Wallaceburg author John Gardiner is set to attend the Art and Heirloom Shoppe on King Street in Chatham on Thursday, December 16 at 7 p.m.
Gardiner will read excerpts from his new literary collection, My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life & Assorted Short Stories, which contains a portion of the author’s memoir about growing up and coming of age in a small Ontario town during the 1950’s and 1960’s, a period of major social change.
“Even though I’m writing about growing up in the town of Hanover, I think a lot of the stuff I lived through, most people have experienced regardless where they grew up,” Gardiner said, in a media release.
“It was kind of a magic time to come of age. The world seemed somehow fresh and innocent and filled with hope – and we really did a lot of pretty crazy things back then.”
Gardiner says the memoir chronicles the author’s life from the day he was born to the time he first gets married and “settles down”… it talks about early days with a paper route and learning to play the clarinet, moves through the switch to the bass guitar and getting started in a rock band, spending time in army cadets, going through high school initiation, working at all kinds of crappy jobs, learning to drink, experimenting with mind altering substances… it’s the total package of life and includes being part of the hippie drug subculture.
Gardiner will be reading a number of excerpts from the book and most of them will be humorous anecdotes about life in the old days and will certainly illustrate how much things have changed.
“We did a lot of things back in those days that aren’t seen as politically correct these days,” he said.
“But it was a time when the guy who filled your car with gas might be smoking a cigarette while he did it. Things were just really, really different.”
There will also be signed copies of both the new collection, and Gardiner’s first book, Memories for Sale, available for purchase.
