This is the introduction that was read before the reading for the launch of Anderson. It's a bit long, but I think it might be interesting as a short history. Bio's are usually dull affairs. The pedigree and all that. I've always found it more interesting to find a story in someone's bio. So, I tried to make one. Bios are strange things in that they are often written by the people they are about in the 3rd person, because they are supposed to pretend to be written by somebody else. I don't know why this convention is observed when it is rather apparent who is actually supplying it. Anyway. Here is the bio that was read, 3rd person and all, despite the fact that I wrote it.
Michael Boyce was an army brat. This means he moved around a lot as a kid. His first 4 years of school were spent each year in a different city in Eastern Canada. He didn’t like school much. At 16 he was thrown out of one. He didn’t go back until, at 21, he went to university as a mature student.
In the interim 5 years, between being a high school dropout and a university student, he played experimental rock, jazz and punk rock music. He thought he was a musician.
When he started back at school, he thought maybe he was a writer. He had a book of prose poems published by Stuart Ross’s Proper Tales Press. He would stand out on the street with a sign around his neck, just like Stuart, Lillian Necakov, Mark Laba and Crad Kilodney used to do. But he didn’t do it very well. One of his teachers scared him about being a writer because he pointed out how hard it is to succeed and survive as one. So Michael started thinking that he was an academic, because he seemed quite good at that. But somewhere during his PhD studies in Montreal, he decided that he wasn’t. He just didn’t like the culture. Instead, he thought he was an artist.
He worked in university radio production doing shows with International Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and star Pianist Dana Reason, and got into video documentary and media art.
After taking his PhD in Humanities, he worked with Montreal film makers Daniel Cross and squeegee punk Eric Denis (aka, Roach) on a film called Squeegee Punks in Traffic. He worked with his wife, Sandra, and two other artists on an interactive installation. He shot a lot of dance on video. He made his own documentary and some small video-art pieces.
Then, when he turned 40 he thought he might be a writer after all. He started working on a script idea, and then decided maybe he should write the story first, and then the story became his first novel, Monkey, published by Pedlar Press.
Then he and Sandra moved to Banff, where it was very good and interesting to think about himself again as an artist. As a writer who’s an artist. He met a lot of amazing artists there and he is now working with one of them, Myron Campbell, on an S3D animation for the NFB based on one of his short stories.
Another short story, which he was writing while living in Calgary, kept getting longer. When he and Sandra moved to Vancouver, he kept writing it, and it eventually became a novel. It is now this novel, Anderson, also published by Pedlar Press, which he is presenting to you today.
