Here’s the intro from novelist Peter Darbyshire’s writing lesson # 1, as featured at Canada’s so anti-gun-you-wonder-how-the-hell-this-got-past-the-editors National Post. Curiously, the name of the lesson is “write what you know.” Go figure.
When I was around four or five years old, my biological father tracked us down and dug in to a hill overlooking our home. He waited three days with a rifle for my mother to come outside while I played in the yard. He must have watched me through the scope of his rifle. I try to imagine what he thought about, but I don’t know. His marriage maybe. Or maybe the cancer. My mother never stepped outside in that time.
Maybe they’d been together long enough that she sensed him. Maybe she just knew him and what he would do. Eventually some hikers spotted his shelter and the police took him away. We never saw each other again.
