On Sunday morning, my bride and I got to talking about the pandemic. We were on the last day of a 10-day jaunt through Ontario, having spent time in the valley of the Grand (my family), the Haliburton Hills (mum-in-law’s home) and Stratford (William Shakespeare and his friends at the mighty Festival). I’d been talking, the day before, to two women of a certain vintage, one of whom had completed an M.F.A. in creative writing during COVID; the other had merely done her Ph.D. in Counselling Psychology. I asked my wife, “So what did *I* do during the pandemic?” She had been hard at work, sometimes harder than ever, in her work with the federal government. Besides the obvious — mass mortality and profound societal disruption — I was most vividly reminded that a) I couldn’t coach basketball, which was hard for a bit, but also that b) the shutdown was easier for me than for my employed and extraverted wife, and many others.
So surely I must have leaped on the golden chance to write like fury! (Well, there was a series of essays exploring some positive consequences we could see during the shutdown. Silver Linings Playbook was a film that wasn’t too old at that time, and I borrowed part of its title, as it had borrowed the idea from one of my mother’s favourite clichés.) But as it turned out, though I read a pile of fine books and rewatched Silver Linings Playbook, I hadn’t published on here as often as my memory briefly insisted, and I didn’t advance my book manuscript much, either. (Yes, that wonderful non-fiction memoir/essay on Men and Sport that the world longs for!)
But my old friend Karl was writing — as he reminded me during our second long conversation in the last month, this time in person, in Burlington. Let me tell you a bit about K.C. Mearns.
He’s been “one of us” for more than 50 years, but was raised in the American Southeast. He was a multisport athlete who became, after a move to Ontario, a Physical Education teacher and avid basketball coach in Hamilton, Ontario. Leaving teaching to go into business in a nearby small town, he ran (and boy, did he hustle!) an antiques business in my hometown of Caledonia for years. We shared the better part of a decade there: coaching together in my alma mater high school and in our local basketball club; being dads to similar-aged kids; AND, what was most odd in that little town, we birthed a novel together. It’s his story, featuring a character known as “Kenneth Michaels”, and he convinced a local English teacher to edit it. (Yup, it was me.)
As somebody who taught writing with wild enthusiasm, but engaged in it with self-doubt and inconsistency, I was fascinated by Karl’s dogged approach and his rich trove of coming-of-age-in-Canada-and-America stories. Before too long, just before the turn of this century, he had KM published and sold a few copies. Karl stopped coaching basketball, our kids grew up and away, and then my family moved to Ottawa. Our connection has been rather sporadic since.
But Karl hasn’t stopped. We re-connected in a real way a day after a milestone birthday for him on June 1; he’s a generation older than me, and has referred to himself as “a fossil” since the 1990s, but the same restless energy remains. He began painting during COVID, a sort of ‘Grandpa Moses’. He claims to have re-written KM a dozen or more times, and has added further adventures of a young Kenneth Michaels in a sequel, The Robert E. Lee Monument. There’s *another* novel, a basketball thriller with international intrigue, called Dyad, and a novella, Camp Harmony, that deals with a Japanese-American family interned during World War II. All four are available on Kobo.
It’s a strange thing. Our recent conversations have caught us up on family matters, and I got to spend some quality time as well with his lovely wife, Betty — but the central and urgent theme has been writing. After having helped nurse KM into existence, I haven’t been a great friend to his writing. I’ve read parts of Dyad, but I had been only dimly aware of the other two. I have been snobbish about self-publishing, but it has to be admitted: the LitWit Score is Mearns 4, Howden 0.
So I have some work to do, in several areas. The first is this: at Karl’s insistence, I re-read a homely little memoir/story about living through the pandemic in Burlington, Ontario. It is touching and thoughtful, and I suddenly realized Hey, this would make for a good Guest Post on YoursTruly.com! M.P. Freeman, as some of you may recall, is another downhome buddy whose writing has made an appearance here and there in the past.
So, keep your eyes peeled, friends of the website, for a guest post from my friend Karl Mearns, the AUTHOR.