ROD MACLEAN volunteers once a week conducting sing-a-long and cartoon sketching sessions at his Vancouver neighbourhood elementary school in False Creek. He first engages students with his voice and guitar and then walks them through simple hands-on cartooning techniques.
“Kids love to sing, and they love to draw, and they love cartoons,” says the former BC school teacher and administrator.
The Horseshoe Bay native has been cartooning since childhood but honed his focus after he retired. Armed with many years of observing school culture at all levels, Rod finally got serious about selling single-panels of his accumulated “Just Kidding” cartoons.
Educational magazines, textbook publishers, and related educational organizations quickly bought them up. More than 600 cartoons later, Rod turned to writing and illustrating children’s books that focused on growing up in the adventurous freedom of his small ocean town.
The “Wharf Rats” was the first in a series of five. “The students are my best and most enthusiastic advisers and critics, and they are my staunchest supporters,” he says.
Rod hopes that through his work he also inspires them to pursue their own expression through art, music and literature.
ALISON REID’s debut novel, A Man for the Summer, is due to be published in June under her nom-de-plume, Allys Reid. Of Scottish heritage, the Winnipeg native and her husband, after a stint in Toronto, ultimately decided to raise their family in the milder Richmond climate.
After the children were grown and gone and she wrapped up her career as the west coast sales rep for Enfamil Baby Formula, Alison said she initially started writing as an exercise while her husband was penning his fifth murder mystery. She says she’s taken small nuggets from her own experiences and from those of her friends and worked them into a storyline injected with humour.
“I’m interested in how, when people get stuck in their lives, they put it all back together again.”
While she’s waiting for her inaugural book launch, she is already imagining her next tome, which will focus on life issues that today’s “mature” women face, told with a twist of fun.
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