Several years ago, after long and serious introspection, I finally admitted to myself what my life problem has been; and is. I suffer from a terminal mental disease called writing. I panicked for a moment, and talked to numerous people in whom I had recognized similar symptoms; they laughed at my apprehensions. They told me there were no known practitioners who specialized in treating such cases, no medicines, and there certainly were no institutions, anywhere where one could go for a cure. Besides, I had been infected for so long—who knows when chromosomes and cells first run amuck, but in my case it was at least forty years—there was really no question about it, they told me. In fact, it had been clear to some of them for a long time: I would die of it. The deadly Writeritis. Where did it come from? I have no idea. I was a perfectly normal Canadian kid, last child of refugee immigrants who had found in Canada all they ever dreamed of in a country, and as a child I was taught all the sensible, practical things: to hold a good job and be a decent, contributing member of society—pay my fines and taxes, give donations to worthy causes, be polite, help those less privileged than I, behave decently in public—all that salt-of the-earth citizen stuff. So I went to school to become a medical doctor, but after the first year of university I didn’t want to do that. First class marks in science, second class in literature—and I changed my major and shifted to Arts and English. What was the matter with me? Was it a symptom that, even then, I did not recognize? My parents were the first not to understand what I was doing; I was the second. profile in New Trail NeWest Press Audio interview with General Manager Matt Bowes