When I was a young man....
When I was a young man....
And a sales pitch - please support us.
All right folks, this is a sales pitch. The sad fact is that writing isn’t really well paid in Canada, so sometimes we have to be a little less subtle. Yes, I’m shopping for paid subscribers. I’ll even promise to deliver some still-to-be-developed special content.
For those who don’t know, pretty much everything that I’ve written since about 2013 can be found at my writing web-site at https://appalbarry.com. I’ll be honest: whenever I start digging into past work I find things that I’ve totally forgotten. Please feel free to take an hour and poke around.
And of course you obviously know about this blog, which began as a journey to France, then became about life in Nova Scotia. This goes back to 2018, when the whole France move was still something to be developed and planned. Once again, I keep finding things that are long forgotten.
It’s possible that some of you actually know that my writing career goes back much further than the turn of the century. Some time in the 1980s I was a regular contributor to the BCAPA - the British Columbia Amateur Press Association. All information about BCAPA seems to have disappeared, but it was included in the listing in the Aardvark Nuptials zine at the time.
In those pre-Internet days, here’s how an APA was published:
You sit down at your typewriter or, if you’re really cool, printer equipped Commodore 64 or Apple computer and type out your Deep Thoughts.
Then you find all the errors and type it all out again. Maybe glue in some pictures.
You take your four or six pages of deathless prose to wherever you can get access to a photocopier, and make the requisite number of copies. Maybe twenty as I recall, maybe more. Bonus points if you can afford colored paper.
You deliver a stack of copies to the people running the APA by the deadline.
The people in charge (aka, the people with the really big stapler) collate all of these piles of paper, then staple each stack together.
Every contributor get a copy of the APA sent to them in an envelope, via Canada Post.
Think of it as a pre-digital Reddit. As an aside, before photocopiers became reasonably common all of this would have been done with a mimeograph machine. And yes, I can still smell the fluid.
Some time after that I actually published a very short-lived zine called Love Hz. Yes, that’s a radio reference, and I quite literally can’t recall what I wrote in it.
And, some time after that, just after the year 2000 I blogged as “Three Squirrels in a Pressure Cooker.” That documented a lot of my time in Kentucky, and afterwards. I actually HAVE the backup of some or all of that blog, and some day when I have too much time I may restore it to the web.
The Internet Archive did grab a lot of what I wrote there, and wow, was I opinionated! Actually, here’s another sample with better graphics.
Including this gem:
Somewhere in all of this I wrote far too many reports, far too many grant applications, far too many budgets, and some actually excellent training materials.
But the day when it clicked, and I realised that I could actually make a (sometimes small) living was when a brand new North Shore Vancouver newspaper publisher named Gagandeep Ghuman launched what is now the North Shore Daily Post. It’s remarkable that he took a chance, and offered to even pay me, and it’s even more remarkable that he’s still publishing today.
This wander down my personal memory lane is really just to help you understand that I’m in this for the long haul, and to encourage you to take the next step and become a paid subscriber.
Right now the two or three corporations that control nearly all of Canada’s newspapers are shedding publications and staff at an alarming rate. Already there are many places in Canada that are forced to rely on Facebook for local news, and who are left high and dry because Facebook refuses to allow anyone to post news from Canadian publications.
It’s dire, and it’s dangerous, and even if you don’t support this blog, please take the time to find another writer or publication that you can give some money to.
Thanks for your time, and support, and patience.
Barry Rueger