The temptation to post this was irresistible! And why not a bit of self-promotion? Normally I'm rather shy and self-effacing, but there are times when it's appropriate to come out into the limelight briefly. This, I feel, is one of the times.
The Ottawa Citizen reporter did a reasonably good job I think. He got a few details slightly wrong, but overall his story was reasonably accurate. I was a pimply-faced brand new teen ager of 13 or thereabouts, not a young man, when I had aspirations to write novels. I'd discovered by the time I was 15 or 16 that although I could write quite well, I lacked the imagination to create plots, I had a tin ear for dialogue, and I couldn't create characters. Novel-writing would have been an uphill struggle without these fundamental skills. I demonstrated my ineptitude in a few short stories I wrote when I was a medical student. Two or three were published in Phoenix, the Adelaide University magazine and two others, now lost without trace, got into a men's magazine, either Man, or Men Only, I forget which. All I remember is that the less said about them the better.
But I can write. I can express complex concepts in clear and plain language that others tell me they find easy and even entertaining to read. I've put that skill to good use writing textbooks of my own and chapters in other people's books, and in composing definitions for the Dictionary of Epidemiology and the Dictionary of Public Health. The Ottawa Citizen's photographer skillfully posed me in front of the row of big fat textbooks of public health that I edited, and asked me to hold a copy of Public Health and Human Ecology, my very own book, the one I'm proudest of. I couldn't have asked for better.
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