Official Review
Purchase Kindle edition
**************************************************************************************************************************************************************
1. How did you get your start in writing?
My education began at sixteen when I dropped out of school and hit the road. The most important lesson in my life happened at about nineteen when, while working in the cotton harvest in Texas, I happened across Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. How this book found me, I don’t know. I didn’t find it, that’s for sure. But it was in reading Justine that I became fascinated with the art of creating with words on a page an image that will take flight when lifted off the page. After Durrell came Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, John Steinbeck and a biggie, The Gospel According to St. John. To answer your question: I got hooked by the magic of putting a single, toneless word into a sequence with other single, toneless words to create a symphony of language.
2. What are the hallmarks of a great book?
I like bare-bones juxtaposed with figurative. Although I will write a run-on sentence half a page long, the simplicity of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is my goal.
3. Let's discuss your book Beyond the Headlights. Can you give us a brief synopsis?
Beyond the Headlights is a rags to riches Cinderella to Julliard story of a dyslexic seven-year-old Aiyana living in a trailer park in remote northern Ontario who, with no musical training, plays complex concertos on the church basement piano.
4. The book discusses dyslexia. Why was it important for you to cover this topic?
As an English teacher, I worked with dyslexic kids. That was my job. But the book is not so much about understanding the disability but about understanding the gift a disability can sometimes create, in this case, the “musical savant”. Research in “savants” in general, and in “musical savants” in particular, suggests a dormant capacity in each of us for exceptional abilities. Headlights goes one step beyond the concept of musical savant and ventures into Carl Jung’s theory of acausal parallelism: A seven-year-old girl who can’t read or write or tell time but can play every composition written by Chopin without ever having heard his music.
5. What was the most difficult part of the writing process?
Creating the story is as easy as watching a movie in that cranial theatre called my head. It’s the putting the story down on paper that is difficult. It is not unusual for me to spend one entire day on one single page which, when I read it the next day, I will delete.
6. Who did you write the book for? Who is your audience?
I had an uncle who built birdhouses. He built birdhouses because he enjoyed building birdhouses. When he was finished, he hung them in the tree. If a bird came to live in one of his birdhouses, so much the better. I write novels because I like writing novels. When I’m finished, I hang them out online. If someone reads one of my novels, so much the better.
7. What was your favorite scene in the book?
My favourite scene in Beyond the Headlights? In the last chapter when Aiyana sets aside her broom and dust pan and mop bucket and seats herself at the Steinway in Roy Thomson Hall.
8. What's on your agenda next? Is there another book in the works?
Beyond the Headlights is number three in the nine-novel Discards series. I’ve finished five. Number six will come out mid-summer, number seven in the fall and two more after that, probably in the following spring. Beyond that? Don’t know. Build birdhouses maybe.
I like to end with some fun questions.
9. If you could have a meal with any fictional character, who would you choose and why?
My own character, Father Clark, who has gone beyond the limits of his own headlights and has reached the other side. I would ask him, “How did you do it? Show me the way.”
10. What's your favorite way to relax?
Ha! You think I’m going to say curl up by the fire and read a good book. Nope. Going to the horse races.
