The Life of Brian
CANADA (PP) - Ontario-born Brian Baker was always taught to be polite, courteous and respectful. But he also learned to be resilient and stand up for what he believed in at a very young age.
The son of a carpenter and stay-at-home mom, he learned plenty about the world around him in his first couple of years.
He learned even more when the kinfolk packed up the car, trailer, cat and sped off to British Columbia. Surviving three years of rain and scant memories of cedar, pebbles on Lillooet beach and one day of snow, the Bakers returned home to Ontario after a tough experience.
Baker grew up in a house where immediate family was crucial for survival. That strong cohesion with his parents helped to be a strong leg to stand on many times when it came to his complex health problems.
At age nine, he acquired hemolytic anemia, and from then on he would hit speed bump after speed bump when it came to autoimmune deficiencies, including idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Common Variable Immune Deficiency and aplastic anemia.
In memory, Baker says he’s spent every single holiday in the hospital at some point or another. It was tough, especially during his life-threatening battle with encephalitis.
But a saving grace for him was his writing.
Always having a touch for creative flare, he turned down playing hockey in favour of escaping into the nooks of his imagination.
Writing for Baker was a panacea, a cure-all for all the health problems, teasing and chaos in a child’s life.
It even ruffled a few feathers, including a bewildered grade 7 supply teacher. Baker wrote a tawdry tale involving him and Cindy Crawford and presented it to the class. He also stunned his own grade 2 teacher with macabre musings of dead bodies uncovered in his Bramalea basement.
Disturbing yes, but a stellar attention getter.
Baker continued throughout high school to write many a fantastic tale and adapted his character, a megalomaniac bird named Psycho Puffin with the evolution of his interests: music, movies and women."Puffins are synonymous with me," he said. "Or at least I think so, since I have one tattooed on my left arm."
Psycho Puffin even made the jump from high school to university, showing up in Baker’s senior year. The puffin had taken over the University of Toronto, St. George campus.
All the news was covered by the Window, a student newspaper run by Baker in 2003. It was temporarily dubbed, the Puffin Press.
With involvement in student journalism and the continual attention to the ways of the scribe, Baker was elected to the Canadian University Press as their Ontario Bureau Chief.
Thus Baker had come full circle and he parlayed his writing into a career post graduation: journalism.
What else did you expect from Baker? The proud owner an Honours B.A. with a useless specialist in archaeology, and minors in geography and English, he took his greatest asset and ran with it … albeit after a two-year stopover at Chapters Oshawa.
"Yes, I worked for the evil empire," he admits, tongue firmly planted in cheek. "Towards the end it was sucking my identity from me. I couldn’t say 'Rock on' or 'Have an awesome day,' to customers because management was that stringent. Oy gevalt."
Not wanting to remain idle post Heather Reisman dominance, Baker volunteered his time with the Whitby Minor Baseball Association as the Website Director and then the Writers' Circle of Durham Region, where he continues to be an active member after being on the board for a year.
It's not any wonder that Baker always has something to do with writing.
Although he no longer writes to escape, his imagination still moves at an alarming pace.
He writes horror, fantasy, thriller and potboiler fiction in his spare time playing on the themes of vengeance, modesty, justice, the antihero, spirituality, philosophy, nature, cataclysm and sex. And since grade 7, the themes have been non-stop.
"I'd like to actually get the trilogy I’ve been working on for a couple of years finished,” Baker says. “Then it’s all about getting it published."
He's hush-hush on the details of his opus, but he adds he is displeased with Canadian publishers who are unreceptive to genre fiction.
Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje are all fine and dandy, but they’re not his bag.
"I find some Canadian literature too pretentious," he says. "It can be a prescription of banal pills with ennui as a side effect."
Obviously disappointed with the moribund themes of Canadian novelists, he turned to American ones that he says have more energy.
Among his favourite contemporary authors are Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Stephen King, Bentley Little, Neil Gaiman and Dennis Lehane.
As for the classics, he's big on H.P. Lovecraft, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus H.G. Welles and Herman Melville.
But Baker's interests don't just stop with literature. He is deeply entrenched in music, listening to pretty much everything but rap, hip hop and opera.
His personal favourite genre is classic rock.
"Nothing beats Led Zeppelin fiercely blaring from the speakers," he says. "Accompany that with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Supertramp, Boston, Van Halen and AC/DC and you’ve got a tight sound."
And where would music be without moving pictures? The MTV generation brought music to television, but movies, now they are the shiznit according to Baker.
"I love film noir, and I love something that entertains and has a great script," he says. "However, movies that have a poor script can still be entertaining. Look at Police Academy."
Police Academy has a bad script?
Everything aside, including his collection of about 600 Cds, 200 DVDs, PS3, a plethora of books and stacks of magazines, Baker’s imagination is still his most important characteristic.
It has survived a battle of wiles with a high school teacher, the archaeology professors at university and even age.
"Without imagination, there would be no progress," Baker says. "And if people don't dream, people don't live.
"It’s how I keep moving."