At 66, Richard Taylor said he doesn’t feel writer’s block anymore.
The age-old affliction has vanished, the Carleton writing teacher and author said. Taylor added that he doesn’t fret over deadlines, or work himself into an artistic rut when people hound him for release dates of new projects.
“I’ve been working on my latest book for 10 or 12 years now,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me at all. I know where I’m going, and I’m enjoying the research for it.
Taylor is already the author of three works–two fictional books and one memoir. His latest book, Water and Desire, is about swimming around the world with writers, both living and deceased.
So far, Water and Desire has taken Taylor from the River Thames in England to swim “with” poet Lord Byron, to Key West in Florida where a dip in the roped-off swimming pool of Ernest Hemingway awaited him.
Writing, to Taylor, is not just a career, but part of his lifestyle—a natural extension of everything he is.
Born in Ottawa, Taylor now lives just across the Quebec border in Val-Des-Monts with his wife, Dale. As a retired teacher and artist, Dale’s own lifestyle fits well with Taylor’s. It was Dale’s teacher exchange in Australia, whisking the family away for a year, that inspired Taylor’s travel memoir House Inside the Waves: Domesticity, Art and the Surfing Life.
House Inside the Waves takes a long, hard look at mid-life blues, world travel, friendship, addiction, the struggles and triumphs of a being a full-time writer, the tragic loss of Taylor’s sister and nephew in a house fire, and his experience in the domestic sphere as a stay-at-home father.
Taylor said his writing style is raw and that he holds nothing back when talking about even the most nightmarish moments in his life. He said he feels that vulnerability, like writing, is an actual part of himself.
“I’ve always been a vulnerable person,” he explained. “I’ve done a lot of risky things—for example, staying at home to look after my two daughters. I wasn’t hard-wired for that. And there’s the travelling, surfing and open water swimming. I’ve been in places where there are sharks and people are killed all the time. Luckily, I’ve managed to get through everything. I like the risk, it gives me a buzz and an edge.”
While teaching may not be adrenaline-inducing in the way that avoiding a shark attack is, Taylor has been a fixture in Carleton University’s English department since the mid-1990s. He said his classes have brought him great sense of fulfilment through the years.
He once lectured on 20th century literature. Now, he teaches the department’s fiction and creative non-fiction writing workshops.
Though both of Taylor’s writing workshops only meet once a week, the environment quickly becomes almost therapeutic–especially in the non-fiction workshop where students are sometimes writing about intimate and traumatic moments of their lives.
Clare Rayment, a third-year journalism student, is taking both Taylor’s fiction and non-fiction creative writing workshops at Carleton University this year.
“It’s heavy and it’s hard,” she said. “You’re hearing about these painful stories from a bunch of strangers.”
But, Rayment said she believes Taylor handles the heaviness of the class well.
“He doesn’t show a lot of emotion but you can see he cares because he asks questions,” she explained. “He’ll say things like ‘That piece you wrote–it was really powerful. You should write more about it.’”
Rayment herself wrote a memoir piece for the non-fiction workshop about her first bra and bullying. After she read the piece in class, Taylor pushed her to get it published.
“He’s just so supportive of all his students,” she said. “He wants to help you out and it’s really nice to have that.”
“Wanting to be a writer and then becoming a writer is a big moment,” he said. “You have this burning desire that’s unfulfilled and it can motivate you. But it can also weigh you down, drag you, make you feel like a failure and make you feel like you’ll never get there. So, actually getting stories, and then a book published–that was pretty exciting.”
