Iain Lawrence | Biography

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in Sault Ste. Marie, in northern Ontario. My parents had come over Britain only a few months before, and were still freezing through their first Canadian winter. My older brother liked to tease me about where I was born: the name fitted nicely into that childish rhyme, "Happy birthday to you. You were born in the Sault."

We moved to Toronto before I was two, then west to Calgary when I finished Grade One. There were other moves, back to Toronto and all the way west to the coast, so that by the time I left high school I had lived in eleven different houses and gone to nine different schools. It was hard at the time, as I was very shy and quite friendless, but now I think I was lucky to have grown up like that.

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From as long ago as I can remember, my father read bedtime stories to my brother and me. He used funny voices for the characters, and made the stories seem utterly real. I remember being enchanted with Stuart Little, and being terrified by old Blind Pew and his rogueish lot from Treasure Island. It gave me a love of books, and of reading.

My Grade Three teacher told my parents that I would grow up to be a writer. I don't remember if I hoped for myself then, but I always enjoyed creative-writing classes more than any other. I wrote three or four little books for my younger brother, making his beloved stuffed duck an adventurous character. None of them survived our frequent moves, which is maybe just as well - I can still let myself believe that they were quite good.

I dropped out of high school in my last year, went north to work in a logging camp, then returned to finish Grade Thirteen. By the end of the last term, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

Over the next couple of years I churned out short stories that nobody liked, a book that nobody published, and historical articles that I did sell, to a newspaper supplement. I lived at home, working at odd jobs that never lasted terribly long: fishing for salmon off the west coast; picking daffodils at Easter; inflating balloons and setting up skittles at a carnival; clearing streams in the Rockies; fighting forest fires on Vancouver Island; taking down the bigtop tent of a travelling circus. When I realized that I wasn't getting anywhere with my writing, I studied journalism in Vancouver then went to work in the small-town papers of northern B.C.

I stuck with that for ten years, and for the most part I enjoyed it immensely. I learned a lot about writing: how to do it quickly without fretting over every word; how deadlines could be inspiring; how to tell a story in as few words as possible. I worked my way up to become the editor of the daily paper in Prince Rupert.

I loved living there, on the ocean. I started sailing, then bought my own boat. The urge to write fiction returned, and I joined a writers' group, though day-to-day journalism sapped creativity so much that all I could manage were tiny little stories of two to three pages.

At the writers' group I met Kristin Miller. She had written a book about quilting, and was trying to get it published. She lived across the harbor, in a tiny community with no electricity or telephones. Her cabin was an hour or two away in my little boat, depending on the winds and the tides, but it seemed like a different world. I moved in with her, with a cat and a dog, and commuted to work all through a long, hard winter.

I fancied her lifestyle much more than mine. I quit my job to work at the same fishfarm that she did, tending to the fish, building floats and digging ditches. Sailing became a passion, and we took off on long trips, for hundreds of miles along the coast. I felt freed to write again, and started with a novel, and another and another. One of the first was about a boy who was shipwrecked, only to be captured by wreckers.

The fishfarm went bankrupt. We moved from tiny Salt Lakes to a house on a hill, to work as caretakers for the radio transmitter there. It was a small house, ringed by meadows surrounded by forest. It faced toward the south, toward the winter storms that shrieked through the wires of the transmitter tower. It was a mile down the hill to our nearest neighbor, along a footpath that became a river in the rain. There were no roads and no cars. I could spend the entire day writing, and did, churning out my novels that never got published. But I did sell stories about sailing, and then two books that were accounts of our voyages.

Kristin had found an agent, who had sold her book, The Careless Quilter. She introduced me to her: Jane Jordan Browne, in Chicago. Jane took on my novels, including the one about the boy and the wreckers. Over several years she sent it around to publishers who never quite liked it enough to buy it. Then she nudged me away from my adult novels and toward stories for younger readers. At her encouragement, I took what I'd learned and rewrote The Wreckers from beginning to end. Within a month, Jane sold it to Random House.

The next books came quickly. It seemed that Jane had found my proper place, and I was thrilled with where it was. I couldn't imagine a better way to spend the days than telling myself stories - the same sort of stories that I had enjoyed as a child. So it seemed that my life had come around in a circle. I gave my finished manuscripts to Kristin, and we sat in the living room late at night, and she read me the stories so I could see how they sounded.

Ten years had passed since I had left my job at the newspaper. Then the broadcasting company decided that it didn't need caretakers any more, and we moved down from our lonely hill, and another six hundred miles to the south.

We have a home now in the Gulf Islands. We have a dog and a cat, a sailboat at the dock. We don't seem to go sailing as much as we used to; suddenly, we're too busy for that. Kristin has a quilting studio, and I have my writing. And I wouldn't change places with anyone.

The Skipper

This is very sad news for me. My little dog, Skipper, died some time ago. She was a great friend to me, and I miss her very much. I don’t think I was ever so attached to a dog as I was to the Skipper. Every day, I think about her.

But we now have a new dog. Her name is Misty. She was rescued from an animal shelter in Alberta, just an hour before she was to be put to sleep. The lady who saved her, a friend of my sister’s, chauffeured Misty out to the coast, more than six hundred miles by car and ferry.

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This is Misty, peering over the side of a beached boat. She’s covered in sand, after a game of stick chasing.

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Coming out of the water after a sunset swim, Misty looks a bit like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

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Misty’s always dashing somewhere or other. Here she goes along a ridge, silhouetted in the twilight.

Thin and shaggy, all silver and gray, Misty has the strong instincts of a herding dog. She spends a great deal of time tracking the poor cat all through the house. She’s a joy to have around, but no great shakes as a sailor. Though she’s slowly improving, I doubt if she’ll ever match the Skipper as a boat dog. I think she gets seasick. My friend Kristin says she just has a harder time keeping her balance, because she’s quite a bit taller. Maybe, for dogs, sea legs are short legs.