you.

1. Illustration by Toronto poet and artist, Jill Jorgenson.