M.T. Kelly

        IT IS DIFFICULT to say when I decided to become a writer. My mother had great ambitions for her only child, with whom she had shared a room until he was 13, and who had to call the children's aid on his own to get some privacy. Her ambitions, however, were not literary. Certainly a turning came when I was at Glendon when I wrote articles for Pro Tem, the Glendon paper. My first published piece was an interview with boxer George Chuvalo. I went on to B. B. King, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs. I worked hard on the pieces, still recalling what I wrote about Phil Ochs: “He was a baggy panted poet singing about the Universe ablaze, that’s what mattered to me, not what cause his talent cried for.” 

        It was good to write those pieces about those people, to craft them, to have my name in print.

        I also wrote a novel in University, My Vegetable Love, whose title says it all. Part of it was published in literary magazines. I had left school. There were no creative writing classes in those days, but we made our own. The novel was the result of a sympathetic professor telling me to write one instead of a thesis for a forth year course. 

        And so I was a writer, and I have been all my life. I have had a number of jobs, but writing has been at the centre.

        When I was 19 I drove down with my first car to Ipswich, Massachusetts, with another literary friend, to "visit" John Updike. Unannounced and uninvited, he let us in and talked to us about his father. As we were leaving he asked us if we'd like Salinger's address.  

        There have been many other literary pilgrimages, all when I was younger. One summer I had a job leading a literary tour of Ireland, by bicycle. Another job, involving writing, was as city hall reporter for the Moose Jaw Times Herald. Out of that experience came my first novel, I Do Remember The Fall, which won the E.D. Smith literary prize for Best First Novel in Canada in 1977.