| High school English teachers Garry Ryan and Dale Wallace, who met through their poetry-writing 10 years ago and have since become friends, recently published their first and second books, respectively.
Wallace has been teaching for 18 years and teaches Grades 10 to 12 at Lord Beaverbrook High School in the southeast. Ryan, a veteran teacher of 27 years, teaches Grades 7 to 12 at Queen Elizabeth High School in the northwest. And through their friendship, the two have also appeared as guest teachers in each other’s schools, presenting their spin on creative writing.
Over the years, both author-teachers have shared parts of their writing with their students. "I know that when the students don’t laugh at the part that I thought was funny, that I have to change it or make it better," says Ryan. Wallace had students create the book cover for both of his self-published poetry books.
In addition to his teaching career and raising two kids with his wife, Wallace has also worked as a psychiatric nurse for the last 27 years. His experiences and dealings with the psychiatric population inspired him to write his latest book of poetry, A Plea for Insanity. His first book of poetry, Desks in a Row, was inspired by his experiences in the classroom.
"I always have poems running through my mind. Some take up to a year to materialize themselves and others come to me quite quickly," says Wallace. "I remember writing a poem on a piece of napkin while waiting for an hour before my daughter’s singing recital was to begin." He has already started working on his third book of poetry, a series of poems dealing with death, the loss of loved ones and grieving.
Wallace finds it hard to believe that he has become a writer. "I failed Grade 11 English!" he admits. "I just wasn’t into it then. I couldn’t understand the subtleties until my mid-20s; that’s when writing started to make a lot more sense. And now I can’t stop writing, it’s something that I just have to do."
Ryan shares the same sentiment and writes whenever he can, early in the morning or late at night. "I like going to the basement to write. I put a CD on and listen to it over and over again – it helps drown out any other distraction that might be out there," he says.
Ryan took five years to complete his first novel, Queen’s Park. He admits that the re-writing process was challenging, but it provided a great learning curve for the sequel he recently submitted to his Edmonton-based publisher, NeWest Press. "I dreaded those days when the manuscript would come back to me with notes from the editor. But raising my two kids with the attitude that one should never give up, I knew that I couldn’t give up either," he says. After all those relentless hours of re-writing, he is somewhat awestruck each time he sees his novel sitting on a shelf at the bookstore.
So what do the kids at school think? One of Wallace’s students recently bought his poetry book, In Plea of Insanity, and said that he was surprised by the content – some of the poems are very raw, the sort of stories that teachers don’t tend to share with students. "There are poems in there that I wouldn’t show them, but I do like to push the envelope a little with my students, they’re not naïve by any means," says Wallace.
One of Ryan’s students also bought a copy of his novel and asked his teacher to sign it after reading it. "I was really touched by that; it was like a gift from him. I thought that it was neat that he went through the trouble of reading it," he says.
Both Ryan and Wallace are enjoying their time in the limelight, doing the book-reading circuit and interviews, which is very different from the writing process. But Ryan knows that when his sequel gets accepted, he’ll be back in the basement getting into the groove of re-writing while listening to the same CD, over and over again. |
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