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I was born with very little hair and very little feet and hands. They
all grew together and I still have them, together with all my organs
except tonsils. I did well in school, and stopped going. I made no
progress in my writing, and kept at it. There's a lesson here, but I
don't know for whom. I can't believe how long I have been married; it
seems like only a few minutes. And there are the children. We have
four of them - actually, they have us and we all know it.
I have been writing novels for adults and children since 1996. No,
that's not true. I wrote for years before that, but no one cared.
Since 1996 I've published books for adults and children. One of them
won an award. A few came close. A couple didn't do well at all. My
most recent offerings are Mystical Rose (adults) and Princess Bun Bun
(kids - as if you couldn't tell.).
In 1996 I published my first novel, Crosstown (Toronto: The Riverbank
Press), which was short-listed for the City of Toronto Book Award.
Humorous short pieces about my life as an at-home dad with four small
children used to appear regularly in The Globe and Mail and Chatelaine,
and can still be found fairly regularly on the back page of Today's
Parent. I reworked some of this material into a full-length chunk of
not-quite-non-fiction, which was published by HarperCollins in 1997 as
Still Life With Children.
And I write children's fiction. Two middle-school novels, The Nose from
Jupiter and The Way To Schenectady (both Toronto: Tundra Books, 1998),
did well enough to require sequels. (A Nose For Adventure was published
a year and a bit ago, and Of Mice and Nutcrackers - A Peeler Christmas,
last fall). Both were shortlisted for a variety of prizes in Canada and
the United States - The Nose From Jupiter won a Mr. Christie Book Award.
My first picture book, Bun Bun's Birthday (Toronto: Tundra Books, 2001)
appeared last spring, and the sequel (Princess Bun Bun) followed it this
year. The third "Norbert" novel, Noses Are Red, has just come out.
Mystical Rose (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), my second adult novel, was
selected as a Globe and Mail notable book of the year. I am currently
at work on my third.
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Richard Scrimger
Photo by Alaro Goveia
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Learn more about Richard Scrimger: read a
profile by
Dave Jenkinson.
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You have to stay on your toes when talking to Richard
Scrimger. Jokes zing past faster than bullets, and they
usually hit their mark. There's no doubt Richard is a funny
man, but he also understands that humor can soften some of
the harder things in life.
For example, when he worked as a
waiter in Toronto, Richard saw many people living on the
streets. So, Richard included a homeless man, Marty, in his
book The Way to Schenectady. Although
The Way to Schenectady is very funny, Richard doesn't shy
away from the sadness and loneliness of Marty's life on the
street.
The Nose from Jupiter, Richard's first novel for
kids, has a serious side too. Alan is a shy
thirteen-year-old. His parents are divorced and he misses
his father, but has a hard time telling him so. Enter
Norbert, an alien with "Capital A" attitude, to help Alan
reach out to both his parents.
The idea for The Nose from
Jupiter was buzzing around Richard's head for many years. "I
was just walking down the street one day and I thought, What
if there was somebody living in my nose?"
From that idea
came a short story, "Norbert's Nose," which appeared in an
anthology called Laughs. When he decided to develop
the story into a full-scale novel, he got a lot of input
from the friends of his four young children.
Richard's advice to young readers is simple: "The single most
important thing, what you must do without fail, is to read.
Read anything and everything because there is no bad
literature."
He is also a firm believer in the staying power
of fiction. "Scientific truth is too ephemeral," he says.
"Whenever you open David Copperfield, you know who you are
going to meet. It's dependable; it's real."
In Noses Are Red, Richard wanted to take Alan and Norbert back to their
small town. As Richard says:
"My fiction starts when I think of a
central picture to build a book around. The picture in this case was
Alan and a friend, alone in the wilderness, portaging a canoe. A very
strong image from my own childhood - I went to summer camp, and spent
many hours underneath an upturned boat, being bitten by flies and
mosquitoes.
The picture filled itself in quickly: Alan's best friend Victor from
The Nose From Jupiter; Norbert in the guise of a mosquito; an
unsympathetic adult who manages to lose the children, and a competent
teen who saves them. I figured it was about time for Alan's mom to
start dating, and came up with the Christopher Leech character. I
originally saw Zinta as a Tarzan figure, living on her own in the wild,
but I didn't know what to do with her at the end of the story, so I
toned her down, made her more realistic, and put her in a summer camp.
This worked out well: Camp Omega gives me a backdrop for the final
conflict, and Zinta's troubles intersect with Alan's.
Most of the incidents that happen on the canoe trip - losing
Christopher, meeting snakes and bears, falling into rapids - are very
loosely based on my own experience. Our camp had a games day and a
casino night. Come to think of it, our teams were the Voyageurs and
Lumbermen (no girls back then). And I vividly remember falling into the
water in the middle of a canoe race. Was I embarrassed! My whole face
was red, not just my nose.
Which brings me to the showdown at the end of the book. Ah, poker.
What a game! I learned to play in Grade 4, and have been playing it
ever since. It is a wonderful game for writers because it is all about
people. Crazy Eights and Go Fish are great fun, but don't tell you much
about the people playing them. Watching people and trying to understand
them WILL make you a better poker player. Alan is not strong, or brave,
or particularly intelligent, but he is good at people."
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