There were always books, partial sets of encyclopedias with photo plates, old school books with Dick and Jane, new glossy covers from grocery stores every week, libraries to nose my way to another world.

From before I could read I was surrounded by venerated books (and all books were whether Holy Bibles antique school books or new Hardy Boys). I still remember that jolt of weight, the Christmas box that released the perfume of ink and glue and the shine of unmarred covers and spine.

There was their sensual appeal -- their hand-weight, their tease of heady-leaden inked ideas pressed into cotton sheets, musty marbled end papers, glossy full-page plates, deckled cut or gilded edges, indent of font into cover cloth -- all to whet my love of page, lift me into whirlwinds of words and dropped out to wider worlds.

In grade 7, I compiled my best poems to date in hand-stapled chapbook, in a very exclusive print run of 1. ;) Through the 80s and early 90s I sent out poems and had them published in local newspapers, school newspapers and in high school yearbooks (and rejected from other lofty A-list places).

In 1993, I made 2 copies of an 8-page chapbook entitled Poems for Lois with 10 light poems by me, plus Christina Rosetti's 1862 poem Uphill and GK Chesterton's 1900 poem, The Donkey.

In the early to mid-nineties I lurked around rec.arts.poems and trepidatively posted my poems online. I have had a website for a portfolio of my poems since 1995.

As far as writing, I remember doing verses for cards and gifts, as a child, sprawled out on the floor, composing, shaving pencil crayons, drawing and pasting collages. [Not that I don't still do that, so I am not sure when exactly that would date the memory from].

Early in childhood I haunted new and used book stores and bought boxes of books at estate auctions to supplement Mainstreet by Lewis, which I read and reread and loved how it nailed my life. It was in one of those grab-lot boxes that I discovered Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather, and The Best Loved Poems of James Whitcomb Riley, my first books of poetry, beyond anthologies. At junior high age, I consumed Barabbas by Corelli, and the rich dense florid text of pulp fiction of the 1800s that threw in German and Latin and French and Italian without explanation or notes. It told me that to be educated was to reference people of history and phrases from Latin.

Outside of novels, there always the promise of Plato and his dialogues that I ran marginalia on, not knowing, or caring who he was. I wish I remembered a bit of the conversation that passed. I reread that in high school as well along with Erich Fromm but I have since gotten rid of a lot of books. (Pity the mould that made Plato go. And Fromm with him.)

I consumed all I could on Mohandas Gandhi, remember going though microfilm at the National Library of newspapers moving ahead in time from one to the next until the shock of his death shocked me as though in real time. That was the week the Berlin Wall went down. I remember the moment I heard it on the news. From my uncle's attention and posture I knew it was big and got goosebumps.

There were always a random catch of books, always a strange mix of scarcity and surplus. I imagined I would run out of books. I had imagined that if I could get myself to university, that's where I could get a classical education context and finally know something.

When I got to university, halls were concrete (in a literally brutalist style). They were strangely unhallowed, the campus full of people intent on instrumental purposes and professors lamenting run-on sentences and sharpening their sardonic wit, not waxing eloquent on the keys to Iliad or the nature of truth and reality. It only occurs to me now that I suppose I could have been content as a duck if I had enrolled in Philosophy.

My daytime passion is teaching various levels of adult English as a Second Language -- ESL.  (It has  been going on longer than I'd believed -- since 1996.)  

I thrived in the intensity of true beginner-literacy classes -- no language background in spoken nor written and coming from a different writing system -- being an ear to the traumas of life, language learning and culture shock and seeing the huge personal successes of clients as they blossom into diverse masterful communication again. I have been enjoying working with High Beginner and Intermediate learners, their isolation changing to growing excitement and satisfaction and watch as they grow new networks of contacts here. I love seeing their confidence as the functional difference in what they can do and grasp, speed up and they reach for creative expression in their 2nd, 3rd or 7th language.

The classroom is a great learning environment of how thin surface differences are between all the groupings of people and how capable people are.  What has struck me is how social communication and language are such separate skill sets. (Some people no matter how many words they have, cannot communicate and others can make magic with so few, or only gesture and charisma.) It parallels the human rights issues of "disabilities", a person is so much more than can be described in one narrow confines of a context or skill set. Any given individual has reams of talents to offer and are offering constantly.

That journal I edited for a few years is a 28-36 page tri-annual publication of professional development summaries, research articles, service provider profiles, book reviews and upcoming events listing.

Beyond the copy editing, co-editing involves coordinating with the other editors, the executive body and committees, soliciting articles to fill the regular columns and niches of the paper -- lead story, news from the executive and other pertinent bodies in the profession, receiving submissions, editing submissions, titling and pulling out quotes, writing summaries, articles, introductions or editorials and sometimes being the one (alternating with my co-editor) creating ads, dropping off at and picking up from the printing centre, getting the mailing list and mailing out.