What inspired you to write your memoir?
In 2001, I was dealing with a “perfect storm” of personal issues that had resulted in a diagnosis of depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. By the end of the summer, I knew I needed to do something drastic, beyond the usual, so I decided on a road trip—a road trip from my home in western Canada to New York City, no less. All I needed to do was to set a date, which I did. That date? Tuesday September 11, 2001. Everything followed from that little coincidence: my own small healing against a vast backdrop of suffering; how the macro can affect the micro, and even vice versa. It’s basically a secular story of revelation and redemption, a physical and emotional voyage.
About your Book:
The story behind this book rests uneasily on a coincidence. The year 2001 had proved to be a troubling one for me on a personal level, with a diagnosis of PTSD and depression following two decades working with abused children and youth, so I vowed that summer to heal myself by planning and taking a road trip. Knowing friends in Brooklyn and having never visited New York City, I settled on that fabled city as a destination far enough from my home near Vancouver, BC to hopefully lend the trip a sense of contemplative isolation and commensurate difficulty, a kind of modern day vision quest. The coincidence? Well, I picked a date seemingly at random, and that date happened to be Tuesday, September 11. What follows is a stunned, lyrical, transcontinental journey through sadness, loneliness, horror and near-apocalyptic tableaux toward a kind of understanding predicated on what we share as humans and not on what divides us. In other words: redemption is possible, however elusive, and we’ve long known this, huddling around the fire while the wind whipped across grasslands, sharing our tales of wounded commonality.
How did you decide how to publish your book and where is it published through:
I didn’t even consider traditional publishing, due to the short length of the account. As soon as I realised how relatively simple it is to self-publish electronically, it seemed a no-brainer to me. It is in all the usual places, Amazon, Smashwords and all the retailers the latter distributes to.
How do you see writing a Memoir as different from writing other genres of books?
Writing fiction is like wearing a Speedo in a fairly crowded place, while writing a memoir is more like running naked through Times Square.
Author Bio:
After working for almost two decades with abused, neglected, homeless and various street-involved children and teens, in both England and Canada, David Antrobus took stock at the end of the Millennium, realised any more of that harrowing work would eventually douse some dimming ember within, and attempted a personal reinvention as an editor and, more importantly, a writer. Which was a return, of sorts, having written fiction in his teens and then only sporadically as an adult. The lessons learned in his previous work and from a lifetime of reading other authors (his favourite books tend toward the dark and the lyrical) inform the fiction he is only now beginning to explore after wrestling with a very personal nonfiction account over the last decade.
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