Maestro Territory Me up at the Lake Of Many Narrows.  That's not it's real name.  But if you can speak Ojibway, it's a pretty good hint.

What do I like to do in my spare time? Well, lately, I’ve gotten into going to the gym. I get there about three times a week, when I’m not on the road. I really needed to get in shape. Actually, I was in shape, only the shape was very similar to that of an eggplant. I want to look more like a carrot, only not so orange.  In winter I love to cross-country ski. We have old logging trails on our land and we keep them “bush-hogged” (Think BIG lawn-mower) so that we can get out to the back forty, the meadow, the swamp. It’s not exactly Olympic competition; we make our own trails. But it’s nice just to step out the door and swoosh away!
        I love to cook. I can happily spend all day creating a meal that might get gobbled up in fifteen minutes. As long as you like the people doing the gobbling, it’s worth it. Come to think of it, I’ll happily spend a year or two writing a book that I hope will get gobbled up in one night. Which is sort of the same thing.
         When you’re cooking you can listen to music or all the great shows that are on CBC Radio. (I especially like “Quirks & Quarks” and “Ideas” and…well, pretty well everything. Yahoo for the CBC!)
         Where was I? Oh, yeah, in the kitchen. I especially like Thai cuisine. All that basil and cilantro and cocoanut milk and fish gravy. Great stuff. But I also love Italian, Greek, Mexican, Spanish, Lebanese, Indian and Japanese cuisine. Truth to tell, I’ve never met any kind of cuisine I didn’t like. Except fast food. I’ve got no time for fast food. And I’ve got all the time in the world for slow food. That’s a paradox, I guess. A tasty paradox. Yum.
        In winter, one of my favourite indoor activities is sitting by the fire doing crossword puzzles. I like to make them up as well as do the ready-mades in the newspaper. My dream is to create a crossword puzzle good enough to be accepted by Will Shortz, the crossword editor at The New York Times. I love to do the New York Times Sunday crossword. I’m very slow – it takes me days. But I like the way you can almost hear the wheels in your head turning as you work away at the clues. Words are the building blocks of writing. If you want to be a writer you’ve got to have a lot of words handy. Crosswords keep me in good writerly shape.
        I don’t watch much TV. Don’t have time. There are just too many books to read. What do I like to read? Lots of things. Mostly fiction but other stuff as well. It’s hard to name all-time favorites or Desert Island Choices. I love making lists but if I start trying to make a Top Ten, soon I have to subdivide it into favourite children’s books, let’s say, and then favourite picture books, and then favourite Canadian picture books, etcetera, etcetera. It gets to be like work.
       Here are some recent faves: Feed, by MT Anderson, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman and High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby.
        I’ve also been reading all of Ian Rankin’s “John Rebus” mysteries set in that gloomy and wonderful city, Edinburgh.
       If you tied me up and wouldn’t let me go until I named my all-time favourite book, I’d probably say, The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne. My next choice might be, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, or maybe Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen or The Once and Future King, by T.H. White. Dracula? Maybe. Then again, I loved Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré and The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame and Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh, and How Tom Beat Captain Njork and His Hired Sportsmen, by Russel Hoban, and Angel Square, by Brian Doyle, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, and Carol Shields’ The Republic of Love.
       Did I mention Tales of a Gambling Grandma, by Dayal Kaur Khalsa?
       You see how crazy it gets?
       When I was a kid I loved Enid Blyton’s “Adventure” series more than anything. I also roared with laughter at The Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks. Then there was Tom Swift Junior and the Hardy Boys.
       When I was in my twenties I read Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Herman Hesse and Richard Brautigan. Everybody I knew was reading them. I devoured Graham Greene -- everything he wrote. I loved C.S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hiddeous Strength. I liked a lot of Lewis’s book, but not the Narnia series; they annoy me.
        I could go on and on, but I’ll stop. Oh, apart from mentioning Chris van Allsburg’s The Mysterious Harris Burdick, and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, and A.S.Byatt’s Possession, and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love, and all the Raymond Chandler mysteries sat in the mean streets of LA…okay, okay, I’ll stop.
        Thrillers, romances, boy’s books, girl’s books – it’s hard to find any kind of consistency in my reading patterns, except maybe that I lean towards British authors. Did I mention, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland? How could I forget that! I’d better just quit. This is impossible.
        But about that desert island…The thing is, you’d want something that was going to take a long time to read on a desert island. So I’d choose the complete works of William Shakespeare. When kids ask me who my hero is, I say William Shakespeare. I probably understand about sixty percent of what I hear when I see or read a play by Shakespeare. But that’s up by about forty percent from when I studied him in high school. There’s just so much to learn. I’ll be reading him for the rest of my life. Desert island or not.

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