Bio/Writes Series
JOHN FARROW, aka TREVOR FERGUSON
Twelve notes (250 words max.) from a writer’s early history that have held him in good stead.
#3. Writing Near Death
A near death experience is intrinsically linked to my life as a writer. At sixteen, I was living in a railroad camp in northern Alberta. I’d been hired away from a job as a flunky in an extra gang kitchen to become the timekeeper on a gang near an outpost called Meander River. There, I worked about twenty minutes a day, tops.
Bored silly, I scribbled.
In my boundless spare time, Cat skinners and yard locomotive engineers taught me to run their machines so that they could take naps and meal breaks. Great fun, until a supervisor arrived and had a bird.
Days later, a boss over the two-way radio ordered me to check the contents of a boxcar. I reported back: “Nine kegs of nails.” I was then told to check my tally, which required a long hot walk, and having done that, to check again. After the third time, I was audibly muttering, not noticing the yard locomotive come up behind me. I turned. It was in my face. I was dead. A debate with myself ensued, which felt like minutes but lasted a millisecond. I agreed to try to save my life—hopeless—by grasping a brakeman’s bar. Whoosh! Suddenly, I was back among the living.
Quit that job. In a shack motel that night, I committed my life to writing. Having avoided death by a hair’s breadth, I could do no less with the bonus time allotted me, other than do what I believed I must.
This series runs at: www.facebook.com/trevor.ferguson1
# 1. The Infinitesimal Epic
Fifty or so years ago, as a teenager, I was working in northwestern British Columbia building railway bridges in remote wilderness areas and dwelling in railway bunk cars. Eventually, I’d have my own sleeping quarters, but for many years I shared a room with three to five other men. Privacy was minimal, a challenging environment for any writer. I had read that William Faulkner—no secret, a hero of mine—could transcribe a chapter on the back of a postage stamp, so miniscule his script. As a way to write so that my inquisitive cabin mates could not read the foray, I undertook to emulate him, scribbling in the tiniest penmanship imaginable. That gained a benefit—my work was virtually unreadable, and so eluded communal rebuke—but I also won another. In deploying an infinitesimal handwriting, my fledgling efforts nurtured an inner conviction. The methodology—not what I was writing but how—felt connected, reaching back to those who had gone before and ahead to what might yet be imagined. The tiny felt subversive, then, which in itself felt important, and the important was refashioned to feel mythic. Somehow, penning microscopic words emphasized the vastness of the large, and the large was perceived as intimate and, amazingly, possible, even imminent. In going teeny, my handwriting felt different than the norm—outside the humdrum—which helped me dare to be divergent and invite the epic in.
This series runs at: www.facebook.com/trevor.ferguson1
# 2. Tuning In: The Leprechaun on the Bedpost
It’s inevitable that writers endure the Charlie Brown experience. Lucy spots a football, Charlie charges, then Lucy yanks it away. Charlie winds up on his backside. Every novelist knows the feeling. Ms. Muse sits us at a desk, gung-ho, enthused, only to give us nothing to kick. I’m not speaking of writers’ block. I’m talking about being fired up only to be chagrined.
I learned early that I was not interested in “an idea.” I want to begin with my headspace as blank as possible. If I stick to an idea, I’m limiting myself to my precognition—in a sense, to the limits of my intelligence. I’ll have none of that. Give me a clear horizon; no mental clutter. Late one day, having struggled with Lucy’s vanishing football, I stumbled to my bed for a nap. I fell into a time when I was half-awake: aware of myself sleeping, yet dreaming. A leprechaun appeared on my bedpost. We had a lovely chat. Awakening, I knew I had the beginnings of a novel—even though a leprechaun would not appear in it. I had cleared my mental synapses to where they were infused with pure atmosphere, and into that distinctive mood a novel could form.
Incidentally, I know that that leprechaun did not exist. It’s not that I don’t believe in them, for what would that matter? The whole time, however, he was seated upon my bedpost. Since I don’t have a bedpost, he could not have been there, right?
This series runs at: www.facebook.com/trevor.ferguson1
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