Bill Talbot

I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s in the Peace River county of northern Alberta, Canada, reaching my teenage years as groups like the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel were getting popular. I had always enjoyed writing, but being exposed to the songwriting of these artists in particular opened up a whole new world for me. A friend and I started writing songs together, signing both our names to all songs, no matter which of us wrote it, a la Lennon and McCartney. I actually had one song published but never got credit for it. My writing partner took my name off the song and handed it in as his assignment to his teacher who then submitted it to a poetry writing contest. It won the contest and was published in a magazine under my “friend’s” name. My first lesson in copyright.

When this phase was over, I mostly did academic writing through my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, which I also really liked. I loved working out my ideas through writing and refining my thoughts as I crafted the piece to its final product. I was able to present a paper on teacher leadership at the Leadership for Learning conference at Cambridge Uniiversity in 1919, and also had one of the articles I wrote on how writing contributes to learning published in the National Council of Teachers of English journal, Language Arts. This time I did get credit for it.

I never really did any more writing on the creative/poetic side until I started teaching English. In my writing workshops for my junior and senior high students, and later for my university students, I wrote along with the students and used my pieces to model the process of giving and getting input for revising. Some of the pieces I wrote were humorous anecdotes which reminded me of some middle school novels I had read, so I decided to use them as the basis for my own book. By creating a character who was painfully self-conscious and having difficulty fitting in with his peer group, I tried to treat the issues of self-esteem and anxiety about friendships in a humorous but sensitive manner. My goal was to help students who were having similar issues identify with the protagonist, but be able to laugh at the ridiculous solutions that he came up with to solve his problems, and perhaps view their own problems in a new light.  

I started writing songs again when some of my university students brought songs they had written to the workshop sessions. I always found writing song lyrics fairly easy, but I didn’t know how to create the music until I got some ideas and encouragement from these students. I have now written numerous songs and am currrently working on recording some of them.