Writing.

I’ve been writing since I was a young boy. The earliest I can remember was when I was 14 years old, living in Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s when I wrote a story for my English assignment. It was a comparison of my school, teachers, school administration, against Nazi Germany. I touched a raw nerve in the school administration at the school, and probably all the way up to the district administration, maybe even higher. I would like to think it went higher up, all the way up, but I will never know. My ego hopes it is on display in some school admistrator’s office as a warning to new teachers to pay attention. I don’t remember everything I wrote in my story, but basically I compared my local school to a Nazi concentration camp where the teachers were the guards and the students were the prisoners who were being tortured and abused. ( as background, the nationalist party of South Africa gained power in 1948 which were Afrikaners who had lost the Boer war of 1898 - 1902 against the British, and they supported Germany during WW2. The national party created Apartheid and remained in power until 1994.)

I also learned that if I’m going to write inflammatory material against ruling power, use a fake name. I was immediately called into the headmasters office, where my father was also called in to the meeting, and I was threatened with expulsion. The only thing that prevented my expulsion was the teachers weren’t prosecuted as war criminals in my story. Boy, did I stir up a ant’s nest!

Fast forward to current times, because of my wife’s business which I joined, I’ve been documenting the bead manufacturing industry in Germany and the Czech Republic, where Sudeten Germans and their factories in Czech Republic which have been in existance for hundreds of years is going away. Even the deported and displaced Germans who resettled in Germany after the war are disappearing into history. I was publishing on the web for all our customers and anyone interested in this history to read.

also during this time my grandson who was living with us was joining me in mushroom hunting on our property and in the neighborhood ( we live rural in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California) and then writing a blog documenting our finds, research and culinary experiences of the mushrooms we found. What I didn’t know was that my 12 year old grandson (at the time) continued writing about mushroom and nature in general in a notebook and on his phone later when his dad ( my son) bought him one. When I was talking to him one day about my recent writing of fiction on a writing platform and publishing on the web, he expressed interest in doing the same with his nature stories he has been writing, but not publishing. He is now 17. I would like to think that I have been the inspiration for him to be a writer. So as soon as I can, I will work with him in going online to one of the writing platforms I use, - Vocal, Patreon or Substack, and then start publishing his original nature, tracking, hunting, trapping, stories he writes, and start earning money for his creative efforts.

my father was a writer, I write, and now my grandson is a writer. The legacy continues.