Why I Became A Writer…Anyway.

I shouldn’t blame Irving Layton, but I do.

“In Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.” Irving Layton

If you’re not familiar with Irving Layton, he’s a poet. He’s dead now. He once claimed his poems would survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. That was pretty clever on Layton’s part. Dead poets don’t tell you you’re balmy. Always compare yourself to a dead poet.

I never met Irving Layton. My father did, and Layton gave him a piece of advice. It led to me being a writer. I won’t tell you what he said yet. It’s a corker, though. Even my father thought it was a corker, and he wouldn’t know a corker if it came up and said, “I’m a corker.”

Way back in the 70s, I was taking a communications course at Ryerson University in Toronto. I wanted to be a DJ. I had absolutely no talent for it whatsoever, so I decided to become a writer. I had no talent for that, either.

Like most untalented writers, I figured I might work my way up to being a bad writer. I actually excelled at that. I was the best bad writer at Ryerson. The only worse writer was a guy named Cal. He was terrible. He runs CBC.

Most dinner conversations revolved around ways I might earn money petting animals at a zoo.

So there I was, excelling at being a bad writer, and I’m living with my parents, who also know I’m a bad writer. Most dinner conversations revolved around ways I might earn money petting animals at a zoo.

My parents obviously worried about me. I was in my third and final year at Ryerson. What if I graduated and couldn’t find a job? The zoo had already turned me down. They said their animal petters worked for free. The really good ones cleaned cages and called the animals “pooky.” I simply didn’t have the qualifications. Animals know when I’m bullshitting them.

I was crushed. The zoo was my backup plan. Now I actually had to find a job as a bad writer in a city filled with bad writers, and two parents who wanted to retire, but couldn’t because they still had a bad writer living at home.

“What if he never leaves?” I heard my father say one night. There were stories of failed writers living at home till they were eighty. I didn’t want to be one of them. I wanted to be out by the time I was sixty.

That’s when this miracle happened. My father was a pharmaceutical sales rep. He worked the hospitals, and one day, he saw Irving Layton sitting in a waiting room. My father decided to pick his brain. “Mister Layton,” he said, “my son wants to be a writer. He’s not very good. Should we encourage him or kick his ass to the street?”

Besides, my father looked like a squirrelly version of Jack Lemmon. Nobody wants that hanging around a waiting room.

“Let the boy write,” Layton said. I wish I could embellish this, but he was a poet not a career counselor. Besides, my father looked like a squirrelly version of Jack Lemmon. Nobody wants that hanging around a waiting room.

Anyway, my father came home from work and told my mother what Layton had said. They sat in the kitchen, discussing it at length, and being parents, wanting only what was best for me…they decided to never listen to Irving Layton ever again.

Robert Cormack is a novelist, humorist and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)”is available online and at most major bookstores (now in paperback). Check out Yucca Publishingor Skyhorse Pressfor more details.