If you are looking for the Laurie Lewis who is a young and beautiful bluegrass singer, this isn’t the right spot for you. However, if you want the Laurie Lewis who is already an old lady, a writer and publisher, then this is the place. Welcome to my world.
Little Comrades on Globe and Mail 2011 top 100 books
My first book has been selected for The Globe and Mail’s annual Globe 100 best books of the year.
Laurie’s bio:
When you’ve lived a long time, as I have, it’s possible that you’ve had not just one life but several. I’ve had a lot of lives and have finally, at last, begun to write about them. The first of those lives has become a memoir, Little Comrades.
The second life is part of a manuscript in progress, set in Manhattan in the jazzy druggy days of the late fifties. I don’t yet have a sense of where and when that particular segment of my life will end.
I am also writing some light “family” stories, of aunts and uncles and grandmothers, and bits of poetry from time to time.
Designer bio:
The next chunk of the life of this Laurie Lewis is the graphic designer segment, which covers the many years I worked at University of Toronto Press as designer and art director. I didn’t do much writing at the time, other than advertising and promotional material for University of Toronto Press. I retired in 1990, after almost thirty years in the publishing business.
The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC)
Publisher bio:
When I retired from University of Toronto Press I moved to Kingston with my husband and my mother. I began to write, just a bit, while commuting a couple of days a week into Toronto to do freelance promotional work for UTP. My mother and my husband were both writers, and I used to refer to our house as “The Home of the Scribbling Geezers,” each of them clacking at their computers in the early morning, and me scribbling into my Grand and Toy steno book.
I was greatly encouraged by the Kingston writers’ community, particularly by Joanne Page, Maureen Garvie, and Carolyn Smart in those early days. It was while producing a book for Maureen’s father-in-law, Harold Garvie, during Kingston’s Centennial year, that I suddenly threw myself into the publishing business, with the formation of Artful Codger Press.
I had worked in publishing all my professional life, since 1961, when I began working at Doubleday in New York, and was intrigued by the notion that so many “older” people were beginning to write memoirs. What interested me was that these memoirs of interesting and articulate people would become part of the social history of Canada, resting comfortably in the National Library, to be consulted by historians into the foreseeable future. At the same time, I began to make connections among the poets’ community and became interested in publishing the work of some of the liveliest minds in the Kingston area. I have never been able to promote the works of Artful Codger Press beyond the Kingston area, but felt that I was serving a useful purpose in publishing well produced and designed books for my community, to be sold locally by the best independent bookstore in the city, Novel Idea.
Another Life
My life changed dramatically in 2002 when my husband went into a nursing home and my mother died, both within the same month. One of the things that helped me through the chaos of that time was the volunteer work I began to do with the Seniors Association in Kingston. I became Editor and Art Director of their publication, Vista, and helped the Association develop professional systems and procedures for producing their monthly publication for members. The publication includes, each month, several pieces of Creative Non-Fiction, primarily, but not necessarily, written by members of the Association.
Becoming a writer
In the relative calm of my later life I began to have some work published in Queen’s Feminist Review and other literary publications. At the same time, I began to glue together some of the fragments of stories I had been “scribbling” for the past ten or so years, not quite knowing what kind of writing I was producing. One year I treated myself to a wonderful workshop at Banff, with Mark Abley, who convinced me that these fragments did indeed make a story. And so, I am finally beginning to focus on my new life as a writer.
I have developed a great fondness for Archie and Mehitabel and “wot the hell, wot the hell, there’s life in the old girl yet.”
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