I am a 23-year-old Centennial College graduate who is living away from home for the first time in my life. A lot of what I'm currently working on revolves around my diploma program and future goal of working in book production. Right now these goals seem crystal clear to me, as if I’ve spent my entire life with one future direction in mind. However, as is often true, this is not the case. In fact,
when I return to my small town in New Tecumseth, many people are greatly surprised when I tell them what I’m doing now. This surprise stems from the fact that until the age of about eight I had absolutely no talent for reading or writing. In fact in first grade I failed reading so completely that I was sent home with extra work to try and justify sending me on to second grade. It wasn’t until grade three that my love of books and language really began to emerge. Almost overnight I began writing songs and stories without any prompting, and I still don’t know why this sudden switch occurred. All I know is that from that point on I had an insatiable love for books and writing. From then on everything I wanted to accomplish involved books somehow. I wanted to be an author, or a scriptwriter, or a newspaper journalist. At the time I was interested in acting and made sure to go out of my way to offer my two cents on the scripts we were given. I made it through elementary school with the goal of becoming an author, something I kept with me most of the way through highschool. However, somewhere along the way I began to realise the challenges of writing as a means of income. Slowly I lost interest in writing, though I maintained a steady diet of literature, and focused on things like working with Feed the Children and other humanitarian charities. I spent my time raising money and networking with people that could make a difference in the world. Slowly I began to realise how people think and the importance of the social side of interacting, something I think I pushed aside often as a lover of the quiet independence of books. It was around my last year of high school when I realised that there was a future career that could incorporate my enjoyment of books and my new people skills, and that was publishing. At that moment I abandoned my dreams of being a starving author (though I do still enjoy writing), and set out to find a school that could cater to my new goals. I first heard of York’s program through a supply teacher in a philosophy class of all things, and he encouraged me to check out the combined English and Professional Writing program. That night I did, and a few months later York was my number one choice for post-secondary education. I spent the rest of my high school career working with charities and taking literature courses that helped shape my view on what literature could do. Finally, I began what I thought was the final leg of my journey, university. However, after spending the first two years in courses that were exceedingly general or too brief to really get down to business, I began to get a little discouraged. I was having a difficult time with the concepts of in-depth grammar, and the idea of publishing as a business was beginning to worry me. I decided to go back to what I knew, reading books and talking about them, and began the process of changing majors. However, I decided to stick with English and Professional Writing, and this Spring (2015) I graduated from my English and Professional Writing Special Honours Program. I'm now taking a one-year certificate program at Centennial College for Publishing: Book, Magazine, and Electronic. These past four years I’ve spent hours poring over each letter on a page looking for typos, or learning how the human eye processes literature. Now in my new program, I know that this is what I have always loved about books; their feel and ability to transfer knowledge on almost anything. My thinking is that if writing novels is not exactly my calling, then producing books written by others is what I’ll direct my passion into. With my degree I get to not only experience this hands-on side of publishing, but also take course like this one, where we learn about books and their history in such a way that it makes me excited for what I can do for literature in the future.
