My Inspiration

If there's anyone who has personally demonstrated to me that truth is stranger than fiction, it's my history professor. I will never forget how on the first day of class he meandered in, hands in his pockets, sat down on a desk, and introduced himself as D.J. "I'm not really a professor," he explained, smiling like a child, though his wrinkled face and mop of grey hair proclaimed him to be at least seventy years old, "I just kind of wander in here and talk about history for a while. I don't sit in an office or wear a jacket."

He certainly did not. He was sporting a vibrant yellow fleece sweater with "GAP" stitched across the front. That first encounter made quite an impression on me. I was sure I would love D.J.'s teaching, and I did.

D.J.'s teaching method consists of pacing in front of the class with his hands in his pockets as he rambles. Every once in a while he has to stop in front of his old fashioned overhead projector and move the page father down so that we can read the next heading. He frequently has to turn the little black knob on the side to adjust the blurry image. That's about the most that D.J. can do with technology. Sometimes he jokes that one day he'll learn how to use PowerPoint, but we all know that he won't. He doesn't even know how to change the bulb on his overhead projector when the old one burns out.

While he lectures, D.J. has a tendency to go off on rabbit trails as he talks about all of the grand adventures he's experienced in his life. He grew up in Britain, but has visited France, Mexico, the Bahamas and most of the rest of the world. I have come to the conclusion that he's odder than the people that he teaches about. Hermann Goering may have painted his fingernails and Winston Churchill may have slept in silk pajamas, but D.J. played with his pet goat, smuggled vegetation out of foreign countries in his shoe, and drove a car without a floor.

D.J. is a large part of the reason that I have decided to study history in addition in English because he has taught me that fact is stranger than fiction.

So that is part of what I will be blogging about: odd historical happenings and little-known facts. However, the title of my blog also leaves the topic open to my other area of study: fiction, primarily in literature, but also in film and drama. I am especially interested in how history and fiction relate to one another. Studying the context of any work of art always sheds a new light on the subject. I also have a dream of travelling the globe, so if that ever happens I will be blogging about it. Basically, this blog is going to have a lot a variety.

I suppose since this is my first ever blog post, I should probably be introducing myself. I am a student just wrapping up my first year at King’s University College, an affiliate of Western University. I am aiming at a double major in English and history and have all kinds of crazy ideas about what I want to do when I finish my degree, (teaching is not among them, lest you ask, like everyone else). I love to write fiction and hope to be a published author in the future. As to my quirky character and strange obsessions, I have no doubt that you will find that out for yourself as I start to blog regularly.

For you grammar nuts out there: I am Canadian and will use Canadian spellings such as “favourite,” “colour,” “honour,” and “grey.” I also strongly believe in the use of the Oxford comma, as you can see from that last sentence. Americans: You have been warned.