About Gerald Neufeld
Heather, my sweet wife, likes to talk about the difference between a passion for something and a compulsion. Is she concerned that I spend less time making goodies in the kitchen that she likes and that I see too little sun? Is she worried about the accumulation of extra pounds and my growing attachment to my keyboard? Thank who or whatever created this wild world of ours that she cares. Otherwise, I might find myself one day permanently adrift in one of those fictitious worlds we novelists inhabit.
Lest I convey the wrong impression about my spouse, she is my greatest supporter, the lady who, almost daily, insightfully feeds back to me about my ideas. No writer could want a better muse.
How strange it is, don't you think, that, at middle age, we should discover within ourselves wells, talents, call them what you like, about which we had no inkling. A love for writing earlier on? Yes, to the extent that one takes pleasure from a well-drafted report on scientific research. That's what I did for most of my professional life, teach linguistics and psychology at university and conduct and write about my investigative work. Some things I explored — psychological processes that enable us to translate thoughts into speech, the manner in which bilinguals and multilinguals acquire their languages and access them, the relationship between idiosyncratic spontaneous speech style and personality. This work is a far cry, you will agree, from what you see on this site. The distance between writing about scientific topics and conveying emotions of characters I've created is almost unimaginable. Clarity and precision required on the one hand and, on the other, a fertile imagination with some knowledge of the world that hopefully enables us to make readers identify with and even love the people we create. It took me over five years of arduous work to bridge the gap that I've not yet fully crossed. Better, perhaps, as a would be creative writer, that I come to the craft with only college English.
I had no way to know that attempts on my part to condense reality through fiction would consume so much psychic energy and generate a passion for creativity through writing. For good or not, I can no longer contemplate more than weeks between finishing one book and immersing myself in another.
Though I have lived in Canada for most of my life, I am US born, raised on the prairies of Montana, later, as a teenager, to be transported by my migratory father to California.
No brief view of who I am can exist without attention to my family. But, since I intend to introduce you to them on this site, I'll say no more here. As I said recently to one of my sons, my children will deduce much about me they didn't know when they read my books.