Writing has always come easy for me. I have an active imagination, and even though I see (and imagine) now through a pair of older eyes, there continues to be those movies that play out in my head that need to be put on paper. Writing has long been a refuge of sorts, a momentary escape to, quite often, relive events you aren’t quite ready to sweep under the rug just yet.
I wrote as a kid. My circle of friends didn’t even suspect; it was my little secret. There were times in my youth when I would feign sickness with my parents to stay home from school, then pumping out a one-hundred page, hand-written piece of fiction. The story was in my head and I HAD to get it out! I still have many of those writings, however there are many more that I have lost over time.
High school at Warren Central High School on the east side was a turbulent cycle of teenage angst and trying to discover who I was in the general scheme of life; and of course girls. I still wrote, just not as much. Yet, I did manage to pen one exposé based on a hulking, large Senior with a mane of out of control hair and eerily resembling the actor John Belushi. I titled it Tubu of the Jungle. It was a hit with my friends and he would glare at us in confusion in the hallway when we pased him and snickered. Had he ever discovered what I had wrote, I would have received a good solid pounding.
In the 1970s and 1980s I resumed writing with a vengeance, documenting a series of travel logs as I criss-crossed the country. I had moved from fiction to reality. This continued into my tenure in Portland, Ore., where I found a lifestyle so very different from that of Indiana. I took a creative writing course at the community college, returning briefly to fiction and producing a piece titled A Parakeet Saga. My teacher praised me before the class, saying “This is what I am talking about!” That was a good feeling! While in Oregon I ventured into film making. I still used my imagination, only in a different venue. I wrote elaborate scripts for my films, using my poor friends as actors.
After my divorce I used writing as a refuge to return back into some sense of normalcy. I also joined a paranormal group, giving me a new area to explore and write about. I wrote ghost themed articles five years for The Examiner and weekly regional highlights for AXIS. I needed more. With the initial encouragement from a courageous editor I have presently contributed a weekly column for The Southside Times for six plus years, along with the occasional community based article.
I don’t write only about the paranormal. I do have other interests. My first book, Scouting the Boundary, is me and my son’s last grand adventure with our Boy Scout troop as we canoed the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. The second, The Fog of Youth, is my high school memoir and the awakening of a teenage bonehead. The third, Roads well Traveled, is volume one of two of a compilation of Examiner and Southside Times columns. The travel logs, of so many years ago, will soon be a reality, also containing A Parakeet Saga.
I can’t imagine myself ever not writing about something!
