It’s already been a hell of a ride…
Born as an only child into an impoverished existence, I suppose there were several ways my life could have turned out, few of them pretty. By the time I left school at 16 I had lived in seventeen different places, been homeless three times…
Don’t ask me where my love of writing came from (certainly not the rest of my family), but it has always been there. When I went back to college at eighteen and then off to University, in English literature and creative writing I found my happy place. People ask whether or not you would go back and do it all again; I would, like a shot.
And - with some caveats - I’d make different choices. Wouldn’t we all?!
Fed-up with being poor, I gave up my love for literature to earn some money. Yes, it meant that subsequently I was always comfortable enough, but on reflection the price paid was too high: nearly forty years in an industry for which I now care little. Indeed, not just the industry but the whole money- and profit-driven commerciality of the workaday world.
That’s one decision I’d change. Because my writing suffered. For thirty years I wrote little of any ‘worth’.
Yet having said that, my 'professional life’ did give me a lot in return. I have to say that. I’ve travelled all over the world, spent periods living in Switzerland and Singapore. And now? A nice house and enough money in the bank to live.
And time to write.
For the last ten years or so I have been trying to make up for those lost years; to claw back all those things that are impossible to salvage: the novels I never wrote, the poems that never saw the light of day. My being prolific is driven by that, the desire to get as much of ‘me’ down on paper - and my world view I suppose - while I can.
Is it any wonder that I’m fascinated in how people relate to their histories, the decisions they make, the relationships they have. Our past informs our present and steers our future - whether we like it or not.
Call it an exorcism if you like, but all that is what drives me and my writing now. And the desire to share, to hold up a mirror - and in doing so perhaps to move or inspire just a little…
