I was giving a talk about my books the other day and I mentioned these quotes; the two at the top are on my drawing table - they keep me going. 

I had reached a point in my life where it was difficult to navigate - it was literally a juggling act! Sometimes we retreat into the past when we feel overwhelmed... Edgar Allen Poe's "Descent Into The Maelstrom" was one of McLuhan's favorite passages. which he used to describe modern living. He said, "Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological transition."  On the micro-level my life was dizzying but on the macro-level the world was changing without much awareness of the change. In my generation the technology of the book was being overshadowed by the new media of TV, and an awful lot of technological change has occurred  since then. Good or bad, we all have to navigate through these changes, no matter how big or small. Both Poe and McLuhan thought pattern recognition was key to navigating through the maelstrom.

I'm sorry to say, I won't be posting pages for a little while because the rest for this book are still in various stages of completion, but I'll be working diligently on them over the holidays. It's actually been in a real juggling act in the last few months - Ken and I are teaching a new certificate program in Comics & Graphic Novels at Camosun College here in Victoria (the only one of its kind in mainstream post-secondary schools in Canada!) that just launched in september, and we're having an amazing time! Hope you'll check it out at: www.camosun.ca/comics

Anyway, I'll still be posting things, and thoughts on things at least one a week - so please stay toooned!! ;^)

My childhood was not the norm, so we made do with what we had and learned to be creative at an early age. We used an old Volkswagon hood as a toboggan in the winter, and the shell sign from a gas station as a raft in the summer. Growing up in a junkyard was always interesting - it was constently changing and filling with things that were either obsolete or just old and discarded. I guess you could say my dad was one of the early recyclers, but the term hadn't even been coined back then!     

My dad and Ken's dad were two very different people, but they got along just fine. Mine ran his own scrap metal business and had lived in the same house for more than fifty years, the one I grew up in! Ken's dad was a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force and  they lived in just about every province in Canada, as well as in Germany, where Ken was born. 

My dad didn't go far in school, and was uneducated in the traditional sense, but he was a self-taught man, who possessed earthy wisdom. He loved talking to people about any subject - had a knack for storytelling, and he'd have you hanging off his every word. My Dad never wrote much but loved to read, especially about different cultures of the world; in a way, he travelled to distant countries via the books he read.