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My first job cured me forever of earning a living through normal means. I sold magazines door-to-door while in high school. It was awful. In university, I worked all sorts of factory jobs in Chicago and Cleveland over the summers, hard grueling work, mostly dealing with nuts and bolts (my father was in management in the ‘fastener’ industry). The worst of these was when I worked on an assembly line spray painting Tampax dispensers. I lasted a week.

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When I came back from the year (1967-8) at university in Europe (Rome), I got involved in politics a little, opposed the Vietnam war, and so on. I only took part in one march (in Chicago) and left halfway through. For me, the psyche of the mob was abhorrent. After graduation, I taught grade school in Cleveland for one year, with grade six as my homeroom. I taught social studies (geography, history), some art and music. I loved the kids but didn't get along too well with the tough Polish nuns who ran the school. Then I got drafted and came to Canada.

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My mother (a great reader) was born and raised in Toronto (Irish, Scottish, French) and my father was born and raised in Cleveland (Russian, German). When they got married my mother moved to the States but our family was much closer to our Canadian relatives. We spent most summer vacations in Toronto and at relatives' cottages on or around Georgian Bay in Ontario. I was deeply attracted to the Canadian landscape and was drawn back to it years later.

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On first coming to Canada, I spent six months living in a large house in downtown Toronto (filled with draft resisters and art students); then I came to Ottawa, obtained landed immigrant status and started looking for land. (I became a Canadian citizen in 1976.) It was ‘back to the land’ time and I had always dreamt of living in the country. While cruising back roads in western Quebec I saw a hand-scrawled sign on a fence post: "Terrain a vendre" and ended up buying 200 acres with three log cabins and a barn for $5500 (1970) with my brother and a friend. The Habitant farmer we bought from made an X on the contract, the lawyer helping him to hold the pen.

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I spent nine years without electricity or running water, leading a life of luxurious simplicity and healthful hard work, cutting my own firewood by hand, hauling water from a spring in buckets, growing my own vegetables, reading by coal oil lamp. I spent a lot of time alone, reading and writing as I pleased. It was my apprenticeship as a writer. The cabin, constructed of squared cedar logs, was two storeys high and about 120 years old. I had a wood cookstove for winter heat and sometimes didn't even have a car, so I'd walk 2-3 miles to the village for groceries. This was near Wolf Lake, Quebec, about one hour north of Ottawa. I saw bears close up, heard wolves, got intimate with winter, shoveled snow a lot, kept the fire going, went crazy with the bugs, grew my hair almost down to my ass, started meditating after reading Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Sunryu Suzuki, wrote poetry and short stories, had my first publication of three poems in 1974 (Fiddlehead), then burned a two foot pile of notebooks in 1976 after returning from studying for six weeks at Naropa Institute (with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and others) in Boulder, Colorado. I burned them because they seemed too important to me, too much self-indulgent claptrap. Besides, the really good stuff has always come back.

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I lived frugally during my time in the country. One year in the early seventies I lived on $600 (believe it or not!) For five years I was a vegetarian, ate a lot of bean stew and made my own bread, grinding wheat berries by hand for flour. (This is becoming a bloody novel.) Some friends moved in, built their own houses (there are now six houses there) and I married in 1977. Moved to Ottawa and got separated in 79. At the farm, I worked at all sorts of jobs: cutting roadside brush, cutting pulp, making maple syrup (made my own taps out of staghorn sumac -- god, I was a maniac), carpentry, woodworking, stained glass work (we did the craft fairs for a few years), sold a few poems.

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When I moved to Ottawa in 1980, I started writing for local magazines, wrote art reviews for the Ottawa Citizen (even though I was slightly colourblind!), taught creative writing and spontaneous storytelling to grades 1-13, started writing a novel, did more carpentry, received a few writing grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and so on. Also I became more interested in Tibetan Buddhism and became a student of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation master who I had met in Boulder in ‘76. Although I have traveled to India and to Europe many times (especially Italy, Spain, France), my true interest is, to borrow a phrase from Guy Davenport, the ‘geography of the imagination’.

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I still live in Ottawa with my wife, Faith, and my son, Elliot. My hobbies are watching baseball on TV, drinking good French wines (sometimes I do both at the same time!), and writing books (the last also happens to be my business). My favourite colour is golden yellow. Amen.