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an autobiographyBy the time I was eight, I’d seen the view from the Eiffel Tower, run the halls of the Louvre, driven by the Coliseum countless times, ridden in a gondola, swum in the Mediterranean and climbed around Stonehenge. Life hasn’t been nearly as exciting since. Once my Dad retired, we stopped travelling and moved to a small rural community in Ontario, Canada. Not much of a cultural climate compared with that of Europe. Maybe because I was so culturally starved, I felt a need to create my own. I began my writing career at ten and by twelve I’d been published in a real arts magazine and knew what I wanted to be. A lot of years went by before I got that serious about it again. I’ve moved around a fair bit since and done a lot of writing. Things are really beginning to take shape. I’ve had work published in numerous Canadian and British journals, as well as online. I’ve written poetry, screenplays and most recently, novels. Appeared on stage, radio and TV as well as in print. Have toured extensively with both blood, love & boomerangs (Insomniac Press, 1999) and Swimming in the Ocean (Insomniac Press 2002). Not meaning to sound clichéd or melodramatic, but I write because my life depends on it. Periods when I’ve stopped writing, I feel utterly lost, seriously depressed and don’t know what I’m here for. I write because it’s what I do, how I process the world, who I am. I tend to write about love and death. I mean, really, what else is there? These subjects evoke the big, unanswerable questions. I have a seemingly insatiable curiosity and these are the themes that keep me asking questions, finding different angles to explore. I also like tackling subjects which are intensely personal but touch an audience deeply because they’re so universal. Things come at me and I catch them. I collect images, ideas, odd turns of phrase. I keep my writing book with me at all times so I’m always ready. I even sleep with it and have acquired the skill of writing in the dark. And, oh yes, I’ve also been told that I have Cate Blanchett’s breasts (or she has mine, depending how you look at it… or them). - Catherine Jenkins, July 2002
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