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Thursday, August 31, 2017

Introduction

For about fourteen months now I've been writing a blog called Only A Large Hill, and it has come time to launch what was intended to be a sort of companion blog.Only A Large Hill is a memoir about growing up in Atlantic Canada during the nineteen sixties and seventies, mostly in and around the city of Moncton. It also takes frequent visits into the part of New Brunswick where my maternal grandparents lived, not far from the border of Maine, and into the neighboring province of Nova Scotia, where my father hailed from. So far I've completed just over one hundred and twenty entries,and have almost gotten myself through the schoolhouse door for the first time.Presently,I've had about twenty five thousand views,and have a small group of core readers, most of whom live in or originally lived in Moncton. Primarily that blog was intended for my family, but I am happy to have all of my other readers along too. It's been a labor of love,and ,I believe,an important undertaking.

Aside from just laying out the sequence of events and memories,Only A Large Hill was intended as a sort of backstage pass into my writers room, so that readers get to see not just the memories that are the meat and potatoes of any memoir, but also some of the various notes that I right to myself about the process of writing.What,hopefully you will get to see is something like you would find if you walked into the room where I write and gazed upon my desk. I've come to realize that not all of the entries would make it into a memoir published in book form.The quality I find is quite inconsistent.But that really is the whole point.Because this is as much a blog about the process of writing as it is about substance.

Only A Large Hill begins with some note concerning why I write, about identity as an Atlantic Canadian,then lays out some background as to who my ancestors were,as a way of fixing context.Then my story begins in 1961.It has not yet been decided where this particular memoir will conclude, but it will not likely take us up to life today.That is a story for another memoir, or,most likely more than one.

Waking Up In Winter was planned as a sort of reflection on coming of age and finding myself in mid life here in the new century. As such,it will be covering a much shorter period of time-something like the last ten to twelve years. Like Only A Large Hill, the form and substance are not really set in stone.It is in every sense a work in progress, and that is as I've intended.

In context,much of this new blog takes place in Western Canada, in the province of Alberta, as different from my home province as New York City is from Mongolia. But I don't believe it's possible to escape the identity that most Atlantic Canadians carry close to themselves.Certainly,for myself,later years have, if anything made me more intensely aware of that unique identity.It is a very strong theme, if not the dominant one in life so far in this century. It seems that having attained a certain age, and having endured events common to all of humanity, I've realized home is an enduring concept, no matter where I go to sleep at night, no matter where on earth I call my home.

With all of this in mind, I would like to invite you along for the ride, to follow whatever direction this blog might ultimately take, to get to know me and my people a bit better, to understand how it is I view my own life, where I've been, where I am, and maybe even where I will be in the not too distant future. Welcome readers.