Introducing new columnist Keith Schell

Keith Schell was a factory worker in a large Ontario city in the Golden Horseshoe when the plant he worked at was bought up by a big U.S. company and subsequently shut down, throwing everyone there out of work. Being at an age where he was too young to retire but too old to start over someplace else at the bottom, meaningful work became difficult for him to find at his age.

In a quandary over what to do with the rest of his life, he decided to go back to school to study Graphic Design, a difficult thing for someone to do at his age. While in school, a teacher advised him to create his own Facebook page to have a presence in the e-world, potentially improving his chances to find meaningful work after graduation.

While he was back in school, his elderly Mother, wanting to pass on a legacy of personal memories to her grown children, began to write down her own country childhood stories in a journal to leave to her loved ones before she was gone.

Never having written anything longer than a grocery list in his life but inspired by reading his Mother’s personal writings, he began to write about his own childhood experiences growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s in the countryside outside of a small town in central Ontario.

When he began to post his stories on-line for his friends to read, they were so impressed with his writings that they encouraged him to try to take his stories to a broader audience.

Those true childhood family stories, as well as other true personal stories about life experiences in the present day, ultimately became the bi-weekly column entitled, “Remembering When”.